# The global spread of misinformation on spiders

Stefano Mammola, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, Valeria Arabesky, Diego Alejandro Barrales-Alcalá, Aimee Lynn Barrion-Dupo, Marco Antonio Benamú, Tharina Bird, Maria Bogomolova, Pedro Cardoso, Maria Chatzaki, et al.

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Stefano Mammola, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte, Valeria Arabesky, Diego Alejandro Barrales-Alcalá, Aimee Lynn Barrion-Dupo, et al.. The global spread of misinformation on spiders. Current Biology - CB, 2022, 32 (16), pp.R871-R873. 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026. hal-03776260

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>

Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Correspondence

The global spread
of misinformation
on spiders

Stefano Mammola<sup>1,2,62,64,*</sup>, Jagoba Malumbres-Olarte<sup>1,3,63</sup>, Valeria Arabesky<sup>4,5</sup>, Diego Alejandro Barrales-Alcalá<sup>6</sup>, Aimee Lynn Barrion-Dupo<sup>7</sup>, Marco Antonio Benamú<sup>8,9,10</sup>, Tharina L. Bird<sup>11,12</sup>, Maria Bogomolova<sup>13</sup>, Pedro Cardoso<sup>1</sup>, Maria Chatzaki<sup>14</sup>, Ren-Chung Cheng<sup>15</sup>, Tien-Ai Chu<sup>15</sup>, Leticia M. Classen-Rodríguez<sup>16</sup>, Iva Čupić<sup>17</sup>, Naufal Urfi Dhiya'ulhaq<sup>18</sup>, André-Philippe Drapeau Picard<sup>19</sup>, Hisham K. El-Hennawy<sup>20</sup>, Mert Elverici<sup>21</sup>, Caroline S. Fukushima<sup>1</sup>, Zeana Ganem<sup>22,23</sup>, Efrat Gavish-Regev<sup>22</sup>, Naledi T. Gonnye<sup>24</sup>, Axel Hacala<sup>25</sup>, Charles R. Haddad<sup>26</sup>, Thomas Hesselberg<sup>27</sup>, Tammy Ai Tian Ho<sup>28</sup>, Thanakorn Into<sup>29</sup>, Marco Isaia<sup>30</sup>, Dharmaraj Jayaraman<sup>31</sup>, Nanguei Karuaera<sup>32</sup>, Rajashree Khalap<sup>33</sup>, Kiran Khalap<sup>33</sup>, Dongyoung Kim<sup>34</sup>, Tuuli Korhonen<sup>1</sup>, Simona Kralj-Fišer<sup>35</sup>, Heidi Land<sup>36</sup>, Shou-Wang Lin<sup>36</sup>, Sarah Loboda<sup>37</sup>, Elizabeth Lowe<sup>38</sup>, Yael Lubin<sup>5,39</sup>, Alejandro Martínez<sup>1</sup>, Zingisile Mbo<sup>26</sup>, Marija Miličić<sup>1,40</sup>, Grace Mwende Kioko<sup>41</sup>, Veronica Nanni<sup>30,42</sup>, Yusoff Norma-Rashid<sup>43</sup>, Daniel Nwankwo<sup>44</sup>, Christina J. Painting<sup>45</sup>, Aleck Pang<sup>16</sup>, Paolo Pantini<sup>47</sup>, Martina Pavlek<sup>17,48</sup>, Richard Pearce<sup>49</sup>, Booppa Petcharad<sup>29</sup>, Julien Pétillon<sup>25,50</sup>, Onjaherizo Christian Raberahona<sup>51</sup>, Philip Russo<sup>52</sup>, Joni A. Saarinen<sup>1</sup>, Laura Segura-Hernández<sup>53</sup>, Lenka Sentenská<sup>54</sup>, Gabriele Uhl<sup>36,62</sup>, Leilani Walker<sup>55,56</sup>, Charles M. Warui<sup>57</sup>, Konrad Wiśniewski<sup>58</sup>, Alireza Zamani<sup>59</sup>, Angela Chuang<sup>60,61,63</sup>, and Catherine Scott<sup>37,63</sup>

In the internet era, the digital
architecture that keeps us connected
and informed may also amplify
the spread of misinformation.
This problem is gaining global
attention, as evidence accumulates
that misinformation may interfere
with democratic processes and
undermine collective responses to
environmental and health crises¹,². In
an increasingly polluted information
ecosystem, understanding the
factors underlying the generation
and spread of misinformation is
becoming a pressing scientific
and societal challenge³. Here, we
studied the global spread of (mis-)
information on spiders using a
high-resolution global database
of online newspaper articles on
spider-human interactions, covering

stories of spider-human encounters
and biting events published from
2010-2020⁴. We found that 47%
of articles contained errors and
43% were sensationalist. Moreover,
we show that the flow of spider-
related news occurs within a highly
interconnected global network and
provide evidence that sensationalism
is a key factor underlying the spread
of misinformation.

