Conference Program

Processes of platformization and deep mediatization (Hepp 2020) characterizing the contemporary communication ecosystem are profoundly transforming science communication, redefining the boundaries between information, education, and entertainment (Bucchi, Trench 2021). In this context, the circulation of scientific knowledge increasingly takes place through short, visual, and highly accessible content produced by content creators and thematic pages operating outside the institutional circuits of academic and journalistic communication (Schäfer 2016). As a result, a model of pop science communication is emerging that, on the one hand, expands the potential to engage broad and non-specialist publics, and on the other raises critical issues related to information quality, epistemic legitimation, and public responsibility.

This paper offers a first theoretical and exploratory overview of science communication on social media, aiming to interpret pop science not merely as an emerging communicative style, but as a form of distributed epistemic mediation within the platform society (van Dijck et al. 2018; Zeng et al. 2021). From this perspective, digital platforms are understood as epistemic infrastructures that intervene in processes of visibility, legitimation, and circulation of knowledge, shaping the ways in which scientific information becomes intelligible, credible, and socially relevant.

The study investigates how science is narrated through platform-native formats, which rhetorical strategies and credibility devices are mobilized by science communicators, and how they position themselves between entertainment, epistemic authority, and educational functions (Zhang, Lu 2023). Particular attention is devoted to the ethical and value-related dimensions of science communication practices, which are considered crucial for understanding the role of digital dissemination in fostering informed and critical citizenship.

Methodologically, the research adopts a qualitative design (Pink et al. 2016) and a transmedia approach (Ciammella 2024), based on the semi-standardized analysis of a corpus of science-related accounts active across multiple platforms (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube). The comparative observation of narrative lines, production practices, and engagement dynamics highlights how scientific authority is performed and negotiated in the digital public sphere.

Overall, the paper proposes to read pop science communication as a space for the cultural reworking of scientific knowledge and as a form of informal education that shapes processes of democratic learning within the hybrid media ecosystem. This perspective invites broader reflection on the technological, symbolic, and institutional conditions structuring science communication in the platform era, and on its role in the construction of democratic and epistemically aware citizenship.

Manipulations and distortions in scientific divulgation and communication on the internet have become top issues in STSs and among the sociologists of cultural and communicative processes. Climate change, among other topics, has fallen under the lens. For instance, Dunlap and McCright (2010) have explored the heterogeneity of the so-called “climate denial blogosphere”; others have analysed the “rhetorical constellations” posted by bloggers on the public Facebook page of a denialist digital platform (Bloomfield and Tillery, 2019; Tillery and Bloomfield 2022).

The present study, moving from the theory of “Co-Production” of science and social order (Jasanoff, 2004; Jasanoff and Kim, 2005), further explores the phenomenon of online climate change denial focusing on the website “Wattsup with that” (https://wattsupwiththat.com), founded in 2006 and run by William Anthony Wattsup, former television meteorologist, chatted climate change skeptic, among the protagonists of the American “Climategate” (Scott, 2021). The platform, self-proclaiming “the world’s most viewed website on global warming and climate change”, is one of the several adversaries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), established since 1987 by the United Nations, the main advocate of the anthropogenic theory of global warming (ATGW), currently shared by 99% of scientists (Lynas et al. 2021; Myers et al. 2021).

In particular, the analysis concentrates on the archive of “failed predictions”, containing more than sixty climate forecasts, delivered since 1966 until nowadays, by representatives of mainstream climate science and proved, based on observational data, ex post wrong.

Together with some surprising outcomes (to anticipate one, until 1988 every prediction hinted at the coming of a new Ice Age, and not towards a warming trend), the empirical case study provides interesting insights to develop an interdisciplinary reflection upon a constellation of related topics that span from the epistemic status of contemporary climate change science to the future of our climate modelling (Bordoni, 2025); from a critical discourse analysis unveiling fallacious reasonings and flaw explanatory logics, rhetorical tricks and unsound conclusions, to a deeper understanding of the role of epistemic coherence in climate change science (Corradi, 2025); from the intrinsic and multidimensional complexity of climate change predictions, to their instrumental, economic and political usages to erode public trust in mainstream scientific accounts (Blöbaum, 2016; Fischer, 2017).

