Factually accurate news stories with headlines or wording suggesting that Covid-19 vaccines could be harmful had nearly 50 times more impact on increasing vaccine hesitancy among Facebook users than outright lies spread by anti-vaxxer groups. This is one of the key findings of a recent study on misinformation and vaccines published in the journal Science.
The authors of the paper suggest in their conclusions that “instead of focusing exclusively on the accuracy of the facts they report, journalists should also consider whether the resulting narratives leave the reader with an accurate view of the world.”
“Impact”, in this case, was defined as the combination of persuasive power (how much the content tends to affect the reader’s opinion) and reach (how many people actually had access to the content). The authors found that fake news is more persuasive, but that “grey content” – an expression adopted to designate material that does not contain lies, but that induces the reader to see exaggerated risks in vaccination – receives much more exposure.
Material categorised as misinformation (“false” and/or “out of context”) by fact-checkers accounted for just 0.3% of views of vaccine content on Facebook in the first few months of 2021. By comparison, a single headline from the Chicago Tribune, categorised as “grey” – “Healthy doctor dies two weeks after receiving COVID vaccine; CDC investigates” – was viewed by 54.9 million Facebook users, or 20% of all registered users in the US. Posts containing this story were viewed 67.8 million times, or six times more than the combined views of all content flagged by fact-checkers.
The authors calculate that “grey content” reduced the intention to get vaccinated against Covid-19 by 2.3 percentage points among Facebook users in the US. They estimate that, with a “conversion rate” between stated intention and actual behaviour of 60% (found in the literature), this represents, in absolute numbers, approximately 3 million people who would have stopped receiving the vaccine because of biased journalistic material. False or clearly misleading content would have had an impact of only 0.05 percentage points, effectively affecting 65,000 people.
False bogeyman
These results reinforce the warning, already issued by numerous experts, that misinformation (and bad information) are relevant factors, but not crucial or predominant, in the composition of most vaccine hesitancy scenarios; the overall impact observed was less than five percentage points.
Trust in the vaccine may be irrelevant if the vaccine is not available, or is expensive, or is only administered during business hours, or by unprepared people, or in places that are difficult to access. “Misinformation” ends up being a convenient scapegoat, a bogeyman to whom failures caused by inadequacies in health systems or incompetence of their managers are attributed.
The study does not look at the causes of the huge difference in reach between fake news, and irresponsible professional journalism on Facebook, but speculates that it may derive both from the filters created by the platform to eliminate or reduce the visibility of false content, and from the audience base of these sources – reputable and well-established newspapers and magazines tend to have more followers and readers than individual influencers or activist groups.
Army Spc. Angel Laureano holds a vial of the Covid-19 vaccine, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., 14 December 2020. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)
Furthermore, it is not surprising that lies have proven, individually, to be more persuasive than grey journalism: in the case highlighted by the researchers, the news story published by the Chicago Tribune, the headline is appealing and leads the reader to infer a (non-existent) cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine and the death of the “healthy” doctor, but the text is factually correct and points out the uncertainties involved. A lie is constructed to persuade; the journalistic text is not. Even the appealing headline does not seek to convince – it merely insinuates and, in doing so, draws attention.
According to the authors of the study, “the best predictor of negative persuasive influence [on vaccination intention] is the degree to which the narrative implies health risks from the vaccine.” And it doesn’t matter whether that narrative is based on false or true claims.
Grey journalism
The usual discourse from journalists and news organisations about the dangers of disinformation is marked by a corporatism that sometimes sounds naive, sometimes cynical, and always monumental in its self-indulgence. Ultimately, the message that is conveyed is that professional journalism – defined by the conjunction of career journalists and traditional news organisations – represents, when it comes to quality of information, 100% solution and 0% problem. An assessment, to say the least, somewhat disconnected from reality.
It is true that these professionals and companies have reputations to maintain, which generates a strong incentive to seek and publish the most accurate information possible – in addition to having a series of standards, practices, processes and protocols that function as filters and quality controls.
But there are problems. One is mere human fallibility, which guarantees that no system of controls and processes will be invulnerable to errors and biases. There is also the fact that it is perfectly possible to follow these protocols “in letter” while violating their raison d’être, disrespecting them “in spirit”.
Finally, even adherence to the norms and rules of good old journalism is at risk today, with the systematic downsizing of newsrooms, the replacement of rigor with speed, and the ever-increasing pressure to gain audiences at any cost, in which ethical concerns are sacrificed on the altar of clickbait. The Chicago Tribune’s shameful headline fits this bill.
World vision
The study authors’ call for journalists to reflect on the accuracy of the “worldview” they are conveying to their readers, and for media companies to consider that the public can react to news in ways that “cause real-world harm” – a call that, at first glance, clashes with industry common sense. The latter advocates that both the reader’s “worldview” and what they do with the information published should be treated as irrelevant—the journalist’s duty, after all, is to inform, not engage in social engineering.
The principle is sound, but it hides several subtleties. The first is that the way in which facts – information – are presented telegraphs ways of seeing the world: the choice of words, the sequence of facts, the framing of events and, returning to the example of the Chicago Tribune, the wording of the headline, all can, consciously or not, privilege in the eyes of the reader a certain interpretation among many possibilities. In this regard, a concern for accuracy would not be out of place.
News organisations have also shown themselves to be sensitive to social science findings that indicate the harmful effects of certain types of news. This is why, almost unanimously, responsible media outlets do not report on suicides or, when they do, they address the issue with caution. There are some scientific findings that indicate a “social contagion” effect between news about suicide and a subsequent increase in the number of suicide cases, mainly affecting adolescents.
It would be great if the recent publication in Science led to an equally sober reaction when it comes to vaccines – and, why not, health issues in general.
On Saturday, 16 November 2024, I presented a 30-minute talk on “Astrology and Science” at Conway Hall in London as part of “Divination Day”, organised by the London Fortean Society (subtitle: Astrology, Tarot, Tomorrow and Us”). It was quite a strange experience as I was the only speaker of the day who actually offered a skeptical perspective on divination. It was clearly not what the audience wanted to hear. Maybe readers of the Skeptic will appreciate it more – so here it is.
In preparing my short talk, I made a lot of use of the volume “Understanding Astrology: A critical review of a thousand empirical studies 1900-2020” by Geoffrey Dean, Arthur Mather, David Nias, and Rudolf Smit, published in 2022 by AinO Publications in Amsterdam. This massive volume (948 pages) is a labour of love by four of the world’s leading experts on empirical tests of astrology that has taken many decades to compile. Although the book can be purchased directly from the publisher, this invaluable resource can also be downloaded absolutely free. This book really does tell you everything you ever wanted to know about astrology.
As for my talk, I started in the traditional manner with a definition. Astrology is defined by the Cambridge online dictionary as follows: “the study of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars in the belief that they affect the character and lives of people”. I pointed out that astrology is also used, amongst other things, in attempts to predict major terrestrial events such as wars, natural disasters, and famines.
By way of preliminary comments, I made a few points that in and of themselves ought to prompt a certain degree of caution in assessing the bold claims of astrologers. For example, although my talk dealt mainly with Western astrology, there are several other versions of astrology, such as Chinese, Hindu, and more – and they all contradict each other. Clearly, they cannot all be valid (and, as it turns out, none of them are).
While no one really knows what the origins of astrology are, one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that, contrary to the claims of many astrologers, it is not based upon careful observation and empirical analysis. For one thing, there are no known records of any such exercise. For another, “there are far too many combinations [of factors] in astrology for our unaided abilities to make sense of” (Dean et al, 2022, p. 70). It is also worth noting that, according to physics, there is no known mechanism whereby astrology could work.
Professional astrologers are often very dismissive of star sign (or sun sign) astrology in spite of the fact that many of them are handsomely rewarded for writing star sign columns for newspapers, magazines, and online sites.
They insist that the power of astrology can only be revealed by examination of “the real thing”; that is, the casting of a full horoscope by a professional astrologer based on exact birth details which is then interpreted in a face-to-face consultation between astrologer and client. The truth is that, when properly tested, the “real thing” turns out to have exactly the same level of validity as star sign astrology; that is to say, none whatsoever.
