Slate snubs skeptics in an item on misinformation in Google

Yesterday Slate posted a piece by Evgeny Morozov that asked the question, “Does Google have a responsibility to help stop the spread of 9/11 denialism, anti-vaccine activism, and other fringe beliefs?” On its face it is an interesting question, one that goes right to the heart of what this blog is about. But except for a one nugget of wisdom which I applaud, the bulk of the article reveals the author’s naivete about matters skeptics deal with every day.

The article comments on a peer reviewed paper in Vaccine that analyzes the “tactics and tropes” of the anti-vaccine movement. Unfortunately I don’t have access to that journal to comment on the paper directly. But I can say the author of the Slate article could have avoided some pitfalls had he availed himself of the large body of skeptic literature in addition to that one paper.

News flash: we’ve been fighting these battles for decades, and are well familiar with the tactics listed. We’ve even been going head-to-head with these communities in Google and on Twitter and in the rest of Web 2.0, using the very same techniques. The evidence easy to find in Google, I’m not sure why Morozov can’t see it.

In the rest of this article I’ll point out how the piece’s proposed solution lacks vision, and suggest some other avenues that don’t require Google to get involved.

My Top Posts of 2011: A Lesson Learned Again

This is the time of year you see a many “year in review” posts. It’s good to take a moment and look back at what you’ve done.

In the spirit of this blog, I’ve got a year in review post coming later that will be a how-to about measuring your own skeptical contribution for the year. But for this one I just thought I’d look at what my top posts in each venue (blog, social media and so on) were and how much traffic or attention they got.

As I’ve pointed out before, raw traffic levels are often a misused indicator. Traffic can surge for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with the quality or importance of the post itself, so it can be dangerous to let yourself be guided entirely by “ratings” as it were.

That having been said, the traffic levels may have some a lesson to teach us (albeit one that we have seen before on this blog). Read on.

Content Roundup: December 2011

December wasn’t as busy as the previous two months, at least online. My day job and holiday preparations took up most of my time, as I am sure is true for many others. But I still got some interesting things posted, and did some housecleaning in the blog here with a new graphical theme and toolbars at the top.  Meanwhile there were several interesting references and conversations on other blogs that related to the projects here.

If you were busy too and missed some of the action during the month, here’s a way to catch up.  This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the material I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Read on to see what you missed!

What is the point of Twitter? Bruce Hood broadcasts an answer

As you can see from the icons at right, I participate in at least three different social media sites. I post updates about this blog, What’s the Harm stories and my daily Skeptic History facts for other skeptics to read.

I post some material to all three but a different mix of posts to each as appropriate to the features of that site. Those features keep changing, but for a long time I’ve personally preferred Twitter as my main social media conduit. I post the most on Twitter.

One thing I like is that Twitter is dead simple. Facebook seems intent on adding more and more gadgets and features every time I look at it, and often it just seems too much. It’s like the overkill of launching Photoshop just to crop a photo. But Twitter stays with a bare bones feature set. I admire that.

The default public nature of Twitter, where everyone can see all your posts (unless you take action otherwise) is a key to its value. I wrote back in August about how this allowed community action to take place against a spammer that wouldn’t have been nearly as easy on the other services. That action resulted in a police arrest.

This post is nowhere near that (in scope or length). It’s just about how I managed to pay a nice compliment to my girlfriend on national television via the medium of Twitter and the help of some friends. Read on, it’s a fun story.

Content Roundup: November 2011

November started out with an idea and ended with a cancer quack, and it continues the high activity from October. I’m continuing to post once or twice weekly at JREF’s blog, and there is lots going on over on Twitter including Delta Airlines running anti-vaccine videos, Power Balance going bankrupt, Kevin Trudeau losing an expensive appeal, and the ongoing Burzynski Clinic saga. So if you missed some of the action during November, here’s a way to catch up.

This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the stuff I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Read on to see what you missed!

