Summaries of important points and comments made by the speakers and audience for this session:

Chris Mooney

·         How do we correct misinformation?

·         “How I Started Worrying and Learned to Doubt the Blog”

·         Internet is second only to TVF as source of information about Science and Technology

·         Brendan Nyhan – people did not change their minds when presented with corrections that challenge their ideological point of view

·         Cultural Cognition of Scientific Facts (Kahan et al): conservative libertarians were more likely to accept an article on reducing pollution when it included headline about nuclear power.

·         “What Happened on Delibaration Day” Case _____

·         Correcting George Will: “no global warming for more than a decade” bloggers tar and feathered him, Washington Post recognized the outrage and WMO wrote letter correcting him, but Will did not apologize or correct himself.

·         Message First, Facts Second

Joshua Rosenau

·         Blogs can’t correct Texas Textbooks.

·         School Board science standards  1998 review “strengths and weaknesses” but they only wanted to review weaknesses of evolution.

·         Texas Freedom Network, texasteachers.org, Teach them Science, NCSE

·         Reach people with documentaries about Kansas, and convince them to speak at meetings.

·         Audience Research: talk about medical advances from evolution, compatibility of faith and evolution

·         Start Online, Move Offline.

·         Make it hard to be dismissed: state why your opinion matters (member of the community, scientific background)

·         If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a big enough coalition. – Bernice Johnson Reagon

Val Jones

·         Science Based Medicine blog.

·         80% of Americans go online for health information, but only 20% consider the source.

·         Case Study of Two Patients going to two different online sources for health information.

·         True story: colon cancer survivor who found oncologist online, breast cancer who tried alternative medicines and died in six months

·         Getbetterhealth.com

Comments:

·         November 1963: Malcom X Black Revolution

·         Margaret Sangers: planned parenthood

·         Meam Goldman: talked about birth control when it was illegal

·         George Will is into Toaster oven science, not real science. (look up article where George Will says he loves science)

·         Van: academic centers need to set up social media centers. Shout down crazy people.

·         Create peer-to-peer references that people can link to in response to people being wrong in comments sections.

·         Van: Health Blogger Code of Ethics

·         Astrology News: Astrologers said It’s true, but it doesn’t change any of the results. There’s a reason it doesn’t change any of the results.

·         Mooney: quick heuristics to determine whether to engage someone, politely say, “I don’t want to have this conversation.”

A great selection of examples of arguments for online digital freedom from some of the better minds of the 1990s.