The Relevance of Scientific Dissemination during the Vaccine Campaign: The Italian Virologist Communication on Social Media

The scientist role has progressively gained an essential relevance during the2020 pandemic. In fact, the virologists’ exposition turned out to be fundamentalfor the public opinion, both for the well-informed and people unaware abouthealth, transmission, infection and, today, vaccination programs. This paperaims to first set an explorative investigation about the social communicationpractices during the first three months of the vaccine campaign addressed onsocial media by Italy’s most established virologists. The arising digital scenarioand the resultant pervasive presence in our daily life of web platforms, such associal media, has revolutionized the nexus between science and society. Morescholars argued about the disintermediated current shape of science communicationthat directly connects scientists and the larger public, driving the sociologicaldebate towards the analysis of the current processes of sense-makingconstruction. On this assumption, we aim to answer the research question abouthow Italian scientists communicate and approach the larger public on socialmedia. Therefore, the empirical part of this paper consists of a data collectionphase conducted on Facebook and Twitter. The collected data have beenanalyzed by a content analysis oriented to identify the contradictory oruniformity of disintermediated communication features of the observed socialmedia profiles in order to push and follow, during the ongoing vaccine dosingprogram, a proactive reflection about the key role of scientific dissemination ofinformation (PDF) The Relevance of Scientific Dissemination during the Vaccine Campaign: The Italian Virologist Communication on Social Media. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366672930_The_Relevance_of_Scientific_Dissemination_during_the_Vaccine_Campaign_The_Italian_Virologist_Communication_on_Social_Media [accessed Apr 28 2023].