FishBarrel now supports US FDA complaints

Last month I reported on the pain being felt by alternative medicine practitioners in the UK as a result of the activism of Nightingale Collaboration. Part of that effort was streamlined via a piece of software created by Simon Perry called Fishbarrel. This tool modifies Google’s free Chrome web browser to provide simple ways to highlight dubious claims, comment on them, and automatically gather them into a properly formatted government complaint. I blogged about Fishbarrel back when it was released.

Initially Fishbarrel only supported agencies in the UK, and Simon has gradually added support for other countries. I’m pleased to relay the news that the Fishbarrel software can now be used by skeptics in the United States to file complaints with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA):

#FishBarrel now works with FDA in the US. US skeptics can now report false medical claims quickly. adventuresinnonsense.blogspot.com/2011/04/fishba…—
Simon Perry (@Simon_Perry) November 04, 2011

Read on for more details and some tips.

Incentivizing online activism – a proposal

An idea popped into my head this afternoon. Readers who are enthusiastic users of services like Foursquare or Untappd will get it immediately, but the rest of you might need some explanation first.

For some time now I’ve been writing about things skeptics can do online to advance the cause of skeptical outreach. Of course blogging and podcasting are obvious avenues, but lately I’ve focused on crowd-sourced projects such as editing Wikipedia skeptically or rating sites in Web of Trust.

I think these projects could have a broader appeal (and perhaps a broader effect) in part because they lend themselves to small, incremental investments of time and effort. Blogs and podcasts generally require a substantial commitment of time, something not all skeptics are able or willing to do. But making skeptical edits to Wikipedia (for example) can be done in very small slices that can easily fit into an otherwise busy schedule. You can spend as much or as little time on it as you see fit, and it all still counts.

But therein lies a problem. For their huge investment of time, bloggers and podcasters get ample recognition for their work.  We all know their names, as they have thousands of readers or listeners.

But how do we provide some recognition or incentive for skeptics to devote little slices of their time to these crowdsourced projects? These tiny incremental efforts normally go unnoticed. Read on for my proposal.

Content Roundup: October 2011

Wow, October was busy for me. Maybe not Novella-level busy, but I’ve had a faster pace of posting over at JREF’s blog, and high interest in my social media posts. So if you missed some of the action during October, here’s a way to catch up.

This is the monthly roundup – links to all the content I’ve been involved with in the last month. It includes this blog as well as the stuff I post on other blogs, my podcasting activities, my best posts on Twitter as well as key shout-outs or mentions elsewhere.

Click through to read more.

Hypothes.is could become a crucial tool for skeptics

I’ve been thinking a long time about the idea of tools that could help people be more skeptical about information they encounter. It is one of the core goals of this blog.

I’ve always thought that the endpoint of this quest would be some sort of tool you could point at any piece of information and have it tell you whether it was true or false. It would be a computerized “skeptic-in-a-box” so to speak. I’ve done a bit of research on what it would take to build it. I’ve always thought that crowdsourcing and a reputation system to weight contributions by value would both figure prominently in any successful design.

Today I’m simultaneously very excited and just a little bit angry. Excited because I just got word that a project has been launched to build something very similar to my skeptic-in-a-box. (I’m angry only because it’s not my personal project.) But if this thing comes anywhere close to achieving its ambitious goals, I can definitely get over the angry part. It aims to go way beyond what I had in mind.

When Hypothes.is launches next year, it could be the most important piece of software ever created for applied skepticism. More details after the jump.

Follow up on NOFOLLOW – still a good idea for skeptics

“Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.” Louis Brandeis (Other People’s Money: and How the Bankers Use It, 1914)

Linking directly to Internet misinformation and explaining why it is wrong is skepticism’s answer to Brandeis’ sunlight. But because Google and the other search engines use hyperlinks to determine the importance of web pages, many skeptics are fearful of linking to pseudoscience and paranormal sites. They fear that doing so will help (in some small way) boost the visibility of misinformation on the Internet.

They are right. Every time we link to the sites of our cultural competitors, we give them a tiny boost up in the search engines. It’s as if we’ve contributed ten cents to a fund for them to eventually buy a billboard. Those coins eventually add up.