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 the 2020 pandemic. In fact, the virologists’ exposition turned out to be fundamental for the public opinion, both for the well-informed and people unaware about health, transmission, infection and, today, vaccination programs. This paper aims to first set an explorative investigation about the social communication practices during the first three months of the vaccine campaign addressed on social media by Italy’s most established virologists. The arising digital scenario and the resultant pervasive presence in our daily life of web platforms, such as social media, has revolutionized the nexus between science and society. More scholars argued about the disintermediated current shape of science communication that directly connects scientists and the larger public, driving the sociological debate towards the analysis of the current processes of sense-making construction. On this assumption, we aim to answer the research question about how Italian scientists communicate and approach the larger public on social media. Therefore, the empirical part of this paper consists of a data collection phase conducted on Facebook and Twitter. The collected data have been analyzed by a content analysis oriented to identify the contradictory or uniformity of disintermediated communication features of the observed social media profiles in order to push and follow, during the ongoing vaccine dosing program, a proactive reflection about the key role of scientific dissemination of information. Keywords: communication of science, scientists’ visibility, social media communication, content analysis, topic modelling