I also wanted to deal up-front with a couple of pseudo-controversies that skeptics often delightedly (and, in my view, misguidedly) point to as allegedly killer blows for astrology. The first of these is the phenomenon of precession. Because the axis of the Earth’s rotation has a slight wobble, the stars overhead do not appear to be in the same position as they were 2,000 years when Western astrology originated. In fact, the constellations that the signs of the zodiac were named after have all moved by roughly one sign. Despite this, Western astrology today is much the same as it was 2,000 years ago. How can this be when, for example, the Sun was actually in Taurus when people who think they are Geminis were born?
Furthermore, it is often claimed that there are, in fact, 13 signs of the zodiac, not 12. The Babylonians knew all about Ophiuchus, the so-called 13th sign, but simply chose to ignore it as they had a bit of a thing about the number 12. The point is that neither precession nor the “13th sign” are recent discoveries.
Astronomers did not suddenly look at the night sky and declare, “Oh my goodness, there’s a constellation that we missed!”. Astrologers have long known about both of these astronomical phenomena but they insist that they are totally irrelevant when it comes to the validity of astrology. For one thing, constellations and astrological signs are not the same thing, despite having the same names. More importantly, astrologers insist, they know astrology is valid – because it works! But does it?
When I was running my anomalistic psychology module at Goldsmiths I used to set the following essay title as a tutorial topic: Does astrology work? The best essays were those which essentially answered, “Yes and no”. In what sense does astrology work? Dean (2016, p. 45) summarises the case for astrology:
Astrology is among the most enduring of human beliefs and has undisputed historical importance. A warm and sympathetic astrologer can provide wisdom and therapy by conversation with great commitment that in today’s society can be hard to find. To many people astrology is a wonderful thing, a complex and beautiful construct that draws their attention to the heavens, making them feel they are an important part of the universe.
But when it comes to the question of whether or not astrology works in the sense of having any scientific validity, the answer is a resounding, “No”! Sometimes astrologers claim that science is simply incapable of testing astrology – and yet you can guarantee they will enthusiastically embrace any empirical findings that appear, at first sight, to offer support for astrology.
This is nicely illustrated by the reaction of astrologers to the publication in 1978 of the results of a study by Mayo, White, and Eysenck. At the time, Hans J. Eysenck was the most influential living British psychologist (albeit that his reputation has taken quite a battering since then). Extraversion scores, assessed using the Eysenck Personality Inventory, were collected from a large sample of adults (n= 2324) and plotted against astrological sign. According to traditional Western astrology, the so-called fire and air signs (Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius; and Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius, respectively) should be more extravert than the earth (Taurus, Virgo, and Capricorn) and water signs (Cancer, Scorpio, and Pisces) – and this is precisely what was found. The results were hailed by astrologers as “possibly the most important development for astrology in this century”.
Their reaction changed somewhat when it was subsequently realised that this pattern of results was due to an artefact known as self-attribution bias. If astrology really worked, it should work whether or not the individuals assessed know anything about their own star sign. In fact, this pattern of results was only found for people familiar with their own star sign. It appears that, whether one believes in astrology or not, most of us know enough about the supposed astrological characteristics of our star sign for it to have enough influence on the way that we complete a personality questionnaire to artefactually produce the reported results.
Astrology diagrams on paper, by Mira Cosic, Pixabay
As indicated by the subtitle of Dean et al’s volume, the predictions of astrology have now been put to the empirical test (at least) a thousand times. The results overwhelmingly fail to support the validity of astrology. When occasional apparently positive significant results in support of astrology are reported, they are invariably found to be due to such factors as inappropriate statistical analysis, inadequate sample sizes, and a range of other artefacts as meticulously detailed by Dean and colleagues.
By far the longest chapter in Understanding Astrology is Chapter 7, which provides critical analysis of a plethora of individual studies of astrology’s claims. Helpfully, Chapter 8 provides overviews of tests divided up into a number of different categories. With respect to tests of signs, the conclusion is clear: “signs (not just sun signs) [are] the most tested and most disconfirmed idea in astrology. In short, no factor involving signs can have any practical effect beyond that due to expectation and role-playing” (Dean et al, p. 772).
When it comes to tests of astrologers themselves, the picture is equally bleak. For one thing, the degree of agreement between astrologers assessing the same chart is abysmally low. Tests relating to geophysical factors, time twins, predictions, horary astrology, mind-related factors, divination, and wrong charts fare no better. The overall conclusion is inescapable. Despite a huge amount of time, effort, and resources having been directed at testing astrology, there is no evidence whatsoever that it has any validity.
In my talk, I also considered the issue of the scientific status of astrology. Up until fairly recently, astrologers were keen to claim that astrology was a true science as shown by a plethora of quotations on page 86 of Understanding Astrology. Indeed, some went so far as to describe it as “the oldest science in existence” and “the most exact of all the exact sciences”. More recently, many astrologers have adopted a negative attitude towards science, no doubt as a result of the accumulation of consistently negative findings from properly conducted scientific tests of astrology.
When it comes to discriminating between science and pseudoscience, a number of commentators have proposed lists of the features that typically characterise pseudoscience. My favourite such list was that proposed by the late Scott Lilienfeld (2005):
A tendency to invoke ad hoc hypotheses, which can be thought of as “escape hatches” or loopholes, as a means of immunising claims from falsification
An absence of self-correction and an accompanying intellectual stagnation
An emphasis on confirmation rather than refutation
A tendency to place the burden of proof on skeptics, not proponents, of claims
Excessive reliance on anecdotal and testimonial evidence to substantiate claims
Evasion of the scrutiny afforded by peer review
Absence of “connectivity”, that is, a failure to build on existing scientific knowledge
Use of impressive-sounding jargon whose primary purpose is to lend claims a façade of scientific respectability
An absence of boundary conditions, that is, a failure to specify the settings under which claims do not hold.
When astrology is assessed in terms of these features, I think any reasonable person would agree that astrology is indeed the Queen of Pseudosciences.
If astrology has no scientific validity whatsoever, the obvious question raised is why do so many people believe in it? Dean et al do an excellent job of addressing this question in Chapter 9 on Artifacts. I only had time to address this issue briefly (my whole talk was only 30 minutes long after all!) in terms of such factors as the Barnum effect (AKA Forer effect), cold reading (intentional and unintentional), subjective validation, making the chart fit the client, making the client fit the chart, selective memory, self-fulfilling prophecies, and the use of (generally) positive readings.
I finished with my favourite astrology cartoon from Punch. A bemused man is staring at the TV as a newscaster reports that, “The practice of astrology took a major step towards achieving credibility today when, as predicted, everyone born under the sign of Scorpio was run over by an egg lorry”. I got the distinct impression that my audience did not appreciate the cartoon as much as I did.
References
Dean, G. A. (2016). Does astrology need to be true? A 30-year update. Skeptical Inquirer, 40(4), 38-45.
Dean, G., Mather, A., Nias, D., & Smit, R. (2022). Understanding Astrology: A critical review of a thousand empirical studies 1900-2020. Amsterdam: AinO Publishers.
Mayo, J., White, O., & Eysenck, H. J. (1978). An empirical study of the relation between astrological factors and personality. Journal of Social Psychology, 105, 229-236.
According to a wide-spread belief, the demand to ‘first do no harm’ originates from the Hippocratic oath, which all doctors take when finishing medical school. Few of us appreciate that both of these assumptions are incorrect. Firstly, doctors do not normally take the Hippocratic oath – you only need to read it to understand why; it contains many points that would make little sense today. And secondly, the Hippocratic oath does not actually include the phrase ‘first do no harm’.
Nevertheless, you might assume, doctors are obliged to do no harm. After all, isn’t this is an important principle of medical ethics? In fact, this assumption is also not entirely correct.
Strictly speaking, doctors need to do harm all the time. Their injections hurt, their diagnostic procedures can be painful, their medications can cause adverse effects, their surgical interventions are full of risks, and so on. None of this would be remotely acceptable if doctors had to adhere to the principle of first doing no harm.
The ethical imperative of doing no harm has therefore long been changed to the demand of doing more good than harm. Of course, doctors must be allowed to do harm, even quite serious harm, as long as their actions can be expected to generate more good overall.
