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Social Media and Science/Health Reporting
Abstract
The social actors, technologies, affordances and business models behind digital media and platforms, such as Facebook, X (previously Twitter), YouTube and Weibo, have changed the practices of science/health reporting. Platformisation offers new opportunities to bring valuable health/science news to audiences with limited access to and low interest in traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and television. In addition, the networked environments where science/health news circulates make it easier, and more likely, for scientists and medical experts to fact-check science and health stories, thus potentially increasing the likelihood that audiences will receive more accurate information. However, digital media innovation and platformisation have also created new pitfalls, given that science/health journalists may find themselves competing with science and health ‘storytellers’ who have far less ability for, or interest in, communicating accurate information.
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This qualitative study explores how and why journalists use preprints—unreviewed research papers—in their reporting. Through thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 19 health and science journalists in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, it applies a theoretical framework that conceptualizes COVID-19 preprint research as a form of post-normal science , characterized by high scientific uncertainty and societal relevance, urgent need for political decision-making, and value-related policy considerations. Findings suggest that journalists approach the decision to cover preprints as a careful calculation, in which the potential public benefits and the ease of access preprints provided were weighed against risks of spreading misinformation. Journalists described viewing unreviewed studies with extra skepticism and relied on diverse strategies to find, vet, and report on them. Some of these strategies represent standard science journalism, while others, such as labeling unreviewed studies as preprints, mark a departure from the norm. However, journalists also reported barriers to covering preprints, as many felt they lacked the expertise or the time required to fully understand or vet the research. The findings suggest that coverage of preprints is likely to continue post-pandemic, with important implications for scientists, journalists, and the publics who read their work.
During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, various officials flagged the critical threat of false information. In this study, we explore how three major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) responded to this “infodemic” during early stages of the pandemic via emergent fact-checking policies and practices, and consider what this means for ensuring a well-informed public. We accomplish this through a thematic analysis of documents published by the three platforms that address fact-checking, particularly those that focus on COVID-19. In addition to examining what the platforms said they did, we also examined what the platforms actually did in practice via a retrospective case study drawing on secondary data about the viral conspiracy video, Plandemic. We demonstrate that the platforms focused their energies primarily on the visibility of COVID-19 mis/disinformation on their sites via (often vaguely described) policies and practices rife with subjectivity. Moreover, the platforms communicated the expectation that users should ultimately be the ones to hash out what they believe is true. We argue that this approach does not necessarily serve the goal of ensuring a well-informed public, as has been the goal of fact-checking historically, and does little to address the underlying conditions and structures that permit the circulation and amplification of false information online.
The article presents the results of a survey of science journalists from six world regions about their work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The responses show perception of increasing workload for most participants. Local scientists and peer-reviewed articles are the main sources. According to the respondents, scientists have become more available during the pandemic. The use of preprint articles was a frequent practice, but a considerable proportion declared they did not adopt different procedures when reporting them. Most also said they take fake news into account when writing their stories.
Which genre of science writing contributes most to public understanding, and how does that understanding happen? Working within a science in society approach, this paper examines public engagement with science as it occurs in the comments and discussion boards of r/science. Researchers use content analysis to identify relevant concept categories and code comments for interaction with science content. The resulting data are analyzed by genre (scientific news journalism, press release, and research article) and open access status, revealing differences in public engagement with implications for science communicators and scholars seeking to understand how the public interacts with science news.
This article explores the uses of sources in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic in social media posts of mainstream news organizations in Brazil, Chile, Germany, Mexico, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. Based on computational content analysis, our study analyzes the sources and actors present in more than 940,000 posts on COVID-19 published in the 227 Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 78 sampled news outlets between January 1 and December 31 of 2020, comparing their relative importance across countries, across media platforms, and across time as the pandemic evolved in each country. The analysis shows the dominance of political sources across countries and platforms, particularly in Latin America, demonstrating a strong role of the state in constructing pandemic news and suggesting that mainstream news organizations' social media posts maintain a strong elite orientation. Health sources were also prominent — consistent with the defining role of biomedical authority in health coverage—, while significant diversity of sources, including citizen sources, emerged as the pandemic went on. Our results also revealed that the use of specific sources significantly varied over time. These variations tend to go hand in hand with specific global milestones of the pandemic.
