Science simplification is considered one of the most useful tools for communicating about science, whether through scientific books, articles, interviews, or documentaries. Depth of the scientific writing employed varies greatly depending on its intended audience. It can range anywhere from educational material for secondary and primary schools, to material appropriate for those pursuing undergraduate degrees, to popular science material written either by scientists aiming to simplify their field by writing books for general audiences or scientific journalists writing for websites and magazines.

Thanks to this wide variety of writing, it is possible for anyone (not just academics) to acquire the latest simplified version of discoveries in advanced scientific fields. Even many academics probably read media that simplify science.

Multimedia technology has grown to produce nearly uncountable forms of media. For example, you can publish content through Facebook posts, tweets on Twitter, and TikTok short views; there are walls, spaces, stories, and many more forms of publishing. Although simplifying science has many advantages, each step of simplification results in the loss of detail. Because many of these multimedia forums are designed specifically to produce super-simplified content for publication, the danger is that they can damage the process of science simplification rather than benefit it.

I’ll use the term GIF science to denote a type of content that, in the contemporary currency of modern social media (i.e., likes and views), can gain more popularity than a well-written 1,500-word article. Although many traditional authors still prefer the quality of their traditional readers over the likes and views on social media, new generations often don’t. Even some traditional media platforms have started to value likes and views in their attempt to modernize. The GIF, or graphics interchange format, is a small, briefly animated image that appeared for the first time in the 1980s but did not become popular until it was used on large social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. GIFs are very good for presenting a brief, humorous video. But they are often used to tout “amazing physics” and “the latest inventions,” which could be considered the latest form (and the shallowest one) of science simplification—GIF science.

Of course, the simplification crisis cannot be attributed exclusively to GIF images. There are also posts, tweets, and short videos, among other formats, as well as future ones yet to be invented. But while Facebook posts or stories can be used to communicate any form of knowledge or contain links, GIF images cannot be used in the same way. For example, a GIF might show a brief school physics experiment or some natural phenomenon, which would make it possible to use as explanatory material but not as main content.

One may ask, what is the problem? Are we resisting change, or are we jealous of the extraordinary success of newly established Facebook pages? The problem can be explained by the basic concept of simplification. In simplifying science, we are necessarily abandoning many of the details. This makes it easier for more people to provide similar content. There are countless fake research papers, but we can be certain that they cannot gain publicity and a high number of citations within the scientific community because of the difficulty in writing a peer-reviewed research paper and the scholarly standards of the scientific community.

It is possible for Richard Dawkins to write a scientific book for a general audience, but Michael Behe can too. While we know that what Dawkins writes is supported by hundreds or thousands of research papers, the general audience does not know that Behe’s writing lacks scientific support.

Therefore, when we simplify, we are opening the door for many others to provide similarly simplistic content. Both scientists and uneducated persons can tweet. What is worse, GIF science enables publication that can be understood even by illiterates. It may appear innocent when you see an animated image titled “amazing physics” that is liked by 4,500 social media users, but it is not so harmless. I have witnessed many cases of easy-to-digest nonsense published via GIF science. One of the first that comes to mind is the depiction of a train in Japan that supposedly traveled at a speed of 4,000 kilometers per hour, which many people believed was genuine. As harmless as this example of fake information is, many considered another GIF, which depicted imaginary interacting geometrical objects, real as well.

One especially harmful example was a GIF showing sugar levels in grapes being tested with a blood sugar meter. This GIF was used to convince diabetics that it was acceptable to eat as much fruit as they wanted without expecting any rise in blood sugar. While many diabetics are aware that fruits cause an increase in blood sugar levels, many do not know how to use blood sugar meters in an empirical way to fact-check the nonsense in that GIF. In this case, the GIF or the short video made it easy to increase the damage of this misinformation. It was language-agnostic, didn’t require any effort to read, and could be watched in a few seconds. It spread like wildfire.

It is a simple observation: As the content becomes simpler, it becomes easier to publish fake information. By monitoring online scientific journals and social media in the Arabic language, I have seen many of those who used to publish real science material being seduced to chasing likes and views; thus they began to publish more GIF science. When academics begin publishing facts in the same manner of those who are uneducated, they give that publishing method legitimacy. Many people may think in this way: “It is acceptable to derive facts from an animated GIF; even doctors use them!” By that logic, if simple posts, tweets, or GIFs receive numerous likes, one may be enticed to publish their own simplified media. Then, the same audience becomes accustomed to seeing super-simplified content gaining legitimacy. By that time, the source of the content does not even matter.

There is an additional effect of GIF science and short videos, such as “amazing physics.” Twitter has (hundreds of times) suggested to me some “amazing physics” content (apparently the platform’s algorithm classifies this content as scientific, and it’s recommending it to me because I am interested in science). This content is accompanied by the sentence, “Teachers who make physics boring are criminals,” which I assume was spoken by MIT astrophysicist Walter Lewin—who I was sure did not think of GIF science when he said that. Those who do not know about physics may be led to assume that all aspects of physics can potentially be represented by funny games and experiments.

They may also assume that reading thick books containing equations is a poor way to teach and that a physics teacher should be a clown, but these assumptions are absolutely wrong. Fun in physics can also be found in equations and mathematics, in which the teacher cannot provide much of the usual circus fun. Teachers can do some experiments, but they cannot be David Copperfield all the time. In physics, there are some topics that can be explained wonderfully by spectacular school lab experiments, but that is only a limited part of teaching physics. Physics cannot provide eye candy all the time. Most important, many countries cannot afford laboratories in schools or even provide a decent classroom. Along with “funny physics” and “amazing physics” GIF campaigns, should we expect more physics haters among those who discover real physics in their first year of study? I hope not.

Science is not a holy book that should be kept in a temple. But when we simplify it, we must ensure that we retain its essence and that it foremost provides useful information, with or without entertainment. Some of the new forms of publishing multimedia via social media may not be suitable for the simplification of science or of any form of knowledge.