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Scientific Method / Science & Exploration

For shame: Trolls defeat Scientific American, Popular Science

Op-ed: Leading outlets for scientific knowledge miss the point when it comes to community.

Every publication makes mistakes. Great publications learn from those mistakes, and the best publications also learn from the mistakes of others. So imagine my surprise at seeing two legendary publications make compounding mistakes by taking serious missteps with their communities. I'm talking about Popular Science and Scientific American, two of the oldest and most revered publications for the popularization and support of the scientific enterprise. Both publications will easily survive these missteps, but they are leaders in the field, and those who follow their recent moves will be led astray.

SciAm nukes its own righteous blogger

Scientific American (SciAm) Online features, among other things, a science blog network. The network's bloggers are paid to write for SciAm, and until this weekend, most of them thought they understood the rules of the quasi-independent relationship they had with the publisher: share their love of science, make a little money, and be part of a real community. But this past weekend, SciAm pulled a post made by one of the network’s writers, Dr. Danielle Lee, and so far the publication has failed to explain its actions in any believable way.

For those of you not familiar with the blog network, it features routine science content as well as posts about being a scientist generally (including a celebration of things that scientists geek out over, etc.). Dr. Lee’s post was prompted by a rather reprehensible event that occurred when her work at SciAm attracted the attention of another publication. An editor from Biology-Online liked Dr. Lee's work so much that he asked if she would contribute to BO as well. After learning that BO was not paying, Dr. Lee politely declined. But the response from the editor was incredible: he asked Dr. Lee if she is a real scientist or a whore. (Yes, you read that right.) By not agreeing to work for free, this professional scientist was apparently a whore in this editor’s view. The editor, an individual named Ofek, has since been fired.

Dr. Lee realized that this was yet another example of the oppression and marginalization of women in the sciences, and she decided to write about it. Not too long after she hit “post,” SciAm deleted her entry from the network site without even informing her. You can see the original post here.

Once the publication got around to explaining why it did this, SciAm ultimately hid behind “legal reasons.” As an editor-in-chief of 15 years, I seriously, seriously doubt this. Here’s a little secret: you can almost always pull an article for “legal reasons” because you can always dream those reasons up. There are always potential legal implications to publishing something. That’s why professional standards include reasonable efforts at fact-checking and, more importantly, timely reactions to legal complaints from outside parties who feel they have been wronged.

SciAm did not say it was asked to remove Dr. Lee’s post by a third party. In my view, the “legal reasons” appear to have been a convenient excuse. Preemptively pulling the post is timidity. Hiding behind “we couldn’t verify the facts” is ridiculous when the author of the post had screenshots of the very e-mails in question. Plus, not a single soul has come forth to dispute the facts (and if SciAm wants us to believe that it fact-checks everything on its blog network, it must think we’re fools). Here's a supporting fact however: Biology Online fired the man responsible for the e-mails.

(Nota bene: SciAm originally claimed via Twitter that the post was “not appropriate” because it was not about “discovering science.” But in its official apology, the publication dropped this excuse because it’s demonstrably false—just look at all of the content from the network that is not about “discovering science.”)

This is a horrible way to treat one of your own. Dr. Lee, confronted by overt racism and sexism, stood up to it and exposed it, and then SciAm erased it. It silenced her triumphant exposé of horrible behavior when it should have been cheering her on. This is a huge letdown to the scientific community, or at least the part of it that is concerned about equality issues for women and people of color.

I don’t think SciAm tried to hurt Dr. Lee, and I doubt SciAm is actively trying to suppress all discussion of equality issues in science. But I am left wondering why it would neglect its own community in this manner, and I can only make sense of it by connecting it to another recent controversy in the science community—Popular Science (PopSci) shutting down its own comments.

PopSci dismisses comments and community

Almost three weeks ago, the fine people at PopSci decided to turn off commenting on nearly all new articles. Imagine the shock that met regular readers under the banner "POPULAR SCIENCE—THE FUTURE NOW," when they read “Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments.”

The article opens with the ridiculous claim that “[c]omments can be bad for science. That’s why… we’re shutting them off.” Only a few lines later, PopSci admits that its mission includes being as “committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide.” Trolls and “spam-bots” are making this impossible, so PopSci would rather throw out the neonatal Homosapien with the slightly alkaline bathwater.

This decision was partly based on “research” published at the beginning of the year. An independent study of how roughly 1,200 Americans reacted to reading fake news fitted with fake comments revealed that people’s opinions of reporting could be shaped by the comments left on an article. We covered the research here, so I won’t repeat it. But PopSci understood this study to mean that trollish commenters could ultimately end up affecting public policy by skewing public perception. So PopSci is shutting off comments, ostensibly to keep the masses from misconstruing or trolling its reporting. Not a paragraph later, though, we find the same comment-killers asking the audience to talk to everyone using social media. “We hope you'll chime in with your brightest thoughts,” reads the announcement. “Don't do it for us. Do it for science.” Just don’t do it on their site?

So comments are bad for science when they're made on PopSci. That seems to be the point—which is to say there really isn’t a point other than that they wanted to shut the comments down because they were annoyed by trolls and spam-bots. The upshot: trolls win. Trolls are just online bullies, with many being very dedicated to shutting down, derailing, or drowning out discussions. PopSci has let the trolls win and has punished its readership as a result. They don't want the controversy that comes with the science, and I can’t totally blame them. It’s annoying when people “don’t get” science.

But both SciAm and PopSci are showing signs that they lack the scientific rigor of the professionals they report on. The publishers and editors, it seems, cherish a future where all are equal and commenting is great and knowledge spreads like a light in the darkness. But neither one is willing to put in the work to get there. Both let the trolls win: PopSci shut down its community, and SciAm let a single bigoted, chauvinist troll not only insult one of its associated writers, but it let him silence her and set its community reeling.

The hypothesis

I often talk to executives around the country about online communities because Ars is one of the biggest and best out there. There is a slide in one of my presentation decks that has two images: a screenshot of typical YouTube comments and “the filthiest toilet in Scotland” (Trainspotting reference). The slide is titled “What do these two things have in common?”

After I let a few people guess, I tell them the answer: “The management doesn’t give a damn.”

So, dear colleagues at PopSci and SciAm, please do give a damn. Take the path that’s a little less cut. Clear the way for others by leading, rather than pleading for a civility that will never arrive. Stand up to wrongdoers and support your writers when they face down injustice. Build your communities and put the time in to make them places people want to stay. Give your readers tools to help police the community and face up to the reality that it's a messy business. Isn't that why you got into it in the first place?

Update: Great News! SciAm has reposted Dr. Lee’s original post, claiming to now have “verified the exchange” (as if this was ever reasonably in doubt). This is a victory nonetheless, and it establishes that SciAm does believe that Dr. Lee’s experiences are important to their audience. We could not agree more.

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