Internet Misinformation Is Giving Spiders a Bad Rap, Study Shows

Self-professed arachnophobes aren’t the only people who’d prefer their lives be spider-free. The spindly eight-leggers generally elicit shivers across the board—even from some entomologists , whose appreciation of insects apparently doesn’t always extend to arachnids.

But as Smithsonian reports , the media could be exacerbating our collective aversion to spiders by sensationalizing and misreporting details about human interactions with the creatures. In a recent study, a group of researchers trawled 5348 news articles published between 2010 to 2020 that involved 6204 total “human-spider encounters.” A tidy 43 percent of the stories contained sensationalist language, including terms like nightmare , panic , murderer , terror , devil , and agony .Â

An even higher percentage—47, to be exact—contained outright errors. Sometimes, an article would feature an image of a spider that didn’t match the species involved in the actual incident. Other articles flubbed details about spider anatomy (they don’t have stingers), taxonomy (they’re not insects), and/or venom effects.

The falsities aren’t specific to American media outlets: The study included news published in 40 different languages across 81 countries. And thanks to the internet, sensational local stories often don’t stay local. As the researchers explained in a paper published in the journal Current Biology , “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.”

Urging people to combat the spread of spider-related misinformation may seem like a PR campaign cooked up by spiders who are sick of all the bad press. But a misguided dislike of arachnids can lead to dangerous and costly outcomes. On at least two separate occasions—in 2012 and 2018 , respectively—California men have set their houses on fire while using blowtorches to rid their properties of spiderwebs .Â

“This probably was a bad idea,” a Fresno fire chief who dealt with the 2018 blaze told reporters.Â

In September 2021, two schools in Northampton, England, briefly shut down due to a suspected infestation of false widow spiders. Though the bite of a false widow —so named because it’s often mistaken for a black widow—can hurt like a wasp sting, more extreme reactions are uncommon.

“There is often hysteria surrounding these spiders, and they have unjustly earned a reputation for being a dangerous pest. But these spiders only bite when they feel threatened,” London’s Natural History Museum explains .

So how can you avoid falling for spider-specific fake news ? For one thing, exercise a healthy skepticism when reading articles rife with fear-mongering terms. You should also try to seek out sources that cite bona fide spider experts, from arachnologists to pest controllers. According to the study, “sensationalism decreased when a spider expert was consulted in the news article.”

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