There have been missed opportunities, mostly from the science community, to explain how the science process works. With its overwhelming ability to give misinformation, social media has not helped matters and has made things worse. Take AI for example.

Judging by the number of postings on social media, AI is portrayed as an evil, sentient machine out to rule the world like on the popular shows and movies ‘Westworld’ and ‘The Matrix’. What is not said is that these are works of fiction and the AI in the stories is the latest incarnation of “when man plays God his creation will rebel”. It is the story of ‘Frankenstein’ in the modern, technological world.
The media and the scientific community are mostly silent about the benefits machine intelligence has already provided. AI is a tool that can take enormous amounts of data and correlate it in a way researchers can find useful. New pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and manufacturing processes would have taken decades to develop if it were not for machine intelligence. AI is not sentient. It can mimic human responses but is not conscious. It’s a highly effective tabulator and nothing more. But since listening to stories about “killer machines” is more interesting than learning algorithmic coding the fear of AI wins the propaganda war.

Most “science news” media give the public the wrong idea about science. For example, reality is not subjective and deterministic on a day-to-day macro-level. The apple is red because that is the wavelength the photoreceptors in our eyes registered, and our brains interpret Whether a human or any organism that can perceive the same wavelength red is red. The non-human organism may not understand the concept of “red” but knows what it means.
It’s at the subatomic quantum level where reality becomes fuzzy only because scientists don’t fully understand it. Terms like “entanglement”, “locality”, and “hidden variables” are inadequate descriptions of the mathematical theorem in quantum mechanics. Thought experiments illustrate phenomena described in math. Unfortunately, the news media takes these examples too far and falsely apply to real-world experiences. They are examples that describe math and not reality. Physicists have told how observable phenomena work and have done it well. But there is still a lot to be known. Like, how things at the subatomic scale relate to cosmic-level relativity. Scientists look at the data, create an idea explain it, and evaluate it. Sometimes they get it right. Most of the time the data makes new questions. So, back to the drawing board, pen and paper, or laptop, to figure out why. Quantum mechanics is not an exact, well, science. It is getting there, but not anytime soon (there’s that nagging problem with relativity).
Here is where the media, for reasons I can only perceive as sensationalism, gives the general public the wrong impression. Whenever a news article claims that scientists have proved, or most often disproved an established theory, you should always take it with a grain of salt. By the way, salt is chemical salt, and not a concept.