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Are You Eating a Credit Card Every Week?

2022-06-17 · explainer · Hank · 3:52 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Internet & YouTube · mode: News analysis

Hank says you are not eating a credit card's worth of microplastics a week, and traces how the claim reached mainstream news in 2022: a WWF-commissioned range became a talking point, a Vienna paper cited only its upper bound, peer review missed it, a press release led with it, and outlets fact-checked only as far as the peer-reviewed paper. He concludes that normal biases and the attention economy make sense-making very hard.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — The false credit-card microplastics claim and why its spread puzzled Hank

  • ★★★ Hank says you are not eating a credit card's worth of microplastics a week, although many credible news organizations have reported that you are. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ Hank says the spread of this untrue claim through legitimate outlets annoyed him but also made him curious, since these outlets do fact check. — 00:00:00

00:00:29 — The steps: WWF talking point, the Vienna paper, peer review, press release, headlines, fact checks and sharing

  • ★★ Hank says that when he traced the claim he found something remarkable: an 11-step process. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank says step one is that the World Wildlife Fund is rightly worried about plastics: there are far too many single-use plastics and we need to stop this. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank says the WWF commissioned a literature review from the University of Newcastle, which added up the ranges of studies on how plastics enter people. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ Hank says the range is too imprecise to be useful, like saying the average person eats between one and 50 pounds of food a day. (playful) — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Hank says the WWF turned the study into a talking point, that people could be consuming five grams of microplastics a week: not a lie, but misleading. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Hank says scientists at the Medical University of Vienna, misled, used only the five-gram upper bound of the 0.1-to-5-gram estimate as a background stat in their paper's introduction. — 00:01:27
    • check: five grams — doubtful
  • ★★ Hank says the 2019 talking point did not spread far because 'could' headlines are unconvincing; nobody wrote that people definitely were eating a credit card of plastic until 2022. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ Hank says peer review did not catch the number because it was a background stat, which reviewers pay little attention to. — 00:01:56
  • ★★ Hank says the university PR team's press release opened by stating that five grams of plastic particles on average enter the human gut per person per week. — 00:01:56
    • check: five grams — doubtful
  • ★★ Hank says that less than a week after the press release a news site published the claim in a headline, and the next day the New York Post did too. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ Hank says legitimate outlets would not simply repeat the New York Post, so they fact-checked, found a peer-reviewed paper with the claim, and with a great headline that was enough for them. — 00:02:26
  • ★★ Hank says the last step is that the headline was so good that many people clicked and shared it, so it spread rather than merely being published. — 00:02:55
  • ★★ Hank was lucky to first see the claim in the New York Post, which he distrusts; seen first at USA Today, ABC News or Nautilus by someone primed to expect the worst, he understands not doubting it. — 00:02:55

00:03:24 — How hard sense-making is, given normal biases and the fight for attention; sign-off

  • ★★★ Hank says people want their sense of the world to rest on reality, but despite the systems we have built, normal biases and the fight for attention make sense-making a monster of a challenge. — 00:03:24 · attention economy

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description lists six failures: funding science for a talking point, amplifying a misleading version, misled authors, peer review skipping background stats, outlets not checking the source, and people sharing without checking. — video description
  • ★ In a comment Hank says all of the mistakes matter a lot, not only the assumption that peer-reviewed claims are reliable. — video description

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: Microplastics · misinformation

Also: Organizations: ABC News · Medical University of Vienna · Nautilus (science magazine) · New York Post · University of Newcastle (Australia) · USA Today · World Wide Fund for Nature

Concepts: attention economy · cognitive bias · Credit card · fact-checking · negativity bias · paltering · peer review · Plastic pollution

Also centred on misinformation: The Top 10 Greatest Hoaxes of All Time · Truth or Fail: HOAXES! · Is Obama a Muslim? Examine the Evidence! · Somebody once told me… · My Greatest Tool Against Vaccine Misinformation · I Believed These Four Lies

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