Does Scientific Evidence Sell? Combining Manual and Automated Content Analysis to Investigate Scientists' and Laypeople's Evidence Practices on Social Media

In: Science communication

Abstract

Examining the dissemination of evidence on social media, we analyzed the discourse around eight visible scientists in the context of COVID-19. Using manual ( N = 1,406) and automated coding ( N = 42,640) on an account-based tracked Twitter/X dataset capturing scientists' activities and eliciting reactions over six 2-week periods, we found that visible scientists' tweets included more scientific evidence. However, public reactions contained more anecdotal evidence. Findings indicate that evidence can be a message characteristic leading to greater tweet dissemination. Implications for scientists, including explicitly incorporating scientific evidence in their communication and examining evidence in science communication research, are discussed.