Often, when I meet people, we talk science. Many are well-informed and passionate about science, but some quote science "facts" from their own research that are patently false and when I ask for the original source of their information, Facebook is a common reference.
The internet and social media are powerful things, putting information at our fingertips and helping us understand new topics more readily than ever before. Almost 80 per cent of us search for health information online as we try to make informed decisions about our lives. The internet however, also contains a wealth of misinformation and false claims hidden behind seemingly credible websites and well-presented infographics.
Scientists can't make claims based on what we see online, or one-off experiments. The scientific community relies on peer-reviewed publications to advance good science - solid experimentation is evaluated by experts in the field who will often reject applications for publication because they fail to meet the quality standard.
This means that when you read a high quality, peer-reviewed journal, the facts and figures have already been through many hoops to ensure that the evidence and conclusions are solid. As a professional scientist and science communicator, I work hard to make genuine, peer-reviewed science accessible to the public. Suffice to say that much of the content you will find online, however credible it may seem, is not as responsible, or subject to such rigorous (if any) scrutiny.