In medical terms, we speak of the risk/benefit balance of an intervention. If the known risks of a treatment are greater than the expected benefits, we cannot ethically administer or prescribe it; however, if the benefits demonstrably outweigh the risks, we can consider it a reasonable option.
But what about the many treatments where there is uncertainty regarding either the risks or benefits, or both? In such cases of incomplete evidence, we need to look at the best data currently available and, together with the patient, try to make an informed judgement.
Perhaps this is best explained by running through a few exemplary scenarios in which homeopathy (the classic example of a therapy that is promoted as being entirely harmless) is being employed.
Homeopathy: there’s nothing in it
Scenario 1: Patient with a self-limiting condition
Let’s assume our patient has a common cold and consults her physician, who prescribes a homeopathic remedy. One could argue that no harm is done in such a situation. The treatment cannot be expected to help beyond a placebo effect, but the cold will disappear in just a few days, and the patient will not suffer any side effects of the prescription. This attitude might be common, but it disregards the following potential for harm:
The cost of the treatment
The possibility that our patient suffers needlessly for several days with cold symptoms that might easily be treatable with a non-homeopathic therapy
The possibility of our patient getting the erroneous impression that homeopathy is an effective therapy (because, after all, the cold did eventually go away), and therefore opts to use it for future, more serious illnesses.
What if the physician only prescribed homeopathy because the patient asked him to do so? Strictly speaking, the above issues of harm also apply in this situation. The ethical response of the doctor would have been to inform the patient what the best evidence tells us (namely that homeopathy is a placebo therapy), provide assurance about the nature of the condition, and prescribe effective symptomatic treatments as needed.
And what if the physician does all of these things and, in addition, prescribes homeopathy because the patient wants it? In this case, the possibility of harms one and three still apply.
Scenario 2: Patient with a chronic condition
Consider a patient suffering from chronic painful arthritis who consults her physician, who prescribes homeopathic remedies as the sole therapy. In such a situation, the following harms need to be considered:
The cost for the treatment
The possibility that our patient suffers needlessly from symptoms that are treatable. As these symptoms can be serious, this would often amount to medical negligence.
What if the physician only prescribed homeopathy because the patient asked him to do so, and refused any conventional therapies? In such cases, it is the physician’s ethical duty to inform the patient about the best evidence as it pertains to homeopathy as well as effective conventional treatments for their condition. Failure to do so would amount to negligence. The patient is then free to decide, of course. But so is the physician; nobody can force them to prescribe ineffective treatments. If no agreement can be reached, the patient might have to change physician.
And what if the physician does inform the patient adequately, but also prescribes homeopathy because the patient insists on it? In this case, the possibility of the above harms still applies.
Scenario 3: Patient with a life-threatening condition
Consider a young man with testicular cancer (a malignancy with a good prognosis if adequately treated). He consults his doctor, who prescribes homeopathic remedies as the sole therapy. In such a situation, the physician is grossly negligent and could be struck off because of it.
What if the physician prescribed homeopathy because the patient asked him to do so, and refused conventional therapies? Again, in such a case, the physician has an ethical duty to inform the patient about the best evidence as it pertains to homeopathy and to the conventional treatment for his cancer; failure to do so would be negligent. Again, the patient is free to decide what they want to do, as is the physician. If no agreement can be reached, the patient might wish to change his doctor.
And what if the physician does inform the patient adequately, makes sure that he receives effective oncological treatments, but also prescribes homeopathy because the patient insists on it? In this case, there is still the possibility of harms regarding cost potential to leave the patient with the impression that homeopathy is effective, which may lead to further harm in the future.
In conclusion
These scenarios are of course theoretical and, in everyday practice, many other factors might need considering. They nevertheless demonstrate why the demand ‘first do no harm’ is today obsolete, and had to be replaced by ‘do more good than harm’.
The latter principle does not support homeopathy (or any other ineffective so-called alternative medicine [SCAM]). In other words, the use of allegedly harmless but ineffective treatments is not ethical. But what if a clinician strongly believes in the effectiveness of homeopathy (or other SCAM)? In this case, they are clearly not acting according to the best available evidence – and that, of course, is also unethical.
The conclusions of all this are, I think, twofold. First, the ethical imperative of ‘first do no harm’ is often misunderstood, particularly in the realm of SCAM. Second, it cannot provide a sound justification for employing therapies that are (allegedly) free of adverse effects.
‘Nerdstock’ was the less-than-flattering name that BBC Four gave to Robin Ince’s ‘Nine Lessons and Carols’ when it was broadcast in early 2010. I was unable to attend in person, so I was more than happy to discover that the BBC had recorded it for later broadcast, even if the title wasn’t my cup of tea.
One particularly vivid recollection is of Ben Goldacre, author of the excellent book Bad Science, bounding on stage with that terrific, restless enthusiasm, and giving a whistle-stop tour of the amazing power of the placebo effect and its evil twin, the nocebo.
‘Pacemakers,’ he spilled into the microphone, ‘improve congestive cardiac failure after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on!’
The comment was clearly crafted and timed to elicit the laugh it earned, but it was also a comment which made me sit up and pay attention. Pacemakers improve congestive cardiac failure after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on? As Goldare quickly commented, this is a ‘properly outrageous’ finding. And it’s one which piqued my interest.
The study behind this claim was published in the American Journal of Cardiology in 1999. Linde et al. recruited 81 patients with obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HOCM, a thickening of the heart wall) and fitted them with pacemakers. The patients were randomly assigned to one of two pacemaker settings: ‘atrioventricular synchronous pacing’ or ‘atrial inhibited mode’ at 30 beats per minute.
In AV synchronous pacing, the pacemaker coordinates the electrical activity between the atria and the ventricles. It detects the natural electrical signals of the atria and delivers a pacing pulse to the ventricles with an appropriate delay, mimicking the heart’s normal conduction pathway and ensuring proper timing between contractions. In other words, the pacemaker is switched on.
In contrast, the atrial inhibited mode only stimulates the heart if it fails to beat normally. In this study, the inhibited pacemakers were set to 30 beats per minute, meaning the heart would have to pause for two full seconds before a pulse was triggered. Since this won’t typically happen, these pacemakers were effectively placebos. They are fully implanted, but do not stimulate the heart.
Several key metrics were recorded at baseline. The New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional classification is a scale to measure the extent of the patient’s heart failure, ranging from one (you have no symptoms and no limitation on physical activity) to four (severe limitation, symptoms even at rest, usually bedridden).
Another metric was left ventricular outflow tract (LVOT) gradient, a measurement of the pressure difference between the aorta and the left ventricle during blood ejection. In patients with HOCM, higher pressure is expected because the thickened heart muscle forces the same blood volume through a narrower passage.
Linde also recorded the time in minutes each patient could tolerate exercise, their peak oxygen uptake, their peak heart rate during exercise, and systolic anterior motion, an abnormal movement of the mitral valve.
Three months after implantation, the patients were brought back and the measurements were repeated. Linde reported that patients with inactive pacemakers saw a statistically significant decrease in their LVOT gradient.
Pacemakers improve congestive cardiac failure after they’ve been put in, but before they’ve been switched on!
Of course, there is far more nuance to this study than that.
As we have touched upon in previous articles, statistical significance is typically measured using a p-value. This is a number between zero and one which expresses the probability of getting these results, or more extreme results, even if there is no true effect.
By convention, scientists have collectively agreed that the threshold for what is considered ‘significant’ should be 0.05, or 5%. While this is a widely accepted convention, it is ultimately arbitrary. Some researchers advocate for a stricter threshold, moving it from 0.05 (5%) to 0.01 (1%) or even to 0.005 (0.5%).
The LVOT gradient change reached statistical significance with a p-value of 0.04. Although this meets the conventional threshold, it is marginal and would not qualify as significant under stricter criteria. By contrast, the change in LVOT with the active pacemaker had a significance level of < 0.0001 – below one tenth of one percent!
Furthermore, the other measurements don’t support the claim that this was a real clinical improvement. Exercise tolerance and peak heart rate significantly improved in the active pacemaker group but showed no improvement in the placebo group. There was also no change in the NYHA functional class for the placebo group, meaning these patients did not experience an improvement in their overall heart failure symptoms. In contrast, the active pacemaker group improved by a full class, on average, from 2.6 to 1.7.