In the absence of clear, consistent guidelines about the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, many people use social media to learn about the virus, public health directives, vaccine distribution, and other health information. As people individually sift through a flood of information online, they collectively curate a small set of accounts, known as crowdsourced elites, that receive disproportionate attention for their COVID-19 content. However, these elites are not all created equal: not all accounts have received the same attention during the pandemic, and various demographic and ideological groups have crowdsourced their own elites. Using a mixed-methods approach with a panel of Twitter users in the United States over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we identify COVID-19 crowdsourced elites. We distinguish sustained amplification from episodic amplification and demonstrate that crowdsourced elites vary across demographics with respect to race, geography, and political alignment. Specifically, we show that different subpopulations preferentially amplify elites that are demographically similar to them, and that they crowdsource different types of elite accounts, such as journalists, elected officials, and medical professionals, in different proportions. In light of this variation, we discuss the potential for using the disproportionate online voice of crowdsourced COVID-19 elites to equitably promote public health information and mitigate misinformation across networked publics.
Social networks have surpassed their intermediary role and become gatekeepers of online content and traffic. This transformation has favored the spread of information disorders. The situation is especially alarming in Spain, where 57% of Spaniards have at some moment believed false news. Since 2016, First Draft has promoted several collaborative verification projects that brought together newsrooms to fact-check false, misleading and confusing claims circulating online during presidential elections in several countries. The main objective of this article is to study the collaboration forged between newsrooms in Spain in order to debunk disinformation contents in 2019 under the name of Comprobado (Verified) and the impact of this initiative. Applying a methodological approach based on non-participant observation, interviews, content analysis of reports, scientific articles, books and media archives, we examine the internal uses of this platform, how journalists verified public discourse, the strategies and internal agreements implemented, and the degree of participation of the 16 media involved. Results show that only half of the initiatives begun were transformed into published reports, and the media impact achieved was limited. Finally, we note that the principal reasons for the frustration of the project were its improvised implementation, due to the date of the election being brought forward, and the scant culture of collaboration in the sector. In Spain at least, cross-media alliances are still an exception.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, journalists have the challenging task of gathering and distributing accurate information. Journalists exist as a part of an ecology in which their work influences and is influenced by the environment that surrounds it. Using the framework of disaster communication ecology, this study explores the discursive construction of journalism during the COVID-19 crisis. To understand this process in the field of journalism, we unpacked discourses concerning the coronavirus pandemic collected from interviews with journalists during the pandemic and from the U.S. journalism trade press using the Discourses of Journalism Database. Through discourse analysis, we discovered that during COVID-19 journalists discursively placed themselves in a responsible but vulnerable position within the communication ecology—not solely as a result of the pandemic but also from environmental conditions that long preceded it. Journalists found their reporting difficult during the pandemic and sought to mitigate the forces challenging their work as they sought to reverse the flow of misinformation.
Efforts to address misinformation on social media have special urgency with the emergence of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). In one effort, the World Health Organization (WHO) designed and publicized shareable infographics to debunk coronavirus myths. We used an experiment to test the efficacy of these infographics, depending on placement and source. We found that exposure to a corrective graphic on social media reduced misperceptions about the science of 1 false COVID-19 prevention strategy but did not affect misperceptions about prevention of COVID-19. Lowered misperceptions about the science persisted >1 week later. These effects were consistent when the graphic was shared by the World Health Organization or by an anonymous Facebook user and when the graphics were shared preemptively or in response to misinformation. Health organizations can and should create and promote shareable graphics to improve public knowledge.
This article examines the role of social media dynamics in the public exchange of information between scientists (experts), government (policy-makers), mass media (journalists), and citizens (nonexperts) during the first 4 months after the Covid-19 outbreak in the Netherlands. Over the past decade, the institutional model of science communication, based on linear vectors of information flows between institutions, has gradually converted into a networked model where social media propel information flows circulating between all actors involved. The question driving our research is, “How are social media deployed to both undermine and enhance public trust in scientific expertise during a health crisis?” Analyzing the public debate during the period of the corona outbreak in the Netherlands, we investigate two stages: the emergency response phase and the “smart exit strategy” phase, discussing how scientific experts, policy-makers, journalists, and citizens appropriate social media logic to steer information and to control the debate. We conclude by outlining the potential risks and benefits of adopting social media dynamics in institutional contexts of science communication.
