q**********i
发帖数: 1 | 1 Overview
The Yan Report is a misleading article masquerading as science, which
falsely claims that the novel coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab. An
example of cloaked science, it was released during a time of intense
uncertainty; as scientists raced for answers about COVID-19, sharing
unvetted data as preprints in open science repositories became an essential
mode of international collaboration. The increasing openness of the
scientific community, though, is a vulnerability that can be leveraged by
media manipulators, especially during times of crisis. On April 28, 2020, Dr
. Li-Meng Yan, a researcher at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), fled to
the United States with support from Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui. They used
Yan’s story — that she was a whistleblower — to exploit the contentious
wedge issue of the unknown origin of COVID-19.
This media manipulation campaign involved planting misleading evidence into
the scientific literature, muddying the waters about COVID-19 and providing
the veneer of scientific legitimacy for the political claim that coronavirus
was a Chinese bioweapon. Subsequently, the Yan Report was amplified through
right-wing media networks, leading to nearly a million views of the report
on Zenodo, an open-access research data repository. While social media
platforms moderated information about the Yan Report after scientists at
several universities debunked it, two follow-up Yan Reports were uploaded to
open science repositories that even more bluntly pushed the bioweapon
narrative, while also refuting the academic responses to the first report.
Seeding the Yan reports in the scientific community as cloaked science
allowed those who linked to them on social media to claim legitimacy, while
also providing the empirical basis for furthering the political aims of the
funders of the reports. |
|
