Health and Science Controversies in the Digital World: News, Mis/Disinformation and Public Engagement

"The fight against mis/disinformation about health and science in the digital space...needs to start from recognising that scientific facts and perspectives - thereby factchecking and correcting information - are far from enough." - An Nguyen and Daniel Catalan-Matamoros, Editors

Digital media, while opening avenues for lay people to engage with news, information, and debates about various science and health issues, have become a means of spreading misinformation and disinformation, stimulating uncivil discussions, and engendering ill-informed, even dangerous public decisions. Recent developments in the COVID-19 "infodemic" might just be the tipping point of a process that has been long simmering in controversial areas of health and science (e.g., climate-change denial, anti-vaccination, anti-5G, Flat Earth doctrines). This edition of the open access journal Media and Communication brings together a range of data and perspectives from 4 continents - including 11 articles and 9 commentaries, the latter focused on COVID-19 - to help media scholars, journalists, science communicators, scientists, health professionals, and policymakers understand these developments and determine what can be done to mitigate their impacts on public engagement with health and science controversies.

Some of the underlying questions that thread throughout the analyses, as outlined in the opening editorial by An Nguyen and Daniel Catalan-Matamoros, are: How is mis/disinformation around health and science controversies produced, distributed, and redistributed in digital environments? Do - and how do - digital platforms contribute to the decline of the authority of scientific expertise that is already seen in other environments? What techniques and strategies can science journalism and communication employ to tackle the dark sides - and promote the bright sides - of digital media in public communication of science controversies? What are the potential mechanisms for the media, technology firms, the science establishment and the civil society to cooperate in the fight against health and science mis/disinformation?

Table of Contents, with brief summaries:

