Abstract
Addressing global sustainability challenges such as climate change in democratic societies requires thorough political and societal debates. Science and environmental communication is needed to inform these debates. However, not all parts of society are equally reached by traditional science communication. In particular young people, especially without academic background, are often left out. The cooperation of science communicators with influencers on the video platform YouTube can be a way to convey scientific information and raise awareness for environmental issues with new young audiences. This case study looks at three videos from the campaign #EarthOvershootDay on YouTube by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) Germany and the educational initiative MESH Collective. The focus of the analysis lies on the established success factors of communication through influencers—specifically authenticity, comprehensibility and storytelling—and how they play out in detail in the three exemplary videos. Besides the analysis of the videos, the study is corroborated by interviews with the producers and a comment analysis in order to include the perspective of the viewers. Our analysis confirms previous findings on science communication with influencers and illustrates the practical implementation of these findings. It shows that authenticity is a central aspect which is not disturbed through the presentation of scientific content. The storytelling approaches are tailored to the respective influencer and their style. The language and structure of the videos are simple and comprehensible, scientific arguments focus on selected aspects and are tied to examples from everyday life. The comments by the users support these findings with the majority of comments addressing the three aspects of our analysis being positive. However, evidence for an in-depth engagement with the scientific contents could not be found in the comments. The stated goal of the campaign to reach educationally disadvantaged young people was only reached to a limited degree according to the assessment of the producers. Additionally, the views of two of the three videos remained below the average for the respective channel. Taken together this indicates that cooperation with influencers might not be an “all-purpose tool” guaranteeing success for science communication.
Highlights
Scientific issues lie at the core of many current societal and political debates (Weingart, 2011)—probably most prominently in recent years climate change
In accordance with the results of previous studies (Breuer, 2012, 105 f.), this analysis corroborates the finding that authenticity plays a central role in the presentation of science web videos, especially when established YouTubers are presenting scientific content that is not part of their regular repertoire
The YouTubers of the three analyzed videos of the case study have selected their topics in a cooperative approach with the team and thereby presumably were able to select aspects according to their authentic interest
Summary
Scientific issues lie at the core of many current societal and political debates (Weingart, 2011)—probably most prominently in recent years climate change. Not all parts of society are reached by traditional science communication formats (Schrögel et al, 2018; Humm et al, 2020). One of these groups are children and young people. While there has been much talk about the darker sides of YouTube—such as the spreading of conspiracy myths or climate change denialism (Basch et al, 2017; Hussain et al, 2018; Paolillo, 2018; Allgaier, 2019; Ekram et al, 2019)—this article sheds some light on a brighter side of the video platform: the potential of YouTube as a tool for science communication to reach and engage young people
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