Dilemmas of Covering a Field: Reporting on misinformation research
Reporting on misinformation research can be dizzying. While some researchers see the issue at the heart of conflicts, climate disaster, and the decline of democracies, others contend that there is no real problem and some politicians see a “censorship-industrial complex” at work. Help from the very platforms where misinformation spreads is needed for some studies and they pay for others. Results are hard to generalize and when strong effects are found they are often less than what the public already believes to be true. And at the end of the day, whatever the journalist writes is subject to all the same strange distortions of the information ecosystem the scientists are studying – and might be labeled misinformation itself.
In 2024, Kai Kupferschmidt wrote a story in Science covering the state of misinformation research and what he saw as the biggest problems the field is facing. In this talk, he looks at the biggest problems in covering misinformation research and his biggest failures - at least as far as his cognitive biases allow.
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Event Information
Date:
March 12, 2026
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Time:
2:00 PM
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3:00 PM
Location:
Cost:
Free for Northeastern Students and Faculty
This event occured on
March 12, 2026
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Reporting on misinformation research can be dizzying. While some researchers see the issue at the heart of conflicts, climate disaster, and the decline of democracies, others contend that there is no real problem and some politicians see a “censorship-industrial complex” at work. Help from the very platforms where misinformation spreads is needed for some studies and they pay for others. Results are hard to generalize and when strong effects are found they are often less than what the public already believes to be true. And at the end of the day, whatever the journalist writes is subject to all the same strange distortions of the information ecosystem the scientists are studying – and might be labeled misinformation itself.
In 2024, Kai Kupferschmidt wrote a story in Science covering the state of misinformation research and what he saw as the biggest problems the field is facing. In this talk, he looks at the biggest problems in covering misinformation research and his biggest failures - at least as far as his cognitive biases allow.
Featured Speaker
Kai Kupferschmidt
Science Magazine
Kai Kupferschmidt is an award-winning science journalist based in Berlin. He has long covered infectious diseases and global health for Science Magazine and co-hosts a German language podcast on these topics called “Pandemia”. In recent years this work has led him to become interested in how false information spreads. In 2023/24 he spent a year as an MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow in Cambridge studying misinformation and disinformation. The following year he was the ninth Nature Marsilius visiting professor for science communication at the University of Heidelberg. Kai has written a book on the science of the color blue and is working on a book about our information ecosystem.