来源：《Science》
原文见刊日期：2022年3月25日
When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls.
21世纪初，当卡尔·伯格斯特罗姆制定计划，让美国为假想的传染病大流行做好准备时，他和同事们担心疫苗可能无法到达最需要的人手中。他回忆说：“我们认为问题是，要防止人们设置路障，阻止卡车停下，把所有的疫苗从卡车上拿下来，相互接种。”
When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “Our ability to convince people that this was a vaccine that was going to save a lot of lives and that everyone needed to take was much, much worse than most of us imagined,” Bergstrom says.
当新冠肺炎出现时，情况与设想的完全不同。四分之一的美国成年人仍未接种新冠疫苗，新冠病毒已导致100多万美国人死亡。伯格斯特罗姆说：“我们劝告人们这是一种可以挽救很多生命的疫苗，每个人都需要接种，但我们的说服能力比我们大多数人想象的要糟糕得多。”
He is convinced this catastrophic failure can be traced to social media networks and their power to spread false information—in this case about vaccines—far and fast. “Bullshit” is Bergstrom’s umbrella term for the falsehoods that propagate online—both misinformation, which is spread unintentionally, and disinformation, designed to spread falsehoods deliberately.
他确信，这一灾难性的失败可以追溯到社交媒体网络及其传播虚假信息的力量——在这个例子中，是关于疫苗的——远而快。“扯淡”是伯格斯特罗姆对网上传播的虚假信息的总称，包括无意传播的虚假信息和故意传播的虚假信息。
An evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, Bergstrom has studied the evolution of cooperation and communication in animals, influenza pandemics, and the best ways to rank scientific journals. But over the past 5 years, he has become more and more interested in how “bullshit” spreads through our information eco-system. He started fighting it before COVID-19 emerged—through a popular book, a course he gives at UW’s Center for an Informed Public, and, ironically, a vigorous presence on social media—but the pandemic underscored how persuasive and powerful misinformation is, he says.
作为西雅图华盛顿大学的进化生物学家，伯格斯特罗姆研究过动物合作和交流的进化、流感大流行以及科学期刊排名的最佳方法。但在过去的5年里，他对“扯淡”如何在我们的信息生态系统中传播越来越感兴趣。他在新冠病毒出现之前就开始与之斗争——通过一本畅销书、他在华盛顿大学信息公众中心开设的一门课程，以及讽刺的是，在社交媒体上活跃地出现——但他说，大流行突显了错误信息是多么有说服力和强大。
“Misinformation has reached crisis proportions,” Bergstrom and his UW colleague Jevin West wrote in a 2021 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “It poses a risk to international peace, interferes with democratic decision-making, endangers the well-being of the planet, and threatens public health.” In another PNAS paper, Bergstrom and others issued a call to arms for researchers to study misinformation and learn how to stop it.
“错误信息已经达到了危机的程度，”伯格斯特罗姆和他在华盛顿大学的同事杰文·韦斯特在2021年发表在《美国国家科学院院刊》(PNAS)上的一篇论文中写道。“它对国际和平构成威胁，干扰民主决策，危及地球的福祉，并威胁公众健康。”在PNAS的另一篇论文中，伯格斯特罗姆和其他人呼吁研究人员研究错误信息并学习如何阻止它。
That research field is now taking off. “You have scholars from so many different disciplines coming together around this common theme”—including biology, physics, sociology, and psychology—says Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, a physicist who studies social media networks at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development.
这个研究领域现在正蓬勃发展。马克斯·普朗克人类发展研究所研究社交媒体网络的物理学家菲利普·洛伦兹-斯普林说：“有来自如此多不同学科的学者围绕着这个共同的主题聚集在一起”——包括生物学、物理学、社会学和心理学。
But the influx has yet to coalesce into a coherent field, says Michael Bang Petersen, a political scientist at Aarhus University. “It’s still spread out in different disciplines and we are not really talking that much together.” There’s also disagreement about how best to study the phenomenon, and how significant its effects are. “The field is really in its infancy,” Lorenz-Spreen says.
但是奥胡斯大学的政治学家迈克尔·邦·彼得森说，这股潮流还没有形成一个有条理的领域。“它仍然分散在不同的学科中，我们并没有真正在一起讨论那么多。”对于如何最好地研究假消息传播现象，以及它的影响有多重要，人们也存在分歧。洛伦兹-斯普林说：“这一领域确实处于起步阶段。”