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Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! And happy autumn. I hope you’re enjoying some lovely crisp sweater weather wherever you are right now. For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. You’re listening to our weekly science news roundup. But before we get into some of the science stories you might have missed last week, we’ve actually got a special little segment to share with you —so let’s just dive right in.

The SciAm multimedia team spent part of last week at the General Assembly of the United Nations, we were hanging out to hear updates on the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals. I got to chat with the U.N.’s undersecretary-general for global communications Melissa Fleming, who shared her thoughts on how misinformation and distrust in science are impacting global well-being—plus, what we can do about it. Here’s our conversation:

Feltman: Melissa, thanks so much for taking the time to chat.

Melissa Fleming: It’s great to be with you.

Feltman: What’s your sense of how public trust of science has changed in recent years?

Melissa Fleming: Well, I think with the rise of social media and the potential for anyone to claim to know science or to communicate science, it’s really in trouble because science can be uncomfortable, especially when it relates to a global pandemic and youre having to give guidelines to people who don’t want to receive it or around climate, for example, and actions that people are afraid to take. So it’s easier for certain actors to say #climatescam and climate change isn’t real than it is for a scientist to say, “Yes, manmade climate change is real.”

The challenge for scientists is going to be, now, not just how do we navigate in this toxic information ecosystem where we have an infodemic of good information mixed with bad information, and people finding it impossible to navigate, and how do we communicate more effectively as scientists?

Feltman: And so, what is the U.N. doing? What tactics have you found success with?

Fleming: Well, we study the disinformation trends and we design our communications not to debunk those trends or to fact check them because if they’re already out there, nobody really pays attention to your correction. What we can do is look at where that information is traveling and to also be in those spaces as an alternative source of information.

And then we also work with influencers, similar to what disinformation actors do. And there are so many out there who wanted to help be forces for spreading good information, information you can trust, information that will help inform people, get them to care about the issues that really matter to them, and also to get them to act.

So we have people, you know, communicating in languages that people speak, all over the world, trying to help us just deliver information that we think is really needed.

Feltman: Yeah, and what are the ways that misinformation and distrust in science is impacting people in their everyday lives?

Fleming: Well, I mean, we saw this very clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic, but I mean, I remember I had breast cancer and one of the first things I did was go online. And one of the first websites I encountered in my search was one called The Truth About Cancer. It had a million followers in this group on Facebook, and it was all over the Internet.

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Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

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