Clickbait or Conspiracy? How Twitter Users Address the Epistemic Uncertainty of a Controversial Preprint
In this recently published article in „Big Data & Society“, Mareike Fenja Bauer, Maximilian Heimstädt, Carlos Franzreb and Sonja Schimmler shed light on the intricate relations between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online.
Uncertainty is an elementary component of science. New research results are published, previously secured knowledge is called into question, and groundbreaking technologies and methods change research practices.
Due to the lack of peer-review, which ensures the scientific value of a paper, preprints are considered scientifically unsecured. Nevertheless, these "unfinished" scientific findings are of central importance to science, as was made particularly clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Preprints make current research results quickly accessible without going through a lengthy peer-review process.
Sharing preprints on social media platforms such as Twitter has many advantages for scientists (e.g., increased likelihood of citations). This way, not only the scientific community is reached, but also a broad public. This study takes a closer look at an unintended but highly consequential effect of sharing preprints on social media platforms: their contribution to conspiracy theories.
Using social network analysis and qualitative content analysis, we look at how scientists and conspiracy theorists fight for interpretive authority over a highly controversial biomedical preprint that was widely shared on Twitter in the wake of the Covid-19-pandemic.
In doing so, we took the uncertain epistemic status of preprints, which we identify as characteristic of preprints, as the starting point of our analysis.
The methodological interdisciplinarity allowed us to examine both the discursive practices of scientists and conspiracy theorists and the structure of the debate. In doing so, we find that despite considerable involvement in the debate, scholars fail to dampen the enthusiasm of conspiracy theorists for the preprint.
The status of epistemic uncertainty fulfills a crucial role for both scientists and conspiracy theorists: Members of both groups not only aim to reduce the epistemic uncertainty of the preprint (e.g., scientist point out the scientific flaws of the study and conspiracy theorists embed the preprint into their narratives as supposed scientific evidence), but both groups sometimes even actively maintained the epistemic uncertainty of the preprint. This maintenance of epistemic uncertainty helped conspiracy theorists to reinforce their group identity as skeptics while scientists maintained the epistemic uncertainty to express their concerns about the state of their profession.
Our study thus adds to the debate around how to deal with conspiracy narratives on social media platforms and shows that simply pointing to “the science” is not enough when trying to counter conspiracy theories. “Follow the science” may sound like a helpful antidote in abstract, but in practice it is often more difficult than imagined. This is mainly because what is considered "science" and what is not is often open to interpretation.
Our study thus contributes to research on the complex relationships between scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories online, and on the role of social media platforms for new genres of scientific communication.
More about the authors:
Mareike Fenja Bauer is a PhD researcher at the European New School of Digital Studies / European University Viadriana Frankfurt (Oder) and a former student assistant at the Weizenbaum Institute. . Her research focusses on anti-feminism on visual social media platforms.
Dr. Maximilian Heimstädt is research group lead of the research group "Reorganizing Knowledge Practices" at the Weizenbaum Institute. In his research he is interested in "openness" as a practice and design principle of organizations. At the Weizenbaum Institute he is researching new forms of work and organization in science, often referred to as "Open Science".
Carlos Franzreb is a PhD researcher at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence and a former student assistant at the Weizenbaum Institute.
Dr. Sonja Schimmler is research group lead of the research group “Digitalization and Opening up of Science“ at the Weizenbaum Institute. She is also a project manager at Fraunhofer FOKUS and a researcher at the Technical University of Berlin. Her research interests range from data science to software engineering and human-centered computing. Currently, she has a special focus on Open Science and research data infrastructures.