Conference session

Why does misinformation about animal agriculture remain so powerful despite strong scientific consensus about its environmental and health impacts? And what would it take to respond effectively to it? This session focuses not only on how misinformation spreads, but on why proposed solutions so often stall. Educational campaigns, fact-checking initiatives, and media-literacy efforts face predictable limits. Structural reforms such as advertising regulation, platform accountability, and institutional evidence safeguards encounter entrenched political and economic barriers, including industry lobbying power, platform profit incentives, media advertising dependencies, and fragmented civil-society capacity. We examine why well-intentioned reforms frequently fail to gain traction, and how to most effectively overcome barriers to reform in the case of animal agriculture misinformation. This session will benefit researchers, policymakers, communicators, nonprofit leaders, and anyone interested in the intersection of food systems, public health, climate policy, and media. While our presentation focuses on overcoming barriers to responding to misinformation about animal agriculture, it should be of more general interest to those interested in mitigating the influence of misinformation in other domains. Participants will gain a clearer map of the misinformation ecosystem, an understanding of which interventions are most likely to be effective in the short, medium, and longer terms, and insight into how to prioritize strategies based on expected feasibility and efficacy. The goal is to move from diagnosing the problem to identifying responses that are realistically implementable and capable of effectively reducing the influence of misinformation.