In total, of the six objective measures assessed, five showed no significant change for the placebo pacemaker group. The only measure that showed an effect, LVOT gradient, was borderline significant, and is likely spurious.
A p-value is meaningful for an individual outcome measure, but every additional measure you make is another opportunity to record a fluke finding by chance. Measure two things, you’re twice as likely to find something significant. Three things, and you’re three times as likely, and so on. If Linde’s figures were correctly adjusted to account for the many different outcomes recorded, the LVOT gradient change would be exposed as random noise.
Alongside the objective measurements recorded so far, Linde also records several subjective measurements, such as chest pain, dizziness, and reported palpitations. As we have discussed elsewhere, subjective measurements must be interpreted cautiously because of potential for them to be modified by bias. Subject expectancy effects, answers of politeness, and other forms of response bias can lead to patients reporting changes which don’t actually reflect any real world difference. Bearing this in mind, it is notable that of the 14 subjective outcomes which were measured, only five showed a significant effect in the placebo group, and all but one of these (palpitations) disappear when an adjustment is made for the number of outcomes measured in this study.
Another problematic aspect of this study was that three patients had their placebo pacemakers reconfigured for ‘active’ pacing part way through the study, because they complained to their doctors that the treatment wasn’t working. The paper isn’t clear what happened to the data from these patients. Was it removed from the analysis altogether? It doesn’t appear to have been, as the size of the inactive pacing group is unchanged at the end. Were the patients assessed early and their data included anyway? No such early assessment is mentioned. Unfortunately, either approach risks skewing the data in favour of the placebo effect by deemphasising the patients who failed to respond to placebo.
In short, while Linde does not provide strong evidence for a real therapeutic placebo effect, it is the kind of research that continues to be cited as evidence for the power of placebo. The reported effects are vanishingly small, and the clinical utility is dubious. I remain skeptical.
We need to talk about men. As of the most recent vote counts, 60% of white American men voted for Trump, compared with 53% of white women. While those are not particularly surprising results, 25% of the Black men and 48% of Latino men also voted for Trump, compared to just 10% of the Black women and 39% of Latino women. Trump has doubled his share of Black male voters, and across all racial demographics his gains were highest among younger men. As always, problems like this are intersectional and multifaceted, but one of the crucial facets we need to discuss is clearly the persistent problem of disaffected men.
One likely reason for these gains is that the GOP offers narratives for meaning-making that appeal to young men who feel that modern society is depriving them of a meaningful life. Researchers have tied the ongoing crisis of meaning for men to harmful personal and political choices that result in worse outcomes for men and everyone around them. If we are looking for things that the left can do to address this problem, we can start by adopting a restorative approach towards men in general and the crisis of meaning many of them are experiencing.
This conversation is made far more difficult by the fact that conservatives like Jordan Peterson have dominated discourse around this topic – that conservative domination, combined with entirely understandable resentment and compassion fatigue towards men, leads many on the left to reject it as a problem worth considering. The common refrain is that men should just “suck it up”, and that “loss of privilege feels like oppression” – which is essentially a fancy way of saying men aren’t actually experiencing real problems, just bad vibes.
Vibes do matter though, and for an unfortunately large number of men, loss of privilege also feels like loss of meaning and purpose. Folks on the left have no trouble mocking Ben Shapiro for his thought-terminating cliché “facts don’t care about your feelings”, but whenever the issue of men’s feelings come up it is often tamped back down with facts about how things are actually perfectly fine for men right now, so people need to shut up about men’s feelings. But men’s feelings do matter, not just because men are people too, but also because having their feelings derided is driving a disturbing proportion of young men to find meaning in the worst possible places.
Everyone needs meaning in their lives. Society used to hand men a simple set of narratives for meaning-making: provider, protector, patriarch. Now some segments of the male population feel they are denied those paths, told that it is chauvinistic to see themselves that way, and that progress demands they sit down, shut up, and let others take the lead. While that is good and right for those who are finally being allowed to also participate in society, many men feel they are denied any appealing alternatives. If a large swathe of the population feels they are being denied avenues for meaning-making in their lives, it becomes everyone’s problem, because they will find a way to make their lives meaningful, and in the absence of water they will drink sand.
Enter the right-wing, with its endless talk of “strong men”. If you’ve spent any time in conservative spaces, you’ve likely seen some version of this meme:
For the right, this meme is an extremely popular way to explain the current state of the world and the people in it, but it also creates a narrative structure for meaning-making for men who currently feel deprived of purpose by modern society. It doesn’t just tell them how things are or how we got here, it tells them how things should be, and it gives them a path forward: become a strong man to lead people through the hard times and to preserve the coming good times from the corruption of weak men. That message is a big part of why Joe Rogan has the most popular podcast in America and commands an overwhelmingly male audience. Absurd as it may seem to those on the left, Rogan provides narratives about strength that are clearly appealing to and meeting a need for a lot of young men.
How do you make ‘strong’ men? According to the right, it’s by making them cruel. “Owning the libs” isn’t just entertainment and sport, it’s important psychological training for the civil war they believe is to come. Men must be callous if they’re going to ignore the demands for compassion that are weakening our society. If they can’t laugh in the face of someone who claims to be suffering, how will they be able to make the hard decisions needed to keep our country safe and prosperous? That’s the meaning narrative that seems to be attracting a significant portion of young men. It simultaneously shields them from all the moral obligations that progressive society wants to place on them, while providing them an alternative set of obligations that feel more empowering to them to fulfil. They get to be warriors who stand against the horde that threatens to overrun their society, both internal and external. They get to stand athwart history and shout “stop”.
A meme released by right wing evangelical propaganda outfit Turning Point USA, featuring actor-turned-Christian-culture-warrior Kevin Sorbo, on the supposed values of his version of masculinity
Men who get pulled into this narrative also come to believe that their cruelty gives them greater insight into the world around them. In their view, the left is trapped in a woke fever dream and cruelty is the only medicine. This gives them the same hit of happy chemicals that conspiracy theorists get from the belief that they have secret knowledge. It allows them to deflect counter-arguments to their approach as based on ignorance and wishful thinking. Only strong men can face the horrors of reality without succumbing to copes like “equality” and “social justice”.
The challenge for the left is presenting alternatives that actually appeal to these men, which likely requires further dismantling of our patriarchal culture. Patriarchy prescribes for men a narrow set of narratives for meaning-making, but progressivism has failed to do much better. Too often, we offer men alternatives that appeal to us as progressives, and then mock them for their lack of uptake. We tell them that strong men are really compassionate and thoughtful, but for many men raised in a patriarchal society that rings hollow. We see this exemplified in incel culture, where men are taught that the mainstream narratives, such as that men can easily find a happy relationship if they just show their emotions more, are lies to keep men servile or sell more products. They’re taught that women secretly still prefer “strong” men, and that their only hope for true happiness is a return to traditional gender roles, because for men true meaning is based in power.
The problem is that meaning-making is heavily subjective. It’s not enough to tell men their lives will have meaning, they need to feel that their lives have meaning, and it has to be meaning they and their peers and the people they look up to view as worthy of respect. Solving this problem will require restorative approaches at the interpersonal level, along with continued efforts to dismantle the systems that cause men to feel that only dominance-based narratives hold meaning for them.
In the short term, this will require helping men feel socially respected again, something that the left struggles to provide. Bluntly put, we need to stop reflexively shitting on men, those need to be mostly ‘indoor thoughts’, same as they are with any other group. The urge to degenerate men as a group as a form of retributive punishment, putting them in their place, is a problem on the left, both morally and politically. The urge is understandable, but we need to get it under control, because young men are well aware of how they are perceived and it is hurting them, and by extension, society in general.