Since the World Health Organization (WHO, February 2, 2020) reported that the spread of coronavirus disease has been accompanied by a “massive infodemic,” the COVID-19 outbreak has become a national and international battleground of a struggle against misinformation. Fact-checking outlets around the world have been actively counteracting false and misleading information surrounding the pandemic. In this article, we conceptualize fact checkers in terms of the “interpretative power” that journalism holds in processes of political performances (Alexander in Soc Theory 22(4): 527–573, 2004, in: The performance of politics. Obama’s victory and the struggle for democratic power. Oxford University Press, Oxford/New York, 2010). Drawing on virus-related fact checks from Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) database, we make two arguments. First, we argue that the new phenomenon of specialized “fact checking” might be considered as a further explicitly differentiated element of Alexander’s model of cultural performance, which fulfills a double duty: trying to contribute to further “de-fusion” (separating audiences from actors when the latter lack authenticity and credibility) on the one hand, and working to overcome it on the other. Second, we explain how new fact-checking practices have become a reflexive supplement to the news media of the civil sphere that might be able to help the civil sphere’s communicative institutions to defend truthfulness in a manner that contributes to democracy.
Focussing in detail on one key component of the infodemic surrounding COVID-19, this article traces the dissemination dynamics of rumours that the pandemic outbreak was somehow related to the rollout of 5G mobile telephony technology in Wuhan and around the world. Drawing on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods including time-series analysis, network analysis and in-depth close reading, our analysis shows the dissemination of the rumour on Facebook from its obscure origins in pre-existing conspiracist groups through greater uptake in more diverse communities to substantial amplification by celebrities, sports stars and media outlets. The in-depth tracing of COVID-related mis- and disinformation across social networks offers important new insights into the dynamics of online information dissemination and points to opportunities to slow and stop the spread of false information, or at least to combat it more directly with accurate counterinformation.
This article provides a framework for analysing changes and continuities in science communication. The field is challenged by three contexts: (1) ‘post-normal situations’ of coping with uncertainties, value questions, an urgency to take action, and associated political pressures; (2) a dramatically changing media environment, and (3) a polarizing discourse culture. We refine the concept of post-normal science to make it more applicable to analyse public science communication in an era of digital media networks. Focussing on changes in the interactions between scientists and journalists, we identify two ideal types: normal and post-normal science communication, and conclude that the boundaries of science and journalism are blurring and under renegotiation. Scientists and journalists develop new shared role models, norms, and practices. Both groups are increasingly acting as advocates for common goods that emphasize the emerging norms of post-normal science communication: transparency, interpretation, advocacy and participation.
The factors that shape the news that citizens are exposed to and act upon are a growing area of research. This article advances a framework to examine how issues and topics rise to prominence and gain attention following publication in a digital hybrid media ecosystem. The four elements (publics, platforms, paraphernalia, and practices) extend previous work by accounting for the actions of individuals in aggregate as publics, the impact of platforms as institutionalized spaces for news, the objects of media consumption and exposure, and the temporal and spatial contexts for practices of news circulation and consumption.
In many countries the public's main source of information about science and technology is the mass media. Unfortunately, in recent years traditional journalism has experienced a collapse, and science journalism has been a major casualty. One potential remedy is to encourage scientists to write for news media about science. On these general news platforms, scientists' stories would have to compete for attention with other news stories on hard (e.g. politics) and entertaining (e.g. celebrity news) topics written by professional writers. Do they stand a chance? This study aimed to quantitatively characterize audience interactions as an indicator of interest in science news stories authored by early career scientists (henceforth ‘scientists’) trained to function as science reporters, as compared to news items written by reporters and published in the same news outlets. To measure users' behavior, we collected data on the number of clicks, likes, comments and average time spent on page. The sample was composed of 150 science items written by 50 scientists trained to contribute popular science stories in the Davidson Institute of Science Education reporters’ program and published on two major Israeli news websites—Mako and Ynet between July 2015 to January 2018. Each science item was paired with another item written by the website’s organic reporter, and published on the same channel as the science story (e.g., tourism, health) and the same close time. Overall significant differences were not found in the public's engagement with the different items. Although, on one website there was a significant difference on two out of four engagement types, the second website did not have any difference, e.g., people did not click, like or comment more on items written by organic reporters than on the stories written by scientists. This creates an optimistic starting point for filling the science news void by scientists as science reporters.
