We live in a perpetual state of misinformation. In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected “post-truth” as its word of the year, an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In 2017, Collins Dictionary chose “fake news” as its word of the year.
With society’s need and capacity for constant innovation and new discoveries, the scientific world has witnessed a significant increase in published research in the past 30 years—roughly nine per cent per year. The advent of the internet has boosted the availability of information and, in its wake, a variety of online journals have emerged; some willing to publish just about any research. The increasing use of social media aiding the spread of information combined with a genuine misunderstanding of statistics create the perfect recipe for mass misinformation.
In the digital age, not a day seems to go by without someone using debatable numbers to support even more debatable conclusions. Research, it seems, has become a race to publish, in which quality plays a role that is only secondary to recognition and discovery. The misleading statistics and false results published by academic sources and the media are often celebrated as “discoveries.”
Shared from person to person, with no apparent source, erroneous statistics manage to make it onto everybody’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and even slip into conversations. Yet, nobody seems to know where these statistics come from—and whether or not they are actually true. Even reputable articles, that can be found both online and in the physical press, use an impressive amount of numbers to seemingly validate their claims—yet fail to cite any respected source or expert.