We also need to stop denying them respect for their efforts towards social justice. In many leftist spaces, we give men ways to help, but out of a sense of retributive fairness we deny them any validation for doing the work. Yes, you can be a good ally, but don’t ever expect appreciation, because that work is simply the bare minimum expected of you as a person of privilege. If you ask for respect, you clearly weren’t being an ally for the right reasons and so need to be put even more in your place. It is understandable why some men see this as a no-win situation and cast about for alternatives. If the left is going to help them, we need to abandon the retributive strain of social justice in favour of restorative social justice practices. That starts with recognising that everyone’s needs matter, including the need for respect, and that nobody deserves to suffer, even men.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the influential progressive educator Paolo Freire argues that “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed” is “to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well” (Freire, 2000, p. 32). That is a hard pill for many to swallow in this day and age, where the oppressed are so thoroughly prevented from liberating themselves it can seem absurd to burden them with also liberating their oppressors. But it is a common refrain on the left that patriarchy harms everyone, including men. It gives them such a narrow window for meaning-making that when those conventional narratives are challenged, either by wokeness or the collapse of manufacturing and other masculine coded roles, they feel a lack of options that drives them to despair. That despair is then commodified by the same capitalist system that also commodifies everyone’s attempts at meaning-making and flourishing, depriving everyone of the energy and resources needed to address these problems.
We need to stop mocking men for their despair, and those of us with the energy to do so need to work on this problem at both the systemic and individual level. Especially progressive men, whose privilege makes it easier to cope with compassion fatigue. It is our job to show compassion and respect while helping other men understand that it is patriarchy and capitalism that are depriving them of meaningful lives, not minorities.
We can’t and shouldn’t offer men a return to the old, oppressive paths for meaning-making, so we need to shift the systems that limit their access to ethical alternatives. This is not a problem with quick solutions, cultural shift like this is measured in decades and centuries, but we don’t have another option. Men will not simply “suck it up” and accept lives that feel meaningless to them. They will fight back and force the world to respect them again, at gunpoint if necessary. I don’t know if we can prevent that reality at this point, but it is our obligation as progressives to try.
“I have only seen this far because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” This phrase, generally attributed to the English polymath Isaac Newton (1642-1726) – himself one of the greatest giants in the history of science – illustrates well what we might call a “knowledge production chain”, in which previous discoveries pave the way for new advances.
In modern science, this usually happens through the publication of peer-reviewed articles in indexed scientific journals. These are called “references”, which are essential when the author of a study makes based on something they did not do, observe or verify through experiments, for example.
Until recently, these references were basically “ink on paper” – newspapers, magazines, books or other editorial products, generally stored and accessed in libraries. The advent of digital technologies and the Internet, however, has radically changed this. Not only have new publications migrated to digital, but old references have also begun to be digitised and made available on the Internet.
A DOI is a unique internet address for documents or other online files, which allows their final destination to be changed. Thus, for example, if a publisher of scientific journals goes bankrupt or is bought by another and its internet address disappears, the articles published by it will continue to be accessible in other repositories using the same DOI address generated at the time of original publication.
Eve’s survey revealed that just over 2 million of the articles in her sample – 27.64%, or more than one in four – did not have digital copies in the main repositories of these types of work. In other words, more than a quarter of the scientific production that uses the Crossref system is at risk of disappearing or having its access hindered in the event of problems with the original digital storage, that is, becoming “ghost DOIs”.
The challenges of digital preservation
Digital preservation involves several activities, ranging from the production of digital documents themselves to maintaining their availability for the necessary time. However, in the case of scientific literature, this time is ideally indefinite, given the need to preserve the chain of knowledge so that claims can be checked and verified. This is also why there is a need for extra copies of the works, with storage in “dark archives”, such as CLOCKSS (Controlled Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe), LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) and Portico, among others. These initiatives store hidden copies of academic materials that can be retrieved and become new destinations for DOI addresses.
One problem is that there is no consensus on who or which institutions should be responsible for preserving scientific literature in the digital age. Eve cites some studies that assume that this continues to be the responsibility of academic libraries, just as it was when libraries physically stored works. In fact, he points out, the LOCKSS system operates on a network whose nodes are academic libraries.
On the other hand, it is in the interest – and therefore the responsibility – of academic publishers to ensure that “their” content is preserved, as well as the legacy of copyright transfer on which the subscription-based access model, still predominant in scientific communication, depends. So much so that Eve points out that, according to the terms of the DOI system user agreement, the members (the publishers, among other content producers) undertake to:
make their best efforts to contract with an external archive or other content repository (an ‘Archive’) … so that this Archive preserves the member’s content and, in the event that the member ceases to store its content, to ensure that this content continues to be available via the permanent link.
Literature at risk
In light of this, Eve’s research focuses on the digital preservation policies and actions of the members of the Crossref DOI system. To this end, he created a scale centered on redundancy, in which members who had at least 75% of their content digitally preserved in three or more of the main dark archives achieved a “gold” standard; those who had at least 50% of their content stored in two or more of these “dark archives” received a “silver” standard; those who had at least 25% of their content in one or more of them received a “bronze” standard; and all members who did not fit into any of these categories were “unclassified”.
Eve then collected samples of documents with a DOI from the more than 20,000 members of the Crossref system – reaching a thousand documents in the case of the richest in content, and proportionally fewer in the smallest ones – totalling 7,438,037 documents. With the help of an automated system, Eve searched for these papers in a selection of the main dark archives, including CLOCKSS, LOCKSS and Portico, plus the Brazilian Rede Cariniana, HathiTrust, the Internet Archive/FATCAT, the Public Knowledge Project PLN and the Scholars Portal.
By cross-referencing these data, Eve found that only 0.96% of Crossref members (204) were observed preserving more than 75% of their content in three or more of the archives consulted, achieving the “gold” classification. A slightly higher proportion, 8.5% (1,797) preserved more than 50% of their content in two or more archives, being classified as “silver”, and just over half – 57.7% (12,257) – achieved the minimum level of preservation, “bronze”, with 25% of their material stored in a single archive. Almost a third of Crossref members (6,982, or 32.9%), however, did not maintain any digital preservation action, going against the recommendations of the Digital Preservation Coalition.
As for the nearly 7.5 million documents themselves, the survey detected nearly 6 million “preservation instances”, a term that denotes the number of copies stored. Thus, an article preserved in three archives has three “preservation instances”. Treating the documents separately, just over 4.3 million of the articles in the sample (58.38%) had at least one “preservation instance”, leaving 2 million works (27.64%) apparently without any preservation efforts. The remaining 13.98% were excluded from the survey because they were published too recently, were not academic articles, or lacked sufficient metadata to have their sources identified.
“Our entire epistemology of science and research depends on a chain of footnotes. If you can’t verify what someone else said at a given time, you’re just blindly trusting things you can’t read for yourself,” lamented Eve, in an interview with Nature magazine.
For the University of London professor, his findings also call into question the academic culture of “publish or perish” – which could well be replaced by “publish and perish”: “Everyone thinks about the immediate gains that come from having a paper published somewhere, but what we should really be thinking about is the long-term sustainability of the research ecosystem. After you’ve been dead for 100 years, will people be able to access the things you worked on?”
Earlier this year, I went to Morocco, where I visited Paradise Valley – a section of the Tamraght River high in the Atlas Mountains. I took a trip through parts of the Sahara desert, and to wild beaches, took a drive up to Essaouira – a city on the sea that’s beautiful and very, very windy. On each of these excursions there were stops along the way. Sometimes to look at a particularly picturesque view. Once to look at some goats grazing in the trees.
On every single trip we stopped to learn about argan oil. Argan oil – often known in the UK as Moroccan Oil – is oil derived from the fruits of the argan tree. Traditionally, argan oil was made in the Essaouira region but after Western demand increased, the production spread down to Agadir, the region where we holidayed.
Argan trees themselves grow only in the Southwest of Morocco and the argan tree is an old species – around 60 million years old. These trees are able to grow in the very arid, hot conditions of Morocco. I was genuinely surprised by how green Morocco is, and a lot of this comes from the argan tree surviving well in these conditions, supporting the growth of other plants. Their roots provide structure for the soil and the shade from their canopy allows the growth of less hardy crops (and the grazing of goats). They are important trees for the region.
The area where argan trees grow has been defined as a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO – a region that can be used for “testing interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and managing changes and interactions between social and ecological systems, including conflict prevention and management of biodiversity”.
