I’m very pleased to have received funding from the NWO (Dutch Science Council) to embark on a new project called Mediated Science. A summary of the project can be found below. Over the coming five year, this (Vidi) grant will allow me to build a small research team around this research theme and dedicate some of my time to a research area I’m passionate about.
Mediated Science: Expanding How We Study Social Media’s Influence on Climate Disinformation
“This project investigates how social media platforms transform the communication of scientific knowledge about climate change. Media and communication research on climate change has long studied social media content and its reception by users, but has paid insufficient attention to social media platforms themselves as powerful societal actors. Today’s platforms are actors with a complex stake in shaping knowledge about climate change, with recent changes reflecting alarming alignment
between some major platform companies and climate denialist politics. Examining platforms’ own influence on climate science communication and dis-/misinformation is therefore crucial.
Mediated Science innovates on previous, content-based analyses by shining the spotlight on some of the world’s most powerful social media platforms. We examine how these platforms intervene to mediate the process through which science about climate change and sustainability becomes available to social media end-users. Hence, we will: ethnographically study how platform affordances shape science communication about climate/sustainability in practice (Subproject 1), conduct historiographic policy analysis and structured interviewing to establish the value that major social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and X give climate scientific
knowledge (Subproject 2), and link local case-study sites to international platform phenomena in a synthesis that will generate a conceptual and methodological framework for future research tracking these developments. (Subproject 3). In doing this, the project will meet an important twofold challenge: grasping the multiple dimensions of platform power over scientific knowledge on climate change, while enabling study of the fast-paced changes in platforms’ positions. This will produce:
1) The first integrated analysis of social media platforms’ epistemic power over climate science as it becomes platform content.
2) A novel method for analysing platforms’ influence on a publicly contested
issue involving interdisciplinary scientific knowledge.
3) A theory of platform mediation that explains how social media not only
transmit but also transform and constitute knowledge.”
Donya Alinejad 