• "Digital Mis/Disinformation and Public Engagement with Health and Science Controversies: Fresh Perspectives from Covid-19", by An Nguyen and Daniel Catalan-Matamoros [Editorial]
• "Pro-Science, Anti-Science and Neutral Science in Online Videos on Climate Change, Vaccines and Nanotechnology" - M. Carmen Erviti, Mónica Codina, and Bienvenido León conducted a content analysis of 826 Google Video search results on 3 controversial science issues: climate change, vaccines, and nanotechnology. Among the key findings: Most clips were pro-science or neutral, with only 4% taking an anti-science stance, and anti-science videos were more frequent among those produced by ordinary users than by the news media, science institutions, and non-science organisations and companies. The presence of scientists does not differ between pro-science, anti-science, and neutral clips.
• "Vaccine Assemblages on Three HPV Vaccine-Critical Facebook Pages in Denmark from 2012 to 2019" - Torben E. Agergaard, Màiri E. Smith, and Kristian H. Nielsen developed an original qualitative coding framework to analyse prevalent topics and inter-textual material (links and shares) in posts generated by the administrators of 3 Danish Facebook pages that are critical of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. They found that these posts assembled different sources (mainstream media, personal anecdotes, political assertions, and scientific sources) to construct the messages, with a focus on adverse events of HPV vaccination and what posters perceived as inadequate responses of healthcare systems. These Facebook pages, however, are not uniform: They are heterogenous and contextual, responding to and exchanging information and misinformation "within the communication environment in which they are embedded" (p. 339).
• "Memes of Gandhi and Mercury in Anti-Vaccination Discourse" - Jan Buts presents 2 in-depth case studies of 2 popular anti-vaccination memes - namely, lists of vaccine ingredients containing mercury, which has been depicted in conspiracy theories as a harmful component of vaccines, and quotes attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, who is known for his condemnation of immunisation. The analysis explores the intersections of conspiracy theory, visual rhetoric, and digital communication - particularly how the ambiguity of memes might serve as vehicles for the dissemination of health mis/disinformation.
• "The Visual Vaccine Debate on Twitter: A Social Network Analysis" - Elena Milani, Emma Weitkamp, and Peter Webb conducted a social network analysis of visual images in Twitter conversations about vaccination. One of their findings is that "pro- and anti-vaccination users formed two polarised networks that hardly interacted with each other." While anti-vaccination users (primarily parents and activists) "frequently retweeted each other, strengthening their relationships...and confirming their beliefs against immunisation," pro-vaccine users (primarily non-government organisations (NGOs) or health professionals) "formed a fragmented network, with loose but strategic connections" (p. 364).
• "Rezo and German Climate Change Policy: The Influence of Networked Expertise on YouTube and Beyond" - Joachim Allgaier presents an online ethnographic case study of a pre-election YouTube video that attacked the climate change policy of Germany's ruling party, Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and unleashed a heated national online and offline debate.
• "Third-Person Perceptions and Calls for Censorship of Flat Earth Videos on YouTube" - Asheley R. Landrum and Alex Olshansky explored why people supported calls for censorship of Flat Earth videos on YouTube, despite the fact they are believed by few. Their theoretical framework is built around third-person perceptions (people are worried that others, not themselves, are being influenced by such videos) and third-person effects (these worries lead people to support censorship of Flat Earth content on YouTube). In 3 experiments with United States (US) users, they found that third-person perceptions existed and varied strongly with how religious people are and which political party they belong to. However, there was only mixed evidence for whether third-person perceptions predict public support for censoring Flat Earth videos on YouTube.
• "Does Scientific Uncertainty in News Articles Affect Readers' Trust and Decision-Making?" - Friederike Hendriks and Regina Jucks found in 2 experiments that introducing epistemic uncertainty about scientific processes into online news articles about climate change did not have a large effect on trust in climate science and scientists or climate decision-making. The presence of uncertainty in the articles, however, did affect the style in which readers reasoned.
• "Health and Scientific Frames in Online Communication of Tick-Borne Encephalitis: Antecedents of Frame Recognition" - Sarah Kohler and Isabell Koinig combined eye-tracking, content analysis, and online experiments, finding that users did recognise the health and scientific frames in articles on an Austrian website about Tick-Borne Encephalitis. Health frames, being more emotional and less neutral, were more frequently recognised than scientific frames. Moreover, health frame recognition was influenced by most health antecedentes included in their research, including confidence in vaccines, health literacy, health consciousness, and health information-seeking behaviours and calculation. The implication, the authors argue, is that health frames can be a potential strategy for creating awareness of vaccination and other health issues.
• "'On Social Media Science Seems to Be More Human': Exploring Researchers as Digital Science Communicators" - Kaisu Koivumäki, Timo Koivumäki, and Erkki Karvonen interviewed 17 tweeting and blogging Finnish researchers in the potentially controversial area of renewable energy. The interviewees were of the general view that scientists as digital science communicators should move beyond traditional functions of informing and anchoring facts to adopt "more progressively adjusted practices" (p. 326), such as luring and manoeuvring, including common content tactics by other professional communicators such as buzzwords and clickbait.
• "Africa and the Covid-19 Information Framing Crisis" - In this commentary, George Ogola outlines how multiple actors - the state, the Church, civil society, and the public - generate, in their fight for legitimacy, "a competing mix" (p. 440) of framings, interpretations, and narratives about the pandemic, with the consequence being the birth of a new crisis in its own right.
• "Covid-19 Misinformation and the Social (Media) Amplification of Risk: A Vietnamese Perspective" - In this commentary, Hoa Nguyen and An Nguyen detail how a chaotic sphere of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" - especially rumours, hoaxes, and digital incivility - in Vietnam works in a rather strange way to keep its one-party system on its toes and force it to be transparent.
• "'Cultural Exceptionalism' in the Global Exchange of (Mis)Information around Japan's Responses to Covid-19" - In this commentary, Jamie Matthews reviews the myth of Japan's cultural exceptionalism, which has been dispersed across the networked public sphere as a factor that helps the country to succeed with fighting the virus.
• "How China's State Actors Create a 'Us vs US' World during Covid-19 Pandemic on Social Media" - In this commentary, Xin Zhao observes how China's state actors have been using global social platforms as a geo-political battle ground during the pandemic, in which they create a tit-for-tat "Us vs US" narrative with information that is questionable but might nevertheless gain some influence over users by the time it is scrutinised.
• "Spreading (Dis)Trust: Covid-19 Misinformation and Government Intervention in Italy" - Alessandro Lovari focuses in this commentary on how an erosion of trust in Italy's public institutions and the politicisation of health and science issues have combined to foster the spread of pandemic misinformation on social media and how the Italian Ministry of Health used its official Facebook page to mitigate, to some extent, such spread.
• "Coronavirus in Spain: Fear of 'Official' Fake News Boosts WhatsApp and Alternative Sources" - Carlos Elías and Daniel Catalan-Matamoros write this commentary from Spain, where they see 2 unexpected forces emerging to tell a different truth from that of official sources and media: social networks, especially WhatsApp, and mystery and esotericism TV programmes.
• "German Media and Coronavirus: Exceptional Communication - Or Just a Catalyst for Existing Tendencies?" - Reflecting on a number of atypical short-term examples in from Germany's COVID-19 response, Holger Wormer argues in this commentary that the infodemic has "accelerated and made more visible existing developments and deficits aswell as an increased need for funding of science journalism" (p. 467).
• "Science Journalism and Pandemic Uncertainty" - In this commentary, Sharon Dunwoody analyses how "copious amounts of uncertainty" associated with COVID-19 can "confuse and mislead publics" (p. 471) in the US, especially with the fuel of social media. In this context, science journalism might play a role by privileging scientific sources, checking facts, and doing analytical stories that concentrate on context and promote understanding.
• "Empowering Users to Respond to Misinformation about Covid-19" - In this commentary, Emily K. Vraga, Melissa Tully, and Leticia Bode review recent research to argue that enhancing science literacy and news literacy - in particular, equipping social media users with the tools to identify, consume, and share high-quality information - could be the foundation for efforts to combat COVID-19 mis/disinformation in the US and beyond.