Argan oil production
Extracting the argan oil is a traditional practice, usually done by women, often by hand. Producing it is very labour intensive. The fruit must first be dried under the sun, before the seed is remove and then cracked open, by hand, between rocks. Inside the seed is a kernel called an almond. This can be roasted to make edible argan oil, or left unprocessed for cosmetic use.
Next the almonds are ground on a type of millstone and then water is added gradually, while kneading into a paste to release the oils. It takes 40 kilograms of dried fruit to produce one litre of argan oil. And that takes 15 hours of labour.
And this is largely women’s work – often in women’s cooperatives – so argan trees are a feminist issue as well as a climate issue.
Argan oil has been used as a traditional medicine in Morocco for hundreds of years, but more recently it has become popular worldwide as a cosmetic product. Its popularity in the UK and US began in the early 2000s. In part because Argan oil is a particularly light oil, so it’s great to use on hair and skin without feeling too greasy.
However, as with any “natural product”, it comes with a whole range of unevidenced claims. In Morocco people often use argan oil for skin complaints like dry skin and eczema – this makes some sense, in that applying an oil to dry skin can help to rehydrate it and keep some of that moisture in. It’s the same principle behind emollients for eczema. Of course, I would tend to suggest that if you have eczema, it’s best to use a very bland emollient as prescribed or recommended by a doctor, because eczema can often worsen with irritants, perfumes or allergens, which might be present in other creams or oils. But I can see how it might help in a pinch.
In terms of cosmetic use, argan oil is most commonly applied to add moisture to dry hair. I use hair oil regularly myself just to smooth down flyaways. I don’t believe it’s doing anything to change or improve my hair in the long term, but it is useful for styling for my very light, dry hair. Some people claim argan oil can cure dandruff if used as a hair mask. This isn’t based in any evidence, but using an oil on the dry skin of the scalp might help rehydrate the skin a little.
The culinary form of argan oil is claimed to be good for the immune system, as it’s high in vitamin E – vitamin E is an antioxidant that is used by the immune system, but we don’t need to supplement antioxidants in our diet in order to support the immune system. Similarly, it’s claimed the vitamin E in argan oil makes it an excellent topical treatment for wound healing due to these apparent anti-inflammatory properties. Again, there is just not enough high-quality evidence to support this claim about vitamin E itself, let alone about argan oil.
Many of the argan cooperatives I visited went further. Not only did they sell a variety of argan oils for either eating or cosmetic use, there were also many modified products to make the argan oil more useful. In some cases this was simply a case of adding fragrance or colour to the product, so that it could be used as a perfume or make up product. In other cases, the oil was added to creams to make it absorb better or be a little less oily on the skin.
There were many products that had other oils layered in, with claims they would help with a variety of other complaints, including hair loss. I hadn’t come across claims that argan oil could help with hair loss previously, but I had seen those claims made for another oil: rosemary oil.
Rosemary oil
Rosemary oil has been all over TikTok this year. Even doctors and dermatologists claim that it can be used for treating hair loss. It’s been covered in British Vogue, British GQ, Cosmopolitan. Some of that coverage has been reasonably balanced, with GQ Magazine saying:
Rosemary oil may not work for everyone, but according to a 2015 trial, participants showed a significant increase in follicle count after just six months of use. However, it’s worth noting that this was a controlled study, so it may not be an accurate representation of real-world results.
[trichologist Gretchen] Oligee and dermatologist Yoram Harth, MD, also point to a commonly cited 2015 study that compared rosemary oil extract to minoxidil when used on men with genetic androgen-related hair loss.
So what about this evidence? Sadly, this 2015 study is of very low quality. It’s titled “Rosemary oil vs minoxidil 2% for the treatment of androgenetic alopecia: a randomized comparative trial”. It involved around 100 participants, which isn’t too bad, but it compares the treatment group to a different treatment – there is no placebo arm. This is a problem, because if neither treatment works, this study will be useless.
Expert dermatologists agree that 2% minoxidil isn’t really strong enough to treat hair loss. And treatments were only followed for six months; nowhere near long enough to see any true effects of a hair growth treatment. Our hair grows in cycles, and can effectively go into a dormant phase. We even have some seasonal growth, with slightly increased hair loss in the autumn and slightly increased hair growth in the spring. We need studies that are longer than six months. But that isn’t even the biggest issue with this study.
The best critique I’ve seen of this study is a video from Dr Michelle Wong, who has a PhD in chemistry and now works in cosmetic chemistry. In it she points out that two of the six crucial data points in the paper are clearly wrong. At baseline and the three-month time point they find the exact same hair count and standard deviation for each of the two test conditions (minoxidil/rosemary oil). This is practically impossible. As Michelle points out, as the measurement is literally just counting hairs, even if you did the measurements an hour apart, you would expect some minor variation in the measurements, let alone across three months. That is a pretty major error to include in a published study.
Wong also highlights that their “significant” increase in hair growth is a hair count increase of, at most, six hairs. There’s a standard deviation of 50 hairs. This is a very tiny number, in terms of hairs. The average human head has between 90,000 and 150,000 hairs. The “significant” increase here was an average of just six hairs.
Further, part of the study involves giving participants a questionnaire about their levels of depression… as one of their methods to measure hair loss. It is baffling.
So, to summarise, argan oil for hair loss: no evidence. Rosemary oil for hair loss: some evidence, but it’s pretty shabby.
As for other oils, the argan oil I saw promoted for hair loss treatment also contained cannabis oil, apparently in order to promote hair growth. Again, the evidence there is lacking. There is a study from 2021 that looked really promising, but it didn’t have a control group. It claims there was statistically significant hair growth, but claimed this based on comparing the result after six months of treatment to the original baseline of the treatment arm. That is not an appropriate way to research this issue. We know that hair loss can occur because of things like stress, childbirth or sudden weight loss, and then the hair returns naturally with time. What we are likely seeing in this paper is regression to the mean… or, at least, we have absolutely no way of ruling that out. Until a properly conducted trial is available, we should be skeptical.
What’s the harm?
Sure, argan oil might not actually be effective for the many things it’s claimed to treat, but is there any harm to using it? After all, aren’t these all natural ingredients? They’re probably therefore fine to apply directly to the scalp to see if they enhance hair growth?
Sadly, that’s not how this works – if we think a product can enhance hair growth then we must also consider that it could enhance hair loss. Acting sufficiently on the hair follicles to change their behaviour in one direction must mean causing a change in behaviour in the opposite direction is also possible. We have no evidence that these products don’t cause hair loss. Some hair loss can even be caused or exacerbated by an allergic response, so applying products that haven’t been regulated as a treatment (and therefore could have a range of other additives in there) could cause allergic reactions and harm to the scalp. Rosemary oil in particular does have some compounds that could be allergenic.
It’s also important to note that concentrated rosemary oil (ie not diluted in a carrier oil) is really likely to irritate your skin. There are some studies that show that some phytocannabinoids might lead to hair loss, too, particularly in very high doses.
As ever, the risk with cosmetic products over medical products is that the regulations are different. It can make it hard to be clear the exact doses of the active ingredients in the product. The other risk here is that hair loss can be a signifier of a serious health problem – many of which would require treatment. Looking for answers on TikTok instead of speaking to a doctor is never a good idea.
None of this means that I’m completely anti-argan oil, however. I still use some kind of hair oil in my hair almost daily (long-haired readers, don’t be aghast, I know it sounds like a lot, but my hair is so hungry for it, I still only need to wash my hair twice a week even with regular hair oil use).
Plus, argan oil production itself is probably a good thing – before it got popular outside of Morocco, deforestation was a major issue. The trees were being cut down to make way for crops and for charcoal. The tree takes around 50 years to get mature enough to grow fruit, so deforestation is definitely not good. And the ecosystem really benefits from this tree, so if trees are maintained to grow oil for cosmetic use – and produced using cooperatives with fair pay and fair-trade methods (big ifs, I know) – then it could actually be a great thing for our environment.
But, of course, there is still a risk that this industry becomes exploitative, if we aren’t careful.
If we define ‘fake news’ as the presentation of a news story that is either known, by its author, to be evidently untrue; or not known, by its author, to be evidently true, we are referring to some long-practiced activities, older than the existence of commercial newspapers.
