Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Blogging about controversial topics

Emily Willingham

Climate change. Vaccines and autism. Creationism. The scientific world is full of topics that incite anger and attract armies of trolls. Freelance writer Emily Willingham is no stranger to the deluge that can follow when blogging about controversial topics. In this chapter, she will discuss her experiences and prepare you to blog about the things everyone loves to hate.

I don’t blog about controversies to be controversial. I don’t do it for the clicks. I do it because I am passionate about my primary subject area, autism, and I have strong opinions about the scientific, public health, and social issues associated with autism misinformation. The work of blogging about the facts is critical on a personal level because I have an autistic son, and a world that views him as a vaccine-injured, “toxic” mutant who needs to be fixed is a world I want to change for him.

A passion and an investment

I can’t recommend purposely blogging about controversial subjects, but the fact is, the more controversial your subject area, the more eyeballs and clicks and link sharing you will get when you write about it. Autism, which as a human neurobiological condition might not seem terribly controversial at first glance, is one of the most polarizing subjects in our culture today. I also write about other controversial issues in science, but autism encompasses debates related to the environment, public health, disability rights, and parenting, all minefields of righteousness and judgmentalism. And boy do people like to fight. When I write something straightforward and terribly sincere about autism, I’ll get a few thousand reads, maybe a handful of comments. But posts about vaccines and autism? I’ve had days I’ve thought that all I need to do is write “vaccines autism vaccines autism vaccines autism” about a hundred times, and I’d get the most readers I’ve ever attracted with a single post.

Passion and investment are critical if you’re going to blog about controversies. You have to be consistent in your approach to the material and willing to alter your conclusions as new data come in. When you build trust in this way with the people who read your work, they will come to you for clarity when they read something somewhere else that leaves them scratching their heads. Responsibility and transparency also are paramount when controversy is your beat because even a hint of a conflict of interest or a failure to be intellectually honest about your material can torpedo trust. And it can harm your goals. I blog precisely because I think that the subject that is controversial shouldn’t be, and I want to cut through the noise and get to the heart of what’s factual about it, minus the muppet flailing.

Some people who blog about controversial subjects do so for venal purposes. Whether we like it or not, writers occupy a world that focuses more and more on personal “branding”—getting clicks and ad revenue—than on great reporting and analysis. For some people, writing for clicks and social media shares works. It doesn’t work for me. Money is great, but it’s not what motivates my blogging. My motivators are my passion for my subjects and my obsession with straight talk.

The drawback of starting from passion and a belief in the effectiveness of straight, honest discussion is how vulnerable it can leave the writer. So when you bring passion to your writing, you also have to bring your thickest skin. Or at least your thickest online skin costume. What you do where no one can see you, how you react in real life, in the glow of your laptop? That’s your business. But online, one key to maintaining reader trust is to stay poised. And that’s the hardest part.

How do you go about writing with poise about a controversial subject that impassions you? First, make sure to write without using a lot of emotion words—or, as one of my commenters once called it, “emotional valence.” Emotion has its place, and I do express frustration, annoyance, disdain, happiness, and other emotions at reasonable levels. But I work very hard to avoid letting emotion drive or support my arguments. I don’t base what I write on feelings. If you’re going to write about controversial topics, you’d better line up your data ducks—facts swimming along in accessible, flowing prose—and leave the feelings for those who react to your words.

Another key is to avoid making it personal, both in what you write originally or in your response to comments. I know that some bloggers have built entire communities around calling people “idiot,” “moron,” and other epithets suggesting the intellectual inferiority of those who don’t agree with them. But I think that engaging in this kind of attack-the-person tactic simply causes anyone on the fence to withdraw from your arguments to avoid the blast of your epithets. If you’re writing about a controversy just to get your choir to come in and sing your praises, then firing away at opponents’ personal characteristics will work just fine. But if your goal is to make compelling, evidence-based arguments that reach information seekers rather than true believers, then why alienate those sincere knowledge seekers by acting that way?

The power of linking

That takes me to the evidence part. In addition to avoiding emotion-laden phrases like “I feel” in support of my arguments, I also try to steer clear of “I believe.” I let the evidence speak for itself. In fact, a frequent phrase I use when responding to comments that nitpick evidence is “My readers can look at the evidence I linked for themselves and draw their own conclusions.” The linking is critical, and the choice of links is crucial. Take advantage of the fact that this is an online world and link any assertion you make to the supporting data or documentation. The best kinds of documentation for a scientific controversy obviously will be the science itself, so wherever possible, I link to original studies or comprehensive reviews, preferably those that are open access, so that people can look at the data themselves. I rarely rely on links to opinions or other blogs unless the people writing those are considered trustworthy and extremely capable analysts and experts in their fields. Trust is a two-way street, and I look for the same qualities in trusted sources that I require of myself.

The urgency of appropriate linking came home to me as I was writing this chapter, in a situation that reveals one of the potential dangers of blogging about controversial topics. I published a post on an analysis in the journal Pediatrics regarding the possible links between gut disruptions and autism. The Pediatrics authors made a point that they’d made previously: if it hadn’t been for a key figure in this field being found guilty of misconduct and dishonesty in a very high-profile investigation of an autism-gut link, scientists might not have treated the subject like an untouchable hot potato. Because of the taint of the original controversy, investigations of gut problems in autism have not been as frequent as they might have been, according to these authors—and I agreed. In my post, I referred to the actions of the key figure in question as “fraud,” but when I published the post I did not link that word to the abundant documentation available to support its use.

