Science communication during pandemics: The role of public engagement in social media discussions

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During times of pandemics, it is vital that the public is well informed about the disease, its dissemination and necessary counter-measures. During the current Covid-19 crisis, direct communication by scientists proved to be more effective than general media consumption regarding the audience’s knowledge, self-efficacy and intention to adhere to the measures (Szczuka, Meinert, & Krämer, 2020, preprint). However, it has not been sufficiently addressed how this direct science communication resonates in social media and to what extend the public engagement with scientific knowledge leads to the messages being corroborated or contradicted and eroded. The goal of the proposed project is to contribute to this question by analyzing the proportion of evidence-based social media activities as well as the dissemination of emotionally toned messages (primarily focusing on fear and anger). Based on findings that pandemics are prone to the dissemination of disinformation, we further scrutinize how actual and feigned experts differ in their communication and how well laypeople can distinguish them. We will employ in-depth manual coding of social media content (communication science), apply this to – already collected - large data sets by computational methods (computer science) and analyse psychological effects and mechanisms by experimental methods (psychology).