At its simplest, fake news involves an attempt to dishonestly convince a reader, viewer or listener of a claim about some aspect of their immediate reality, such as their healthcare or their politicians. But there is also a more complex form of fake news: an attempt to dishonestly convince a reader, viewer, or listener of a claim about a rival news source. As Donald Trump’s habit of accusing the journalists attending his own press briefings of being creators of ‘fake news’ (or, oddly, just ‘fake news’ itself) suggests, in the context of some public awareness that news fakery can happen, it is possible to convince the public to classify as fake all claims that come from a certain person, organisation, company or grouping. Indeed, it is possible to convince the public that everyone except a single news source is lying to them – a fundamental component of conspiracist thinking.
This second form of news fakery can be achieved by a process that involves the first: one can publish a whole contrived news story, attribute that news story to one’s adversary and then sit back to wait for someone to discover that the story is fake and observe smugly while one’s adversary is cancelled. But there is an even more efficient, and less risky, way of discrediting one’s adversaries: fake the very existence of the fake news story, by publishing what looks like public reactions to that non-existent news story rather than the story itself.
This practice makes it much harder for anyone to show that one’s target did not actually publish that news story, as it is always possible to insist that the original is unavailable for scrutiny not because it never existed but because of the ephemeral, messy and plethoric nature of works of news media. It is plausible to insist that the original fake news story cannot be found because it was published in the evening edition of a certain newspaper rather than its morning edition, or because someone has made a mistake about what day it was published or what newspaper it was published in, or because it was broadcast only on late-night news on terrestrial television in just one region, or because its authors have deleted it from their website.
An early instance, though probably not the earliest instance, of this second form of news fakery occurred in the American film industry in early 1910. At the beginning of 1910, the filmmaking industry in the US was divided into two factions: an older faction, the seven production companies (including the Edison Company) who had orchestrated the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company (MPPC) in late 1908 in an attempt to use patents to monopolise the production, distribution and exhibition of films throughout the USA and Canada, and a younger faction, the six production companies, most of them set up by distribution companies who were trying to operate outside of the reach of the MPPC’s patents.
The ‘independent’ production companies and distribution companies had formed the National Independent Moving Picture Alliance in September 1909. One of these ‘independent’ distributors was the Laemmle Film Service, run by Carl Laemmle, who in June 1909 set up his own production company, initially called Yankee Films but soon re-branded as Independent Motion Pictures, or IMP. These ‘independents’ were trying to carve out a share of the market for hiring films to cinemas in the face of a system of licenses that the older faction was using to try to persuade cinema managers across the USA and Canada that getting their films from anywhere other than the MPPC was basically illegal. And in this situation of desperation, they were willing to try anything.
At the beginning of 1909 there was no star system in the film industry in the USA: when creating publicity posters for a film, for example, it was normal not to give the names of anyone who acted in the film; credits in films might indirectly name the director of the production company if that production company’s name was also the director’s name, but would not name any other people involved in making the film unless that person was, for example, a famous theatre celebrity appearing in a film on a short-term basis. But during the Summer and Autumn of 1909 Carl Laemmle, on a trip to Europe, probably saw some evidence of the Pathé Frères company launching a publicity campaign for a film actor, one Max Linder, and when he got back to the USA in mid-October 1909 he seems to have decided to do the same thing for one of his employees.
When Laemmle got back to the USA, he found that William Ranous, the director/producer who he had left in charge while he was away, had employed a new actress, a Canadian who was born Florence Bridgwood, who used the pseudonym Florence Lawrence, and who, significantly, had recently been fired by the Biography company, one of the members of the MPPC.
Florence Lawrence had accrued some recognisability during her time acting for films at Biograph, even though Biograph had never used her name in any publicity. That is, she was an asset that the older faction had somewhat short-sightedly thrown away. Finding that he now had such an asset on his hands, and willing to depart from the US industry’s norm of keeping film performers anonymous in publicity, Carl Laemmle jumped at the opportunity by launching a publicity campaign for her in which he used her name, in an attempt to gain an advantage over his rivals.
We can see evidence of this in a poster, dating from late January 1910, distributed by the Laemmle Film Service alongside Lawrence’s films, on display at a cinema in Los Angeles, a poster which refers to her as “America’s most popular moving picture actress”.
Postcard sent from the Shell Theatre in Los Angeles to “Miss Florence Lawrence” care of Carl Laemmle, 111 East-14th Street, New York, and postmarked on the reverse either 25 or 29 January 1910. Florence Lawrence Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, VF211.
Detail from top right of the postcard
Reverse of the postcard shown in Figure 1a, showing postmark of 5pm on 25 or 29 January 1910. The message reads “With all / good wishes / From / “The Shell Theatre / Los Angeles. / Cal[ifornia].”
The eight photographs used on the poster have survived, and are reproduced below, with text under the photographs reading: “America’s Foremost Moving Picture Actress Appears in “Imp” Films Only!”.
Figure 2. Undated photographs of Florence Lawrence taken in c.late November/early December 1909. Courtesy of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research. Image 132974.
Had Laemmle built Lawrence’s public profile and she didn’t agree to renew her contract when it expired in late 1910, Laemmle would have just built value in an asset that one of his rival companies could then use in competing against him. He therefore seems to have done everything he could to capitalise on Lawrence’s value during her time with him, including escalating this publicity campaign, and in collaboration with his press agent Robert Cochrane, he decided to use some second-order news fakery to do so.
Reproduced here is an example of advertising that IMP placed in the film trade press in early March 1910.
IMP’s advertisement for The Broken Oath (mistakenly called The Broken Bath) and The Time-Lock Safe printed in the trade press on 5 March 1910, which contradicted purported reports of Lawrence’s death. Moving Picture World 6.10 (12 March 1910), p.365. (Note that the cover date of magazines at the time referred to a date one week after it was published.) Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.
Notice the opening text:
“The blackest and at the same time the silliest lie circulated by enemies of the “Imp” was the story foisted on the public of St. Louis last week to the effect that Miss Lawrence (the “Imp” girl, formerly known as the “Biograph” girl) had been killed by a street car. It was a black lie because so cowardly. It was a silly lie because so easily disproved. Miss Lawrence was not even in a street-car accident, is in the best of health, will continue to appear in “Imp” film, and very shortly some of the best work in her career is to be released.”
Before the publication of my 2019 book The Origins of the Film Star System, those film historians who have come across this advertisement in the trade press have got this story at least a bit wrong in a variety of ways, with some claiming that some St Louis newspapers published a news story which claimed that Florence Lawrence had died(1), and some claiming that no stories even mentioning the idea that Florence Lawerence had died had appeared in any St Louis newspapers(2).
The truth is more complex, because some news stories were printed that referred to the belief that Florence Lawrence had died. The most elaborate of the surviving examples is reproduced and transcribed here, originally from Billboard in March 1910. To gloss some details: the Gem was one of St Louis’s independent cinemas, and the Wagner company was St Louis’s main independent film hiring company.
Anon., ‘Rumor Hands a Hot One’, Billboard 22.10 (5 March 1910), 17. Courtesy of the Media History Digital Library.
“Chicago, Feb. 26 – Dame Rumor aroused herself in a manner that for a few moments caused Mr. Carl Laemmle, of the IMP Company[,] to sit up and take notice, and then make a bee-line for the telegraph office [….] All this happened last week when a story was flashed over the country that Miss Florence Lawrence, the queen of moving picture actresses, had been killed in an accident, and that thereby the IMP Company had been deprived of the services of the famous “girl of one thousand faces.” It may not be ascertained as to the exact source of the story, or as to who were the instigators. It is to be hoped, however, that the flimsy foundation that is responsible for the rumor was not prompted by ulterior motives of jealousy or otherwise. Miss Lawrence has gained an enviable reputation on the sheer merit of her work, which is indeed a revelation such as has put her on a plane with those famous of our well-known emotional actresses. Further than this, she has grown into the popular fancy of that big host of people who constitute the world of moving picture patrons in a manner that has never heretofore been accomplished. [T]he following telegrams, which were received by Mr. Laemmle, testify conclusively as to her hold upon those people who know her face, admire her art and treasure her acquaintance even though it has of necessity been of the “absent treatment” [i.e. silent film] sort. Here are reproduced several of the wire inquiries which were the first of the many that followed up the story:
St Louis, Mo., Feb. 19, 1910 Mr Carl Laemmle – Was Miss Lawrence killed. Wire at our expense quick. (Signed) F. L. TALBOTT. Gem Theatre.
