Project Partners
Description
Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic are global challenges in which scientists play a crucial role and immediate political action is required. While climate change has been on the public agenda for several decades, the pandemic is a relatively new issue. In such cases, social media offers scientists the opportunity to disseminate scientific results to the public and to express calls for action and their personal attitudes towards politics. So far, little is known about the extent to which scientists make use of this option.
Kaija Biermann, Nicola Peters and Prof. Dr. Monika Taddicken addressed these questions in a study. The similarities and differences between visible German climate experts and visible German Covid-19 experts regarding advocacy and assessments of policies and political actors on Twitter were examined using content from 2021. The results show that climate experts addressed politics and expressed negative evaluations, the degradation of competence and blaming in their tweets more often than Covid-19 experts. However, the Covid-19 experts made more political calls for action. The comparative study provides insight into the interrelations between science and politics in digital communication environments and visibly illustrates scientists’ communication behaviours towards different socio-scientific issues.
Presentations
Publications