This article explores the role of peripheral actors in the production and circulation of journalism through the case study of a North American not-for-profit digital-born journalism organization, The Conversation Canada . Much of the research on peripheral actors has examined individual actors, focusing on questions of identity such as who is a journalist as opposed to emergent and complex institutions with multiple interventions in a time of field transition. Our study explores the role of what we term a ‘complex peripheral actor,’ a journalism actor that may operate across individual, organizational, and network levels, and is active across multiple domains of the journalistic process, including production, publication, and dissemination. This lens is relevant to the North American journalism landscape as digitalization has seen increasing interest in and growth of complex and contested peripheral actors, such as Google, Facebook, and Apple News. Results of this case study point to increasing recognition of The Conversation Canada as a legitimate journalism actor indicated by growing demand for its content from legacy journalism organizations experiencing increasing market pressures in Canada, in addition to demand from a growing number of peripheral journalism actors. We argue that complex peripheral actors are benefitting from changes occurring across the media landscape from economic decline to demand for free journalism content, as well as the proliferation of multiple journalisms.
Viewing the Invisible is a multimedia collaboration that explores common methodology between arts and sciences. Portraits of science influencers were painted while dialogue between artist and subject was filmed. Here, we show the implementation of our recent exhibition as a model that can be adapted for use elsewhere in public or school settings to challenge misconceptions about the role of creativity in science and technical precision in art.
This article contextualises, defines, and operationalises the concept of platformisation. Drawing insights from different scholarly perspectives on platforms-software studies, critical political economy, business studies, and cultural studies-it develops a comprehensive approach to this process. Platformisation is defined as the penetration of infrastructures, economic processes and governmental frameworks of digital platforms in different economic sectors and spheres of life, as well as the reorganisation of cultural practices and imaginations around these platforms. Using app stores as an example, we show how this definition can be employed in research.
This article examines the public communication of COVID-19-related ‘preprints’ (unreviewed research studies) in a digital media environment. To understand how preprint research flows from preprint server, to media story, to social media audience, we analysed engagement with ‘second-order citations’ – social media posts linking to media coverage of research – using a sample of 41 media stories published by the research amplifier platform The Conversation (TC) that mentioned preprint research during the early months of the pandemic. We applied content analyses to the Facebook and Twitter accounts sharing these stories and analysed the engagement that the posts received. We found that TC stories mentioning preprints were shared among a diverse collection of Facebook and Twitter accounts, providing a second layer of social media amplification of preprint research. Still, posts by a small proportion of ‘elite’ actors – people with prominent roles in media and communications, politics or academia – tended to generate more engagement.
The use of artificial intelligence-based algorithms for the curation of news content by social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter has upended the gatekeeping role long held by traditional news outlets. This has caused some US policymakers to argue that platforms are skewing news diets against them, and such claims are beginning to take hold among some voters. In a nationally representative survey experiment, we explore whether traditional models of media bias perceptions extend to beliefs about algorithmic news bias. We find that partisan cues effectively shape individuals’ attitudes about algorithmic news bias but have asymmetrical effects. Specifically, whereas in-group directional partisan cues stimulate bias perceptions for members of both parties, Democrats, but not Republicans, also respond to out-group cues. We conclude with a discussion about the implications for the formation of attitudes about new technologies and the potential for polarization.
This study identifies the journalistic features of four Israeli science-news websites and suggests a conceptual framework for describing and analyzing different channels of science communication. Findings show how these websites, while employing scientists as reporters, adopt journalistic practices in producing, presenting, and disseminating science news on various topics. Based on these findings, it is suggested to add to the traditional dichotomic classification of direct and mediated channels of science communication, a third entity we name “Peripheral science-journalism.” Another insight that comes out of the findings is that amateur journalists’ contribution to journalism and society should be evaluated by addressing the practices they employ and the product they provide rather than their personal, professional, or institutional affiliation.
In this article, I explore the treatment of evidence in vlogs by Egyptian doctor-influencers: how they present it and what they use instead of it. I answer the following questions: 1) How do doctor-influencers present evidence on social media? 2) If evidence is not the research, then what is it? The data was collected through in-depth interviews with 12 Egyptian doctor-influencers from different specializations; two focus groups; and critical discourse analysis of 48 of the influencers’ most popular and most engaging videos.
