Comment by currymj

i think this is true internally, bad papers more often than not get ignored within a scientific community. Even if fake findings cause other researchers to go down a rabbit hole pursuing a bad direction (as has happened apparently in biology and psychology multiple times, and probably every field) this doesn't matter all that much for society.

but when scientific research artifacts are used by people outside a scientific community, it is unfortunately a weak link problem. if there's one bad study that tells people what they want to hear, they will seek it out and find it.