One important implication is that against climate change denial, it is urgent to safeguard the specific epistemic status of climate predictions, and disclose the actual limits of their reliability, showing the (ever shifting, but nonetheless knowledgeable) boundaries between what we know, what we don’t know, and what we cannot know (Krauss, 2021; Stainforth, 2024). More generally, the positive democratization of access to scientific knowledge through the internet, hiding distorted communicative means and aims, more urgently needs a careful and timing critical sociology of scientific communication, ready to reveal the pitfalls of misleading interpretations and instrumental usages of scientific tenets and findings: before they turn, online, quickly viral.

Contemporary societies are increasingly defined by overlapping crises that generate conditions of persistent uncertainty, a state conceptualized as a "permacrisis" (Zatti, 2024). In these contexts, scientific experts are called upon to act not only as knowledge producers but also as public communicators and mediators between scientific institutions, decision-makers, and citizens. The Covid-19 pandemic served as a definitive "stress test" for this relationship, exposing the fragility of expert authority while simultaneously placing it at the heart of public discourse. Within the current platform-mediated information ecosystem, the circulation of knowledge is filtered through hybrid media logics and an unprecedented "infodemic" (Cosentino, 2023), which complicates traditional hierarchies of knowledge and transforms the communicative expectations placed upon professionals.

This presentation investigates the multifaceted processes through which scientific expertise is constructed, represented, and contested. The theoretical framework draws on the sociology of expertise (Eyal, 2019), the social construction of knowledge (Latour, 2005), and the dynamics of recognition in expert-public relations (Pizzorno, 2007). The contribution adopts a dual-methodological approach to capture both the subjective reflexivity of experts and the objective media landscape in which they operate.

The first part explores the experts’ self-representation through twelve focus groups involving sixty researchers from public and private institutes in geopolitics, climate studies, and healthcare. This qualitative phase investigates how experts interpret their communicative responsibilities and their perceived legitimacy when facing non-expert audiences. The findings reveal that experts’ professional identity is increasingly shaped by "reputational recognition" that transcends peer-review circles, moving toward a public validation model. Two relational configurations emerge: a trust-based model, where expertise is accepted as an authoritative guide, and a conflictual model, where expertise challenges epistemic authority, leading to symmetrical and often polarized interactions.

To complement this analysis is the study of a particular investigation: a lexicometric analysis (Baker, 2023) of the press coverage regarding the Covid-19 vaccination campaign. By applying multi-dimensional correspondence analysis and cluster analysis to an extensive corpus of national press articles, the research identifies the dominant semantic fields and rhetorical frames that shaped the public narrative of the vaccine rollout. This lexicometric component allows for a mapping of how "expert voices" were mediated, highlighting the tension between technical-scientific approach and the spectacularization of medical discourse.

By triangulating the experts' internal reflections with the external media representation of the vaccination campaign, the presentation offers a comprehensive critique of science communication in the digital era. It concludes that expert authority is no longer an inherent institutional attribute but a fluid constructed entity, negotiated through visibility, relational trust, and the ability to navigate in the informational environments.

The Covid-19 pandemic represented a moment of profound transformation in the processes of science communication. The centrality of data in the public narrative of the health crisis (especially, during the initial period from March to May 2020 and during the first phase of vaccine distribution in January 2021) made journalism a key mediator between scientific knowledge institutions and the public. Tables, graphs, percentages, and statistical indicators, along with medical and scientific terminology, became a constant presence in everyday news coverage, turning data-driven journalism into one of the main channels through which scientific information reached a mass audience.

This contribution reflects on the role of data in science communication through the results of an empirical study on how Italian audiences perceived and interpreted data-driven news during the pandemic. The research is part of the broader project The Social Effects of Fake News and focuses on how audiences approach informational content that incorporates scientific and statistical data. The study is based on a survey conducted between 2020 and 2021 with 399 respondents across Italy, investigating the relationship between media consumption, trust in institutions and the ability to interpret news items involving scientific data.

