Governments and social media platforms should not rely on content removal for combatting harmful scientific misinformation online, a report by the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has said.

The Online Information Environment report also warns that the UK Government’s upcoming Online Safety Bill focuses on harms to individuals while failing to recognise the wider ‘societal harms’ that misinformation can cause. Misinformation about scientific issues, from vaccine safety to climate change, can cause harm to individuals and society at large. 

The report says there is little evidence that calls for major platforms to remove offending content will limit scientific misinformation’s harms and warns such measures could even drive it to harder-to-address corners of the internet and exacerbate feelings of distrust in authorities.

It recommends wide-ranging measures that governments, tech platforms and academic institutions can take to build resilience to misinformation and a healthy online information environment.

Professor Frank Kelly FRS, Professor of the Mathematics of Systems at the Statistical Laboratory, University of Cambridge, and Chair of the report said, “Science stands on the edge of error and the nature of the scientific endeavour at the frontiers means there is always uncertainty.

“In the early days of the pandemic, science was too often painted as absolute and somehow not to be trusted when it corrects itself, but that prodding and