Online news stories about people’s encounters with spiders, such as this harmless jumping spider, frequently contain misinformation or sensationalized language, a new study finds.
xbn83/Moment/Getty Images Plus
Even spiders, it seems, have fallen victim to misinformation.
Media reports about people’s encounters with spiders tend to be full of falsehoods with a distinctly negative spin. An analysis of a decade’s worth of newspaper stories from dozens of countries finds that nearly half of the reports contain errors , arachnologist Catherine Scott and colleagues report August 22 in Current Biology .
“The vast majority of the spider content out there is about them being scary and hurting people,” says Scott, of McGill University in Montreal. In reality, they note, “spiders almost never bite people.”
Headlines and summaries of the latest Science News articles, delivered to your inbox
Thank you for signing up!
There was a problem signing you up.
Of the roughly 50,000 known spider species, vanishingly few are dangerous. Instead, many spiders benefit us by eating insects like mosquitoes that are harmful to people. Even with the rare exceptions like brown recluse and black widow spiders, bites are extremely uncommon, Scott says. Some stories about bites blamed spiders that don’t occur in the area, and others reported symptoms that don’t match symptoms of actual bites. “So many stories about spider bites included no evidence whatsoever that there was any spider involved,” they say.
To conduct the study, Scott and their colleagues analyzed over 5,000 online newspaper stories about humans and spiders from 2010 to 2020 across 81 countries. In addition to errors, the team determined that 43 percent of the stories were sensationalized, often using words like nasty, killer , agony and nightmare . International and national newspapers were more likely to sensationalize spiders than regional outlets. Stories that included a spider expert were less sensationalistic, though there was no such effect from other experts, including doctors.
If people knew the truth about spiders, they could spend less time blaming them for bites and killing them with pesticides that are toxic to many other species, including humans, Scott says. Clearing up the misinformation would be good for spiders, too — especially the one in your house that doesn’t get squashed out of fear. Spiders in general stand to benefit, the researchers conclude, because news helps shape public opinion, which can influence decisions about wildlife conservation.
“Spiders are kind of unique in that they seem to be really good at capturing people’s attention,” says arachnologist Lisa Taylor at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the study. “If that attention is paired with real information about how fascinating they are, rather than sensationalistic misinformation, then I think spiders are well-suited to serve as tiny ambassadors for wildlife in general.”
S. Mammola et al . The global spread of misinformation on spiders . Current Biology . Published online August 22, 2022. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.026.
Betsy Mason is a freelance science journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is coauthor of All Over the Map and the cartography website Map Dragons .
Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education.
Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions.
Not a subscriber?
Become one now .
