Elisabeth:
It’s different because in the beginning I looked at sever- al COVID-19-related papers that came out and wrote some critiques about it. I did experience a lot of backlash because of that. So I felt I had to take a break from social media and from writing about COVID-19. I focused a little bit more on other work because I just felt that a lot of these papers on COVID-19 became so politically divisive that if you tried to be a scientist and think critical- ly about a paper, you were actually assigned to a particular political party or to be against other political parties. It’s hard for me to be sucked into the political discussion and to the way that our society now is so completely divided into two camps that seem to be not listening to each other. I was curious about that because I’ve followed your work for a number of years, as you know, and certainly you have had critics before. I’m thinking of the case in China that you uncovered, the leading figure in the Chinese Academy who was really a powerful political figure in addition to being a scientist. So that was a case in which I found a couple of papers at first from a particular group in China, and I was just posting on a website called PubPeer, where you can post comments, concerns about papers. And in this case, these were image duplication issues, which is my specialty. I did not realize that the group I was looking at at that moment was led by one of the highest ranked scientists in China. If I had known that, I would probably not have posted that under my full name, but under a pseudonym. Since I had already posted, some people were starting to send me direct messages on Twitter like, “OMG, the guy you’re posting about now is the top scientist in China so you’re going to have a lot of backlash.” Then I decided I’ll just continue doing this. I found a total of around 50 papers from this group and posted all of them on PubPeer. That story quickly became a very popular story in China: number two on Sina Weibo, a social media site in China.
Ivan:
Elisabeth:
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