Abstract
The growing importance of social media for getting science news has raised questions about whether these online platforms foster or hinder public trust in science. Employing multilevel modeling, this study leverages a 20-country survey to examine the relationship between social media news use and trust in science. Results show a positive relationship between these variables across countries. Moreover, the between-country variation in this relationship is related to two cultural characteristics of a country, individualism/collectivism and power distance.
Highlights
Nowadays, the public increasingly gets science news online, via social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube (Brossard, 2013)
Social media news use is more strongly related to trust in science than traditional news use
Social media expand and diversity information networks (e.g. Bakshy et al, 2015), promote engagement with news posted by trusted social contacts (e.g. Media Insight Project, 2017), and provide direct access to science news posted by scientists and universities (e.g. Collins et al, 2016; Darling et al, 2013)
Summary
The public increasingly gets science news online, via social media such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube (Brossard, 2013). Social media are used to share new scientific insights but Public Understanding of Science 28(7). Scholars have only just begun to explore the wide range of online formats and platforms used for science communication (Davies and Hara, 2017), and few studies to date have examined social media from a cross-national perspective. Our study fills this gap in the literature by testing the relationship between social media news use and public trust in science in 20 countries worldwide. Specific types of scientific research could be limited if people think that money invested in it is unnecessary or wasteful (Huber et al, 2019)
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