The upshot was that the key figure in question sent a letter threatening to sue me for libel. It’s not a tenable threat because he is a public figure and he’d have to prove that my goal was to defame him, which it was not. But if I had only linked to the literally dozens and dozens of online articles and papers using exactly that term in the same context, that word wouldn’t have looked like it was only mine; indeed, the editors of the journal in which his original, now-retracted paper appeared had themselves published an editorial using the word “fraud.” But as I’ve said, it’s an online world. I immediately added a link to one of the dozens of possible pages of online evidence of the validity of the term and placed a parenthetical note establishing that the addition was an update. That approach is also key to retaining trust. Don’t ever alter something fundamental about a live post without making it clear that you’ve done so, or you will open yourself to accusations of sneakiness, at best—and there goes your reputation for being trustworthy. For most bloggers, the hosting service or publisher offers no protection from libel suits, so you should always support any potentially upsetting claims with clear evidence.

Comments

Obviously, you have control over what you write. But you can’t say the same about those who post responses to your blog entries. You have no control over what they write or how they write it except maybe, depending on your publisher, by hitting the “delete” or “spam” button. Your commenters can engage willy-nilly in all kinds of personal attacks and diversions and throw up every kind of fallacy that exists (or even invent some new ones). Some outlets, such as Popular Science, have a rule about not allowing commenters at all. But if your publisher allows comments, research supports that engaging early with your commenters is key to ensuring that an appropriate tone prevails and that their responses don’t negatively skew your readers’ impressions about your article.¹ I keep this finding in mind when thinking about anyone who begins perusing comments on my posts, which can and do run into the hundreds.

My rules for managing comments are as follows:

• I don’t respond to ad hominems, including demands to prove or establish my credentials or defend myself against false accusations of, say, being a “pharma whore.” What I write stands or falls on the evidence, even though I’m heavily credentialed. If I’m subject to a particularly personal attack, I will borrow a line from Spock in the new Star Trek movie series: “Reverting to name-calling suggests you are defensive and therefore find my objections valid.” I drop that line in and do not respond any further to that commenter.

• I respond to inappropriate language from commenters. I will call commenters on threatening language or language that is abusive, and on sites where I have control, I moderate comments closely and delete or block commenters who violate house rules.

• If I do respond, I keep my answers as brief as possible. Do not fall into the trap of repeating your points or arguments—it wastes your time and can be sustaining to egos that are already large enough. If your goal is to reach people on the fence who are bothering to read the comments, once is usually enough to make a point. In fact, don’t engage in lengthy exchanges with any commenter unless it’s a really interesting, revelatory discussion that touches on something unknown to you—in which case, now you’ve got more blog fodder.

In this age of multiple platforms and platform cross-pollination, your online presence will extend beyond your blog or other publishing tool. For anything I do in social media that is public—public posts on Facebook, Twitter exchanges—I try to follow the same rules of exchange I have for my blogging. The only exception is that I’m much faster to block people who clearly are engaging me just to try to get attention. I don’t feed trolls or narcissists, regardless of the platform.

What’s next?

Speaking of blog fodder: what if your blog well runs dry? One good strategy is to establish yourself as a general controversialist. I write a lot about autism, but my wider “beat” is simply “debunkery” and bringing some common sense to a lot of the nonsense that gets disseminated as science. Second, use Google news alerts—which you can set up through your Google profile so that you receive an email when any term you specify appears on the Internet—and follow people who curate links and have discussions in your areas. That approach generally gives me plenty of fresh fodder; indeed, more than I can keep up with. Have an alert for people with whom you disagree—you’ll be able to see their latest material very soon after it’s published, which might give you some ideas. And finally, have a Google Alert on yourself, so you’ll have a heads-up when someone blogs about you. The last thing you want is to wander over to Twitter some fine evening only to step unaware into a minefield of twenty tweets mentioning something ugly that someone’s written about you.

Regardless of where you get your fodder, make sure that you also have the necessary energy level at hand when you hit “publish.” You will have days when you have all the energy and time you need to deal with a deeply controversial part of your controversy, and your loins will be as girded as they can be. But there will also be days when one more straw might crack your brain—and those are the days to hold back on that controversial post. If you have no choice, for some reason, and have to press “publish,” the world can wait if you need to take until the next day to open up that comment page and see what’s happened in the interim. Sometimes that kind of waiting gives me the time I need to dial back my emotional reactivity to the subject. And if you wait, sometimes you might find yourself pleasantly surprised to see that others have come in and provided lucid, useful responses so you don’t have to. Sometimes.

Finally, I have no way of predicting how successful a post will be, if you measure success in terms of attention relative to time invested. Posts I’ve spent careful hours on to plug every possible logic hole and avoid stirring up even more controversy can land with a thud of just a few thousand views. But in those cases I don’t spend a lot of time on comments because, well, there just aren’t as many. And posts I’ve spent just twenty minutes on, that practically wrote themselves in my head before I ever put fingers to keyboard, will catch like a viral inflammation through social media and blow up within an hour. The trade-off with those fast and fast-flying posts can be more extensive investment in comment responses, which sometimes continue for weeks. Either way, when you’re blogging about controversies, there’s no such thing as a “quick writeup.” On the controversy beat, hitting “publish” on a blog post usually isn’t the end. In most cases, it’s just the beginning.

Emily Willingham is a medical writer and freelance writer. She blogged at Forbes, and is co-authoring a book on evidence-based parenting scheduled for publication in 2016 by Perigee Books/Penguin.

Emily is based in San Francisco. Find her at her website, http://www.emilywillinghamphd.com, or follow her on Twitter, @ejwillingham.

Note

1. “The ’Nasty Effect’: How Comments Color Comprehension,” NPR, March 11, 2013, http://www.npr.org/2013/03/11/174027294/the-nasty-effect-how-comments-color-comprehension.