Five million users from the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic to the end of the emergency; peaks of 16,000 ‘clicks’ for cards on hot topics; almost 20 thousand followers on Facebook. These are some numbers of ‘Dottoremaeveroche.it’, the anti-fake news portal of the Fnomceo-National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists, which celebrates its fifth birthday today. And on the occasion of the anniversary, the commitment of the ‘anti-hoax doctors’ is renewed, a project launched to answer citizens’ questions on health and to counter false news in the health sector.
It was 16 February 2018 – reads a note from Fnomceo – when the site, born from an idea of the then secretary of the Federation, the late Luigi Conte, and the head of the Communication Area, Cosimo Nume, was presented to the press to the Ministry of Health. To baptise him, among others, two exceptional godfathers: the science popularizer par excellence, Piero Angela, who passed away last August, and the pharmacologist Silvio Garattini. The working group is multidisciplinary, coordinated by Il Pensiero Scientifico Editore and made up of neuropsychiatrists, doctors, journalists and scientific authors, debunkers and fact-checkers, university professors, communication experts, linguists. Objective: to understand the reasons why our brain falls into the cognitive traps that make us believe in fake news, pseudocures, real conspiracy theories. And dismantle them, through a welcoming and empathetic communicative approach. A “kind communication”, as defined by the project manager, the doctor Alessandro Conte.
“Dottoremaeverowho – he underlines – has the mission of conveying scientific information and correct lifestyles to citizens. During the pandemic, traditional media were not always able to communicate the uncertainty of a new situation, from which we learned something every day. They preferred to give the word to scientists, some really experts, others less so, who gave their opinion not always based on robust evidence”. Instead, “the management of information is crucial for the effects that they cause on the population – says the president of Fnomceo, Filippo Anelli – Repercussions that can be positive, with the adoption of correct lifestyles and active adherence to prevention rules, or harmful to health and society”. This is why it is “essential not only to deny false information – the doctors remark – but also to provide a method to increase the critical spirit of users. The ‘Aware Navigation’ section was created with this objective, in which it is possible to test the own ability to recognize sources and acquire tools to search for information on the Net”.
“Dottoremaeverowho has set himself the stated goal of becoming a safe haven in the stormy sea of disinformation in the health sector – continues Anelli – We would never have imagined waves of such magnitude, a ‘perfect storm’ that also hit information, so much so that there has been talk of an ‘infodemic'”.
“It is now necessary to re-establish a climate of trust that cannot be obtained with unreasonably optimistic, miraculous, or even alarmist messages – warns the president Fnomceo – Trust is earned by communicating in calm tones and with intellectual honesty. And also by managing to make it clear that the scientific progress advances by attempts, passing through adjustments and changes of course, and that knowledge grows precisely through constructive uncertainty, doubt, and rises by anchoring itself to the evidence that is gradually collected and never clinging to granite preconceptions”.
Dottoremaevero’s commitment therefore does not end with the pandemic, but “continues with the return to normality and the emergence of new questions – the doctors’ orders assure – and from synthetic meat to the threat of bird flu, from the climate emergency to ‘artificial intelligence, the team of anti-hoax doctors is always ready to answer”.