Scientists have not yet adapted to new information environments.
The news media are presumed to play a central role in bringing science to a wider public. However, the surge of antidemocratic forces helps illuminate the populist and anti-populist tendencies of media in demystifying science. This article shows that science and politics share an intrinsic affinity under contemporary populism. The digital reportage on the science and politics nexus uncovers media populism which largely crystallizes the mediatization of politics in Rodrigo Duterte’s Philippines. A reading of science-related articles published by the leading dominant news media outlets unfolds discursive narratives that impact the watchdog function of the Fourth Estate. “Government science” mainstreams official State accounts including the anti-science sentiments of Duterte. “Reforming science” is a middle-ground, reformist-inspired narrative that features legislative and policy measures. And “alternative science” advances the voices of non-State formations and challenges the administration’s science agenda. The implications of these narratives on media populism are presented.
Science journalism has never been more important, but citizens must sometimes struggle to find independent, evidence-based information. At the same time, conditions for specialist science journalists are becoming more difficult. This chapter discusses these conundrums and what they portend for the future of science journalism. It first tracks the evolution of the field, noting the long history of popular science and the presence of science stories in the mass media for as long as these channels have existed. The chapter then moves to reflections on characteristics of 21st-century science news content and opportunities and challenges confronting science journalists in this age of digital media and gig economy. © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Massimiano Bucchi and Brian Trench; individual chapters, the contributors.
Disagreement and incivility are increasingly common in science communication. While previous work has explored effects on issue attitudes, it has not examined how disagreement and incivility in news coverage influence attention to and trust in science. In this study, we investigate how civil and uncivil disagreement about non-politicized issues affects attention to science news, evaluations of research, and scientific trust. Results reveal that disagreement and incivility can not only lead to less attention to and acceptance of particular science issues, but also broader mistrust of scientists and scientific methods.
In the current digital era, crucial questions include whether and how nondemocratic regimes retain information control in the face of proliferating new communication technologies. The scholarship has long cited China as a prime example of how authoritarian regimes implement internet censorship. Echoing emergent studies that have called attention to the highly fragmented nature of China’s censorship agencies, which operate at different government levels, this research addresses local censorship agencies and their practices. Combining participatory observations and in-depth interviews conducted in a district in H City, one of China’s digital economy hubs, this research explores how the local censorship regime deploys soft forms of maintaining control over information. Based on an institutional approach, the findings show that the local censorship regime has adopted proactive strategies to build a reciprocal relationship with local news start-ups, forming a variant of ‘contingent symbiosis’. The local censorship regime uses policy and economic stimulus to co-opt news start-ups, inducing them to distance themselves from politically sensitive issues and local negative news and boost local propaganda agendas. These internet organisations have attempted to sustain positive relationships with the local censorship regime to acquire government resources and patronage, which would ensure their stable operation and survival under stiff competition in a precarious institutional environment. This research further explains the conditions of fragmented governance and platformisation under which this contingent symbiosis forms and the routinised practices that sustain it. This relational governance is covert and brings new challenges to the free flow of information.
As digital platforms have come to play a central role in the news and information ecosystem, a new realm of watchdog journalism has emerged – the platform beat. Journalists on the platform beat report on the operation, use and misuse of social media platforms and search engines. The platform beat can serve as an important mechanism for increasing the accountability of digital platforms, in ways that can affect public trust in the platforms, but that can also, hopefully, lead to the development of stronger, more reliable, and ultimately more trustworthy, platforms. However, there are a number of tensions, vulnerabilities and potential conflicts of interest that characterize the platform beat. This article explores these complex dynamics of the platform beat in an effort assess the capacity of those on the platform beat to enhance the accountability and
trustworthiness of digital platforms.
This research takes a socio-technical approach and uses participant observation and in-depth interviews to explain how two major TV news organizations from Colombia utilize social media to distribute video and engage TV audiences in online settings. Findings show that social media, particularly Facebook, are changing how television channels think of videos and their perceptions of audience engagement at the organizational level. Social media not only play a dominant role for distributing video but they influence with their recommendations and metrics TV decisions regarding content production. Finally, this research discusses the implication of these findings for the future of TV journalism.
