Why “Follow the Science” is so Shareable — and so Self-Defeating
The first time I interviewed Dr. Dominique Brossard, she ended up in a “clickworthy” headline that got more than 50,000 views: Joe Rogan’s COVID-19 scandal exposes one epic truth about Spotify, says scientist. (The alternate headline, “Joe Rogan isn’t the Problem, Spotify is the Problem,” lost out in A/B testing.)
The “epic truth” was that content platforms had radically changed how information moves. Market incentives pushed those companies to show provocative videos, wild stories, and pithy ideas to their millions of users — very often passing over content from credentialed experts.
“Is the problem misinformation? No, the problem is the new information ecology,” Brossard told me at the time. An internationally recognized expert in science communication and public opinion, Brossard’s academic work has been cited more than 21,000 times by other researchers.
We recently talked about another pandemic-era slogan: “follow the science.” In terms of its meaning, the phrase was contrary to anti-vaccine rumors. As a meme, it spread for many of the same reasons as those stories and conspiracies: it was evocative and controversial enough to gain traction with the algorithms, influencers, and ordinary users on social platforms.
When we spoke, Brossard had just completed a pandemic-era appointment serving on executive committee of the National Academies’ effort to provide policymakers with evidenced-based advice on communicating about science and health.
During the pandemic, I got the sense that people who said “follow the science” or “believe the science” held basically the same opinions on things like social distancing, masking, and vaccination. What did that slogan mean to you?
We saw early in the pandemic that “follow the science” was actually detrimental. First of all, it didn’t portray science accurately. Science evolves through a process — especially when you’re dealing with a new virus — and it was changing day to day during the pandemic. Policies differed across countries where experts were directly informing public policy. For example, vaccines approved in Europe weren’t approved here, and the U.S. recommended six feet of distancing while Europe used three. There were so many instances that showed science isn’t a perfect, unified thing.
We were also concerned that “follow the science” implied that policy should be based only on science. In reality, policy decisions are political decisions. They take scientific expertise into account, yes, but also people’s jobs, childcare, social realities. The slogan made a very complicated situation look simple.
And frankly, it gave political leaders a way not to own their decisions. In Wisconsin, for example, we had a period of social isolation that was supposed to end on a particular date. Then the government announced they were extending it by one month, and a lot of people got angry. The politicians didn’t explain a clear scientific justification, but it was easy to blame “the science.”
Still, there are plenty of people who think public policy should be based primarily on scientific evidence. Is that a feasible approach to governing?
It’s just not grounded in how policymaking works. Nobody “follows the science” in isolation because science is only one actor in a much larger policy process. Take fluoride in water. What does science tell you? At very high levels, it’s harmful. At the same time, we know that communities without fluoride have more cavities. So which science do you follow?
In Europe, the risk policy that countries use to make those decisions is shaped by the precautionary principle — if there’s some indication that something might be dangerous, they don’t do it. That’s why we don’t have GMOs, we don’t have fluoride in water, and so on. In the US, it’s much more market-driven. Each community can decide.
Europe doesn’t put fluoride in its water?
Right. No Western European country fluoridates its water.
Whoa, I didn’t realize that.
Exactly! When I did my PhD at Cornell 23 years ago, there was a super progressive community in Dresden fighting fluoride for very different political reasons from what we see in the US today. My point is: “follow the science” immediately raises the question — what science, in what context, serving which goals, under what political system?
Science is also just one voice in policy debates. And on top of that, there’s no such thing as “the science.” Different disciplines use different methods and have different norms about what counts as sufficient certainty. In engineering you can control many variables; in social science, we have a lot more uncertainty. So the idea that there’s a single, monolithic thing called “the science” that we can simply follow, it just doesn’t make sense.
I set up a google alert for “follow the science” a few months ago, and it has turned up some surprising and often contradictory examples of people using “the science” justifying their positions. In 2025, does the phrase still mean anything?
People follow the science that aligns with their belief system. You can always find a piece of scientific evidence that supports one policy action over another. So sure, follow the science as in look for evidence you have good reasons to trust. But what science? Is it the science the majority of the scientific community would consider good? Is it a fringe finding? “Follow the science” doesn’t tell you. It can mean almost anything. The only thing it does is polarize people even more.
To me, it’s a slogan you can post and share easily. The algorithms make it spread farther because the more people disagree about a post, the more engagement you have. The more engagement you have, the more it’s going to appear in people’s feeds.