Journalists, Health and Science Communicators

What are ways that journalists and other communicators understand higher quality information? Over the past century, practices have emerged that can help us know when a report or article might uphold certain values of journalism, such as accuracy, impartiality, verifiability and transparency.

For two years, the News Quality Initiative has worked with journalists and health communicators to better understand what elements make for a better news article generally, for science/health journalism, and for vaccine-related news. We’ve arranged these markers into three categories of quality:

Fact Checkers, Content Moderators

Fact checking and content moderation teams have long acknowledged the challenges posed by harmful communication within social media and other spaces on the internet.

Understanding that misinformation can be harmful, project members and partners tied to the UW Social Futures Lab have developed a framework to aid in characterizing magnitudes of misinformation as a harm to understand how urgent certain types of content may be to address. This framework draws from existing research in the related fields of cyber-harms and hate speech. The framework includes:

Psychologists

What makes a piece of content particularly persuasive or convincing? Generally, it is because of how the information is being presented. Psychologists have identified a number of manipulative techniques designed to persuade an audience to feel or think a certain way. These techniques are effective because they take advantage of the way humans naturally perceive or react to information, and can be all the more worrisome if the information is misleading or false.

Recognizing and exposing the presence of these manipulative tactics can be a valuable tool, which include:

Philosophers, Social Scientists

Trust is an integral aspect of human behavior. It allows us to navigate conditions of uncertainty, vulnerability and risk in our daily lives with a sense of confidence and security. This concept becomes especially relevant when it comes to the way we gather and process information.

Though we understand its importance, trust is not easily understood.  When it comes to the topic of vaccines, levels of trust may be understandably rooted in fear and uncertainty, a distrust of institutions, or within the complicated nature of vaccine development. One plausible pathway to building trust in the area of vaccines is to share trusted forms of information:

To address this, we are building a prototype database that contains high-quality question and answer resources developed by many community leaders that are in alignment with authoritative guidance on vaccines.