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posted by martyb on Saturday April 08 2017, @08:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the highly-illogical dept.

On April 6, William Shatner had a Twitter spat with noted physician Dr. David H. Gorski, founder of Science-Based Medicine, a blog which takes a sceptical and scientific look at controversial medical claims. A few days earlier Shatner made pleas to support Autism Speaks, a controversial group which has has been criticised for an approach which stigmatises autism, and for only recently changing its position from suggesting a link between vaccines and autism to accepting the overwhelming science that such a link does not exist (and they still don't seem to have unequivocally rejected anti-vaccine views). Many people attempted to call Shatner out on this, including Dr. Gorski, and Shatner responded by doubling down and responding with hit pieces on Dr. Gorski from dubious pseudoscience sites critical of him, such as TruthWiki, Newstarget, and NaturalNews. Slate has an article about the incident:

With that, millions of followers were treated to a hit piece about Gorski hosted by TruthWiki. It's hard to overstate the unreliability of TruthWiki, a haphazard collection of conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific nonsense riddled with typos and bizarre assertions. The exercise section, for instance, includes only two entries: "Natural Help for Diabetes" and "Deepak Chopra's Eye Exercises."

When Science-Based Medicine objected to Shatner's tweet, he posted another set of links discrediting Gorski, this time to the websites Newstarget (motto: "Obliterating Your Safe Spaces With Truth Bombs") and NaturalNews, which is run by Mike Adams, aka "the Health Ranger"—who also founded TruthWiki.

"All on Google," he added after them, as if that certified their authenticity.

NaturalNews is like TruthWiki but without the veneer of reliability: It's a cesspool of pseudo-scientific insanity seasoned generously with political vitriol and outlandish conspiracy theories. That's not biased journalism—it's the only way to report accurately on the site.

[...]Shatner is a celebrity, which means that he has outsized influence. That he would use his platform to lend credibility to such sites, spreading them to 2.5 million followers, could have terrible consequences. Shatner has made his support of vaccination very clear, but NaturalNews has tons of "articles" demonizing vaccinations—an example is a video titled "Vaccine Cannibalism Exposed." But there's an upside: The real-time tweeting of his thought process provides a helpful window into the practices of everyday intelligent people trying to figure out the truth. They Google, they find a few articles that confirm their biases, and they're done. No matter that the articles are on websites that spread virulent misinformation. What look like dead giveaways of quackery for some go completely unnoticed. This is instructive, even if it's frustrating.

It's unfortunate that Shatner is now on the receiving end of a lot of outrage because of a few misinformed tweets. At the same time, celebrities wield tremendous power, and to be cliché about it, that comes with some responsibility. I can only hope this will serve as a lesson to him and to others about the importance of applying information literacy before tweeting. Ideally, he would have perhaps recognized his misstep and deleted the problematic tweets instead of doubling down, but human pride is a powerful thing.

As for the rest of us, well, let's just say that a part of information literacy is realizing that just because someone is famous doesn't mean they have it.

Dr. Gorski himself (writing under the pseudonym Orac) has written of the affair from his perspective.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Lagg on Sunday April 09 2017, @12:48AM (1 child)

    by Lagg (105) on Sunday April 09 2017, @12:48AM (#491021) Homepage Journal

    I'm convinced twitter can only lead to ruined lives in non-read-only mode. I was horrified when my 140 characters were hijacked by cultists and moreso when replies would be uncomfortable and wink-wink nudge-nudgey. It's moot now, but you think maybe he'd have researched properly if he had a room for a citation or twitter was designed in such a way that it wasn't a stream of consciousness antenna?

    It seems like if there's one thing this piece of shit is good for it's getting people to make posts where ambiguity scales with level of complex thought attempted. Over and over again. Celebrities and attention whores make a post they regret. Then are essentially stuck because they probably have 10000 archives watching them. Making the deletion a good way of getting oneself into deeper shit.

    Of course. Sometimes it's also a really great news source. For better or worse.

    Still though. If twitter didn't exist I think the shat just wouldn't have bothered posting something like that on a blog and it would have been a passing thought based on innocent ignorance. Because blogs require liek a paragraph and that's some college shit right thar. I'm- I mean taxes are too goddamn high to worry about this!

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  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday April 09 2017, @05:32PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Sunday April 09 2017, @05:32PM (#491202) Journal

    Posting about subjective matters in a environment that attracts more attention whores than intelligence is indeed a recipe for misery. Hopefully people see the light and jump ship from the cesspools like facebook, twitter, and anything else I might have missed..
    (with the hope that they won't jump ship until they got enlightened)

    As soon as things starts to be about persons and form or unsourced claims = warning flag.