Science amplifier platforms such as The Conversation have gained popularity in a changing media ecosystem in which the traditional roles of journalists are eroded, and scientists are urged to engage with society. The Conversation constitutes a blend of scientific communication, public science communication and science journalism, and a convergence of the professional worlds of science and journalism. In this study, we investigated the nature and impact of the Africa-focussed edition of this platform, The Conversation Africa. We analysed articles published over a 5-year period since its launch in 2015 (N = 5392). Contents from South Africa dominate the platform, but contributions from other African countries are increasing. Regarding the role of The Conversation Africa as an inter-media agenda setter, mainstream media more often republished stories related to politics or economics, while stories about social issues such as education, conservation and art were more often shared on social media.
The news industry faces profound financial instability and public distrust. Many believe the solution to these ongoing crises is for journalists to improve their relationship with their audiences. This raises important questions: How do journalists conceptualize their audiences in the first place? What is the connection between what journalists think about their audiences and what they do to reach them? Perhaps most important, how aligned are these “imagined” audiences with the real ones? Imagined Audiences draws on ethnographic case studies of three news organizations to show how journalists’ assumptions about their audiences shape their approaches to their audiences. In doing so, it examines the role that audiences traditionally have played in journalism, how that role has changed, and what those changes mean for both the profession and the public. It concludes by drawing on audience studies research to compare journalism’s “imagined” audiences with actual observations of news audience behavior. The result is a comprehensive study of both news production and reception at a time when the connection between the two has grown more important than ever.
Journalists are increasingly investigating and reporting on problematic online content such as misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories, leading to the creation of a new misinformation beat. The process of collecting, analyzing, and reporting on this kind of data is complex and nuanced. It is especially challenging as online actors attempt to undermine their work. Through in-depth interviews with twelve journalists, we explore how they investigate and report on online misinformation and disinformation. Our findings reveal some of the unique challenges of reporting on this beat, as well as the ways in which reporters overcome those challenges. We highlight and discuss how journalistic values could be better embedded into the design of tools to support their work, the power dynamics between social media companies and journalists, and the promise of collaborations as a way to support and educate journalists on this beat. This work provides contextual knowledge to researchers looking to better support investigative journalists - on the misinformation beat and beyond - as their work becomes more entangled in sociotechnical systems.
Based on face-to-face, in-depth interviews with 31 Chilean journalists from national TV, radio, print, and online media, this study explores how news professionals negotiate their identities and media use on Twitter and Instagram. The results suggest that, overall, they use Twitter and Instagram to stay informed, report the news, engage in branding activities, and interact with their audiences, expanding the scope of their work to include new professional roles and allow for the emergence of different but not mutually exclusive digital selves. Important nuances are found based on the platform used and the journalists’ perceptions of which practices are valid and relevant. Specifically, three analytical approaches to digital selves were identified. While we found strong patterns of a reinterpretation of journalistic practices through the normalization of some traditional functions, which are represented by the “adapted” approach, we also found clear elements of redefinition of journalistic work represented by the “redefiner” approach. The journalists who embrace this orientation disrupt traditional norms, merging their different selves on both platforms and using their accounts to target specific audiences. We also identified an approach close to individuals who resist the idea of mixing their professional work with social media practices, remaining “skeptical” to changes.
In China, the discussion of “fake news” often revolves around online rumor. In addition to politically motivated rumors, a large portion of profit-driven, sensational rumors permeate China's Internet. This study examines the diffusion of day-to-day online rumors on Weibo, WeChat, and mainstream news websites—the three major online news platforms in China—within an agenda-setting framework. Specifically, the study analyzed the top ten most widely distributed online rumors in China in 2016, focusing on how each rumor was reported and the transfer of rumor salience within and across the three media platforms. A total of 18,347 news items were quantitatively content analyzed and time-series analyses were conducted to discover the rumor diffusion patterns. Overall, the results show that Weibo was most likely to advance rumors, while WeChat had the greatest rumor refutation-to-advancement ratio. Mainstream news websites set the agenda of both Weibo and WeChat in refuting rumors and, ironically, also set the agenda of WeChat in advancing rumors. For rumor refuting within social media, the agenda-setting power of mainstream media remained strong on Weibo, while on WeChat governmental accounts and alternative information sources were more effective in building the mainstream media agenda.
