The Bullshit Economy: Making money with pseudoscience.
June 14, 2019 11:59 AEST
This opinion piece article was written as part of a course at the Centre for Public Awareness of Science.
The recent cases of measles outbreak in the U.S. demonstrated the dangerous effects that pseudoscience and scientific misinformation can have on society. Recently social media platforms have been cracking down on pseudoscience communities — banning accounts, removing pages, disabling advertising revenue and removing them from search terms.
Pseudoscience communities have been abusing social media. They use it to sow uncertainty in the population, cherry-pick information that conforms with their beliefs, effectively forming an echo chamber. They groom recruits, providing them with all the right information to instil loyalty and present a false image on the scientific consensus of topics like vaccination safety, medical cure-alls, acupuncture, chiropractic and nutrition.
Sustaining a long-term community isn’t an easy task, it is a constant information and marketing campaign requiring moderation and control of members, long term commitment to posting advocating on media platforms through content production like videos, articles, hosting websites and conferences. It’s a commitment of time and importantly.. money.
Where are these groups getting funding from to maintain the spread of pseudoscience?
In short: advertising.
Pseudoscience and Misinformation.
It’s important to note that pseudoscience isn’t necessarily a new issue of the 21st century nor is the existence of pseudoscience the bulk of the issue. The main issue is the rapid spread and adoption of scientific misinformation.
Misinformation has been around for centuries. Back in Roman times when the Roman general Antony met Cleopatra, the Roman military leader Octavian waged a deformation war against Antony denouncing him as a puppet of Cleopatra, a womanizer and a drunk. This slander was distributed through short messages written on coins, pretty much the Roman equivalent of tweets.
So if misinformation has been around for ages, why is it such a big issue now?
The internet, in particular, has created unparalleled change. Hardly anyone can imagine their world without the internet. All information is a short google away or a quick scroll through Wikipedia, learning a topic is a 3-minute youtube video, an online degree or a custom-tailored journey through khan academy.
As always, with great power comes great responsibility.
Our sources for trusted scientific information has changed. 60% of Americans rely on the internet as their primary source of science information. In a world where anyone can create and distribute information with a short video clip, a blog article or Facebook share regardless of their expertise, profession or intention. Figuring out if that information is accurate is no easy task. Is it then really a surprise then that there are misinformed people whose beliefs are borderline dangerous?
How Youtube helps Pseudoscience.
As anyone who has watched videos on youtube would know, every video nowadays has one or many ads conveniently scattered throughout the play-time of the video. Apart from being annoying, these ads give channels opportunities to earn revenue from your clicks and views.
But the ability to earn revenue is only part of the picture, to get those sweet advertising dollars you need people to actually watch your videos. That’s where the Youtube recommendation and search system comes in where it suggests videos that a user might watch, the system has been criticized in the media for recommending conspiracy with youtube attempting to make changes to stem discourage the recommendation of misinformation.
Money.
Ad revenue for a channel is calculated from many different factors from how many people view a video and the bid (yes they pretty much auction of your views to advertisers) of the advertiser for someone to view their ad, to how long the viewer watches for and whether they click the ad or not. Values can range anywhere from 2$ US dollars per thousand views — also known as CPM value — . to upwards of $7.50 or more.
By using the lower conservative $2 CPM estimate to calculate how much per year pseudoscience channels were potentially earning from ad revenue. We examined 106 pseudoscience youtube channels representing a whopping 49 million views across 64,314 videos from categories like flat earth, vaccine denial, astrology, chiropractics and conspiracy channels.
We found that around 15% of channels that were examined potentially earned over $50,000 a year in ad revenue alone. Of those channels, almost 40% of them earned over $100,000. That’s a staggering amount to be earning from spreading pseudoscience and is above the average working salary in the US. These figures were made using a conservative estimate, many youtube channels also earn income from alternative sources like donations and merchandise sales, so there’s the potential for even higher revenue figures.
Pseudoscience communities don’t just sustain themselves by pure will alone. Whether from deceitful manipulators or misinformed citizens, these communities grew and flourished off the nutrients of unbounded and unrestricted social media platforms.
We can no longer depend on the curators and creators of information to be trustworthy. We all have a duty to fact check and critique information we receive, and to disavow false information and hazardous thinking both by citizens, governments or companies. We have seen from the harm it has caused, that pseudoscience had no place in this world and it’s time we cut it off at the root.