The pandemic clearly showed that science communication does not only concern the dissemination of scientific results, but also the translation of technical languages and complex data systems into narratives that are understandable and socially meaningful. In this context, journalism assumed a crucial epistemic role: not only reporting information, but interpreting and contextualizing data produced by the scientific community. However, the increasing visibility of scientific data in news coverage also revealed new tensions in the relationship between science, media, and public opinion, particularly within an environment characterized by information disorder and the so-called “infodemic.”

The findings of the research highlight a paradox in the relationship between audiences and science-related information. A significant portion of respondents expressed high levels of trust in doctors and scientists; at the same time, the same respondents showed a relatively high propensity to trust epidemiological or statistical data conveyed and used by the same doctors and scientists.

To explain this contradiction, the research proposes the model of the "know-it-all approach". This model describes an attitude in which individuals believe they possess greater interpretative competence than others when evaluating events, policies, and data. Within this framework, scientific data are not rejected outright; rather, they are reinterpreted through personal experience, prior beliefs, or alternative narratives. The result is a tension between scientific authority, journalistic mediation and the social perception of scientific evidence.

These findings suggest that, in contemporary media environments characterized by hybridization and platformization, science communication cannot rely solely on the presentation of data or scientific evidence. Instead, it requires greater attention to the ways in which data are translated, contextualized and narratively framed. Data-driven journalism represent therefore a crucial space for science communication, provided it develops narrative and transmedia strategies capable of making data understandable, verifiable, and socially meaningful for diverse audiences.

Medical communication finds in social networking platforms a privileged space for visibility, circulation, and legitimation, leading to the development of unprecedented forms of mediation between experts and citizens (van Dijck et al. 2018). While, on the one hand, it is primarily in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic that health became central within public discourse, thanks to the presence of experts in Tv programs across traditional media; on the other hand digital media have provided a new space for medical and scientific communication aimed at fostering and disseminating a culture of prevention, especially among younger people (Goodell 1977; Lombardo & Mauceri 2020; Campus & Saracino 2022; Mihelj et al. 2022).

As part of the broader process of redefinition of media landscape – in which actors ‘outside’ the traditional information system actively participate in the production of specialist information – experts assume the role of “science influencers” and develop successful strategies through their ability to combine scientific accuracy and linguistic simplification, and to adapt their communications, styles, narrative, and languages to the standards of social media (Ducci et al. 2021; Zhang & Lu 2023). The effectiveness of the message depends on the balance between informational accuracy and communicative “proximity”: concise graphics, thematic rubrics, non-specialist vocabulary, and attention to current issues all contribute to the construction of content oriented not only towards the transmission of knowledge, but also towards the promotion of informed behaviours in matters of prevention and health, as well as the countering of misinformation. Social media thus become a strategic resource for medical communication, while the authority of experts directly shapes both the credibility of content and their capacity to influence public audiences (van Dijck & Alinejad 2020; Štětka et al. 2026).

Instagram and TikTok represent particularly significant communicative tools for medical dissemination due to the use of audio-visual content (images and videos), its capacity to encourage interaction and engagement, and its ability to translate specialist content into accessible formats. Medical communication on Social media, in fact, does not consist just in a simplification (or a “decline”) of specialist knowledge, but rather in a cultural translation that entails the selection, hierarchisation, and elaboration of content according to its readability, recognisability, and shareability. Among the most well-known examples in Italy are Dr. Monica Calcagni (@ginecologa.calcagni), Dr. Claudio Olivieri (@dr.claudio_olivieri), Minerva Salute (@minervasalute), and HeiMI-Salute e Prevenzione (@heimi.saluteeprevenzione), which are meaningful case studies for studying the editorial strategies and content production practices that have contributed to a “revival” of medical information through social networking sites. The research was conducted through a qualitative analytical approach applied to three distinctive elements of the above-mentioned selected social profiles: (a) the aims of the profile’s content, (b) the evolution of the editorial format, and (c) the business models.

The analysis outlines both strengths and risks in the role of experts as influencers on social media. While platforms enable medical communication to reach wider audiences and foster engagement, data-driven logics reshapes how expertise is communicated, creating tensions between scientific accuracy, visibility, and algorithmic personalization.