The chronic growing pains of communicating science online

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• increase scientific literacy among the electorate

• conquering this challenge will require partnerships among the scientific community, social media platforms, and democratic institutions.

• science-centric bubbles on social media platforms, sheltered from often sizeable cross-sections of citizens that feel disconnected from the scientific community

• minimally responsive to scientists who upload content—however engaging it may seem— to TikTok or YouTube

• designed to monetize outrage and disagreement among users

• Decades of communication research indicate that anecdotal accounts on social media of breakthrough severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infections or severe adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccines, regardless of how rare both are, will be imprinted in people’s memories much more effectively than pages of sound statistical data documenting herd immunity

• Preprints as a form of anecdotal evidence have exacerbated the problem

• winning these short-term Twitter battles using questionable “evidence” that itself might turn out to be wrong is likely to do irreparable long-term damage to the public’s perception of science as a reliable way of understanding the world.

• What evidence reaches which parts of the audience is increasingly up to automated algorithms curated by social media platforms rather than scientists, journalists, or users of the platforms themselves.

• Algorithms that select and tailor content based on an audience member’s social context, personal preferences, and a host of digital trace data increasingly determine what scientific information an individual is likely to receive in Google searches, Facebook feeds, and Netflix recommendations (10)

• Scientific logic and access to information are two of the main foundations of enlightened democracies

• Training scientists to better communicate their science

• gaming Facebook’s or Google’s algorithms when communicating science, using tools of digital marketing, for instance, to enhance the reach or effectiveness of their communication.

• address the symptoms rather than the underlying problem.