Against the background of a fast-changing media environment and increasing competition in the science arena, we explored how media outlets use science-based press releases issued by research-intensive universities in South Africa. We compared 40 science-related media articles to related institutional press releases. We found that most press releases are re-published with minimal journalistic input and no crediting of the original source, with indications of hype present in a third of the media articles. This could be a reason for concern because press releases issued by research institutions are written to serve the interests of the institution and not to reflect on science. When media outlets re-publish these press releases without editorial input, it means that the critical or investigative role of the media is lost. Given concerns about the long-term implications of churnalism and hype in science media coverage, we ask whether PR-driven communication of science, as practiced by university media offices, among others, serves the long-term interests of science and society. We suggest that universities should consider the options and benefits of moving towards a new science communication paradigm focused less on reputation-building and more on constructive public engagement and helpful dialogue with society.
This study analyzes the predictors of media use for information about science and research by drawing on the theory of planned behavior and audience orientations. It uses data from a representative survey in Switzerland. We find that both audience orientations and motivations explained the use of media to access science information. People with positive attitudes toward science were more likely to use all kinds of media to access information about science. Positive evaluations of mass media coverage predicted print media and website, television and radio use positively but social media use negatively. Thus, social media could be a way to reach people who do not appreciate the coverage of the traditional mass media as much as others but who are still positive toward science. However, people who use social media may possess lesser knowledge to assess to what extent such science information is trustworthy and correct.
Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.
This randomized controlled experiment (N = 707) is the first to examine the role of video, source and user attributes in credibility assessment of online science news videos, and the impact of web-search on this role. We created a science news YouTube video in 12 versions (3 × 2 × 2 for source, quality and popularity). Each participant was randomly assigned to one version and was asked to rate the credibility of the source and the scientific information presented in the video. We found that perceived credibility is positively associated with perceived quality, as well as users’ YouTube experience. For those participants who did not conduct an online search during the assessment task, there was a positive association between the presenter’s perceived credibility and the video’s perceived credibility as well as its popularity; however, such associations were not present for participants who did conduct an online search.
In the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, social media platform providers such as Facebook and Twitter have severely restricted access to platform data via their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). This has had a particularly critical effect on the ability of social media researchers to investigate phenomena such as abuse, hate speech, trolling, and disinformation campaigns, and to hold the platforms to account for the role that their affordances and policies might play in facilitating such dysfunction. Alternative data access frameworks, such as Facebook’s partnership with the controversial Social Science One initiative, represent an insufficient replacement for fully functional APIs, and the platform providers’ actions in responding to the Cambridge Analytica scandal raise suspicions that they have instrumentalised it to actively frustrate critical, independent, public interest scrutiny by scholars. Building on a critical review of Facebook’s public statements through its own platforms and the mainstream media, and of the scholarly responses these have drawn, this article outlines the societal implications of the ‘APIcalypse’, and reviews potential options for scholars in responding to it.
Many citizens and decision- makers obtain information about science mainly, or even exclusively, from news and online media. Accordingly, social science has devoted considerable attention to the analysis of science news coverage. A review of this literature reveals a number of ongoing, substantial transformations: In line with the crisis of legacy media, the rise of online communication, and the extension of PR by many societal stakeholders, science communication is changing. Science journalism has come under pressure in publishing houses, and science journalists’ working conditions have worsened. The amount of science news coverage is stagnating, albeit after a rise that lasted several decades, and seems to navigate toward either a more controversial reporting about politicized issues such as gene editing or a less critical “churnalism” that is more strongly influenced by PR efforts than before. The implications of these changes for science communication and societal decisions regarding science communication are considered.
As scientists increasingly communicate with the public, hype (i.e., exaggerating and/or sensationalizing communication with other scientists and with public audiences) has become a matter of concern. There are many sources of hype, some of which reinforce each other- science itself, mass media science reporting, and universities engaging in public relations and self- promotion with varying degrees of legitimacy. Competition for public attention affects science in particular when the resulting hype undermines public perception of science’s commitment to factual evidence, and hype borders on fraud when claims of discoveries prove to be unsubstantiated. Science organizations have reacted by formulating codes of conduct and trying to eliminate both practices that overstate the impact of findings and postpublication activities that distort scholarly conclusions. More research is needed on the effects of hype on public trust in science and the effectiveness of alternative ways to discourage and penalize it.