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St. Louis, Mo., Feb. 19, 1910 Independent Moving Pictures Co. – Daily papers here printed death of Florence Lawrence. Affirm or deny. May use answer for publication. Wire. (Signed) WAGNER FILM & AM. CO.
[…]
Signed “Monte L. De Hoog,” and from St. Louis, this little bit of verse was mailed to Carl Laemmle, at Chicago.
IN MEMORY OF FLORENCE LAWRENCE (Died Feb. 17, 1910.)
The angel of death has come again And gathered for his own, A Friend whom we have learned to love, Whose name we’ve never known
As a loving and faithful wife; Or a maiden full of grace; She had made us laugh and cry, And in our heart she’s found a place
On many a pleasant journey With her we have been, When the Man up in the gallery Flashed the picture on the screen
But now she is gone forever, And we have lost a pearl: We shed a tear in memory of The moving picture girl.
Well, Monte, you will have to put your rhyme on ice, where it will keep a long while , for Miss Lawrence has a one hundred per cent. health certificate that should keep her with us for a long while, and Messrs. Laemmle and Cochrane are too solicitous for her safety to allow her to even take a street crossing without having traffic stopped until their star is transported to the safe side of the curb.
As for Miss Lawrence, she read the astounding news, which was smuggled into the papers from we know not where, and since then has been busy assuring her host of friends that she is very much alive and intends to be in that happy state for many years to come.
Here’s hoping that the love of her friends, the kind words of sympathy, and all that goes to prove that one has a place in this world may continue to be for the reigning queen of the picture artists. Here’s hoping, too, that ever will be their life in those hearts which are not filled with self, but that their use in praise of this one departed by held in abeyance and stored away on the shelves of the far distant future until mellowed by time their appropriation be accomplished with a life’s work completed.”
What is going on here? Of course, Carl Laemmle and Robert Cochrane are trying to make out that Lawrence Florence is much more famous and much more publicly adored than she actually is, as a way of trying to get the public to treat her as more famous than she actually is, which might in turn actually make her that famous.
Laemmle and Cochrane organised for Florence Lawrence to make a series of personal appearances, in the company of her fellow employee King Baggot in St Louis, Missouri on the weekend of 25th to 27th March 1910 (Baggot was a St Louis native), and Laemmle and Cochrane had probably already done so before creating this press release; these personal appearances both ‘responded’ to the non-existent public outcry about the news that she had died and created opportunities for further news stories about Lawrence being mobbed by fans. But in addition to this ‘fake it until you make it’ strategy, in this press release Laemmle and Cochrane are also orchestrating a piece of subtle second-order faking of fake news.
The press release claims that one of IMP’s competitors had published a fake news story about Florence Lawrence’s death, and its ‘evidence’ of this earlier fake news story takes the form of horrified responses to that news among residents of St Louis, both people who work in the film industry (the manager of the Gem and the manager of Wagner) and a member of the general public (the probably entirely invented ‘Monte L. De Hoog’). We can be very confident that no original news stories claiming that Florence Lawrence had died were ever published, but by faking these bits of evidence of a horrified reaction to such a story, IMP faked those original news stories indirectly. The staff at the IMP company did this both to try to discredit the MPPC companies by making them appear to have created a piece of fake news and to build the IMP company’s own reputation by making out that the IMP staff have heroically saved the public from an attempt to deceive them.
Billboard was reproducing most or all of IMP’s press release. Such press releases are designed to feed copy into national and local newspapers, and several local newspaper editors do seem to have been convinced by this claim that a story about Lawrence’s death had been printed somewhere, because versions of the story about the debunking of the fake news of Lawrence’s death appeared in some local Mid-West newspapers, including the St Louis Post-Dispatch on 6 March 1910(3), and on 7 March 1910 a contributor to Louisville’s Courier-Journal remarked that “it was only the other day that a report had gained wide credence that this charming actress had met with an accident while posing on the streets of New York”(4). That is, the attempt at discrediting IMP’s business rivals, without even naming them, met with some success.
In early 1910, then, in the era of print newspapers, we can identify industry awareness of some basic guidelines for how to conduct news fakery in the context of the public awareness that news fakery can happen:
Do not actually directly fake the news. To do so means there could be a paper trail that might lead to you. Instead, print a third-hand ‘account’ of the fake news in the form of a report of people who have supposedly read/seen/heard that original news story.
Attribute the act of hearing the fake news to a reputable source, so you can say that you have it on good authority that the lie existed.
Avoid naming the people who are supposedly responsible for the fake news, but nonetheless imply their identity.
Make the claims in the third-hand fakery both a) perverse, and b) imbecilic in their susceptibility to being shown to be incorrect.
Make the claims in the third-hand fakery amenable to an act of refutation that serves one’s own interests (in Laemmle’s case, the announcement that as Lawrence was luckily not dead, it was incumbent on IMP to announce which films the public might see her in next).
This act of covertly faking a piece of covert-turned-exposed fake news and attributing that act of fakery to one’s opponent was a straightforward consequence of a highly competitive business environment, itself a product of the little-regulated form of capitalism that was practised in the USA at the time. (I say ‘little-regulated’, as anti-trust legislation did exist in the USA: with reference to the prohibitions against a monopoly that had been stated in the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, decisions in several cases concerning the MPPC, at District Court level, Circuit Court level and Supreme Court level, in late 1915 through to early 1918, resulted in the MPPC’s dissolution, in spite of the argument that its pool of patents exceptionally gave it the right to control trade in and use of films in the USA.)
Fostering unwarranted public mistrust of one’s competitors is one natural consequence of any system that makes competition the crux of how humans interact with each other. Unwarranted public mistrust of anyone and everyone except for a single source of ‘information’ is one of the two fundamental components of the mindset behind conspiracy theorising (the other is a lowering of the burden of proof for that single source of ‘information’). Our habits of thought are shaped by large-scale systems to which we have grown so accustomed that we cannot even see them as systems anymore. With a knowledge of what capitalism prompts its subjects to do to each other, we should not be surprised at just how widespread that public mistrust and its resulting conspiracism currently is.
Footnotes
(1) Anon., ‘Heroes and Heroines of Moving Picture Shows’, St Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, 6 March 1910, p. 4. Anon., ‘Famous Picture Actress is Still in Posing Land’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15040 (6 March 1910), section 4, p. 8; this article included two of the eight ‘range photographs and claimed that the fake obituaries had been printed on 4 March 1910.
(2) Anon., ‘Love Picture and Two Star Comics’, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky) 113.15041 (7 March 1910), p. 10.
(3) See, for example, Ralph Cassady, ‘Monopoly in Motion Picture Production and Distribution,’ 1959, The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures, ed. Gorham Kindem (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982, pp. 25-68, p. 52, Richard Schickel, The Stars (New York: Bonanza, 1962), p. 11, Alexander Walker, Stardom: The Hollywood Phenomenon (New York; Stein & Day, 1970), p. 31-2, Kevin Brownlow, Hollywood: The Pioneers (London: Collins, 1979), p. 156, Charles Musser, ‘The Changing Status of the Actor’, Before Hollywood: Turn-of-the Century American Film (New York: Hudson Hills Press/American Federation of Arts, 1987), pp. 57–62, p. 59, Richard Dyer MacCann, ‘Early Luminaries’, The Stars Appear, ed. Richard Dyer MacCann (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1992), pp. 44-47, p. 45, Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907-1915 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 112, Hugues Marc Antoine Bartoli, ‘Florence Lawrence: Myth and Legend of the Biograph Girl’, Classic Images 343 (January 2004), pp. 71-6, p. 73, Robert Kobel, Silent Movies: The Birth of Film to the Triumph of Movie Culture (London: Little, Brown & Co., 2007), p. 151, Richard Abel, Americanizing the Movies and “Movie-Mad” Audiences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 232.
(4) This has been the case for most (but not all) film historians who have written on the topic since Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities, 1990 (Champaign, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 2001), p. 58.