Spiders are widely feared animals,
and thus an ideal model system to
study misinformation spread. The
successful dissemination of online
misinformation is indeed associated
with cognitive attraction³, namely the
presence of quasi-universal stimuli that
appeal to human emotions (such as
disgust and fear), and for which there
is a plausible evolutionary explanation

<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. Global distribution of newspaper articles on spiders and drivers of misinformation spread.</figcaption></figure>

(A) Global distribution of news articles on human-spider encounters. Bipartite directed network linking each country (pies; n = 79) with each spider-related event reported by the press (dots, n = 2,644). Note that two countries (Botswana and Iceland) for which we did not find any news are not displayed on the map. The size of each pie chart refers to the number of news articles published in the country between 2010 and 2020; the color of each pie represents the proportion of sensationalistic news. Direct connections among countries are shown in Figure S1. (B) Drivers of sensationalism in media articles on spiders. Estimated parameters for the model of sensationalism are based on a Bernoulli generalized linear mixed model. Baseline level for multilevel factor variables are: 'Traditional' (Type), 'Encounter' (Event), and 'Regional' (Circulation). (C) Estimated parameters for the probability of each country to form connections according to an exponential random graph model. Baseline level for Language is 'English'. Error bars indicate standard errors (B) and 95% confidence intervals (C). Exact estimated regression parameters and p-values are in Table S1 in the Supplemental information.
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>

(e.g., the avoidance of 'dangerous'
animals). Spiders fit perfectly into this
scheme, and thus we can expect more
misinformation and sensationalism
to be associated with spider-related
content compared to other topics⁴⁻⁶.

For our analysis, we compiled
5,348 news items from 81 countries
and 40 languages (Figure 1A). First,
we asked: 'What is the quality of
spider-related information in the
global press and which news-
level factors are associated with
sensationalistic contents?' Across
our dataset, the quality of global
articles on spiders was exceedingly
poor, with 47% of articles containing
errors and 43% being scored as
sensationalistic by spider experts
(Supplemental information). Next,
we used logistic regression to
test for relationships between
sensationalism and eight predictors
at the news-article level, while
controlling for the species involved
in the human-spider encounter and
the language and country of the
news (Figure 1B). The probability
of an article being sensationalistic
increased in international and
national newspapers compared with
regional ones; it was higher when the
article contained photos of spiders
or bites, and it was lower when
the reported event was a bite or a
deadly bite compared to a human-
spider encounter. Furthermore,
sensationalism decreased when a
spider expert was consulted in the
news article; there was no evidence
of a similar effect when other experts,
such as medical professionals, were
consulted. Finally, there was a strong
covariation between sensationalism
and the presence of errors. Overall,
the regression model explained 53%
of the variance (Conditional R²: 0.525),
45% of which was attributable to the
country, language and spider species
involved. This suggests that the story
subject and the cultural aspects are
central in predicting article quality.
The remaining unexplained variance
(~47%) is likely to be related to
harder-to-capture factors, including
the writing style of the journalist and
editorial policies of the news outlet.

After consolidating a quantitative
understanding of the relationship
between sensationalism and news-level
attributes, we used network analyses

to predict how information quality
(sensationalism and errors), along
with different country-level predictors,
affect the global flow of information.
Spider-related information flows
through a highly connected network
(33% of all possible connections
among countries are realized; Figure
S1 in Supplemental information). Yet,
the influence that different countries
have on this flow of information is not
uniform. To test this, we identified
15 country-level factors (including
news-related attributes, spider-
related attributes and socio-economic
descriptors) that are potentially
relevant predictors for the country's
importance in the network. Because
many of these variables were strongly
intercorrelated, we consolidated
variation to six main predictors
and modeled their contribution in
determining the probability of forming
connections between any two nodes
in the network (Figure 1C). The number
of internet users, the number of deadly
spider species, and the proportion of
sensationalistic news published in the
country strengthened its connection
with other countries. English-speaking
countries were more likely to be
connected in the network compared
to any other language, and countries
publishing news in the same language
were also more likely to be connected.

General implications pertaining to
any type of information system, as well
as discipline-specific considerations,
emerge from our analysis. First, through
these kinds of studies, we can identify
the potential roots of poor-quality
information and ultimately target
and avoid bad practices (as writers)
and sources (as readers). Second,
our analysis emphasizes how quality
matters in determining the spread of
information. This effect was mostly
associated with sensationalism,
consistent with the idea that emotional
language is a powerful driver of the
spread of misinformation³. Importantly,
there is an improvement in information
quality when journalists engage with
experts. Not all experts, however,
provide equal value: consulting spider
experts, but not doctors and other
professionals, such as pest controllers,
decreased sensationalism and factual
errors. This corroborates previous
observations that medical personnel
and other authorities often provide

incorrect identifications of spiders and
information about bites.

Our network analysis also shows
that even local-scale events published
by regional newspapers can quickly
become broadcast internationally
(Figure 1A). This implies that
improving the quality of the
information produced in these local
nodes could have a positive effect
reverberating across the network — a
typical example of a ‘think globally,
act locally’ management strategy.

All of this is of central
importance given that the spread
of misinformation has real-world
consequences. According to a recent
estimate, the online proliferation of
fake news accounts for an economic
loss of ~$78 billion annually⁸. As far as
spiders are concerned, misinformation
foremost results in waste of money
and resources by people and
institutions. Emblematic cases include
the closure of schools due to alleged
'invasions' by harmless false black
widows (genus *Steatoda*)⁴; or the
story of a man accidentally setting his
house on fire while using a blowtorch
to clear spider webs out of his
backyard⁴. Furthermore, the content,
tone and quality of these stories
shape people's perception of risk⁶
and influence socio-political decisions
concerning wildlife conservation⁶,⁹,¹⁰.

Therefore, our results can be
translated into efforts to promote
higher-quality news and decrease the
prevalence of inaccurate information —
for instance, through closer collaboration
between journalists and experts and
by exploiting new online channels
to communicate accurate science¹⁰.
Our approach can be applied to other
information systems, producing tangible
benefits for resource management and
public health and safety by limiting
the costs associated with widespread
misinformation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We are grateful to Dr. Jason Dunlop for
sharing information on the number of
members of the International Archnological
Society by country.

SUPPLEMENTAL INFORMATION

Supplemental information includes
statements, experimental procedures, one
figure and one table and can be found
with this article online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026.

## DECLARATION OF INTERESTS

The authors declare no competing interests.

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