"Here's Your Evidence": False Consensus in Public Twitter Discussions of COVID-19 Science
CoRR(2024)
摘要
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about an extraordinary rate of scientific
papers on the topic that were discussed among the general public, although
often in biased or misinformed ways. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods
analysis aimed at examining whether public discussions were commensurate with
the scientific consensus on several COVID-19 issues. We estimate scientific
consensus based on samples of abstracts from preprint servers and compare
against the volume of public discussions on Twitter mentioning these papers. We
find that anti-consensus posts and users, though overall less numerous than
pro-consensus ones, are vastly over-represented on Twitter, thus producing a
false consensus effect. This transpires with favorable papers being
disproportionately amplified, along with an influx of new anti-consensus user
sign-ups. Finally, our content analysis highlights that anti-consensus users
misrepresent scientific findings or question scientists' integrity in their
efforts to substantiate their claims.
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