After many mistaken announcements of alien signals, the the public would become very skeptical of new announcements. The lesson for them is that scientists are searching, that announcements are public and not a secret, and that they should be skeptical just like scientists.

So I think that these potential extraterrestrial life announcements are organically educating the public on how science works and doing more good than harm.

Some people argue that we should restrain from making them, even after published work (e.g. phosphine on Venus), because the media spin of the news, or the negative impact on perception and funding for future work.

What I learned from many years working in the astrobiology field is that indeed there is small negative impact, but the positive impact is overwhelming resulting in more people learning and becoming interested in science and engineering topics.

A study of a potential signal from an extraterrestrial technology discovered by the #BreakthroughListen project was leaked to the @guardian. Unfortunatelly, there is no formally published scientific article yet so other scientists can't verify or comment on the details.

We have been through similar sories before, most ending on natural or terrestrial phenomena. Others like the Wow! Signal are unknown, but here unknown means we can't tell the source of the signal among some possibilities, not like imposible to explain unless aliens.