Masks don’t work but you should get one: Circulation of the science of masking during the COVID-19 pandemic

Bogomoletc, Ekaterina, Andrew Binder & Jean Goodwin. (2021). Masks don’t work but you should get one: Circulation of the science of masking during the COVID-19 pandemic. In D.M. Berube (Ed.), Pandemic Communication and Resilience (Risk, Systems and Decisions). Springer/Nature.

The Covid-19 pandemic quickly increased public demand for scientific information, thus providing a stress test that can reveal whether, and how, the science communication environment is able to meet those demands. The topic of mask use by the general public emerged as particularly fraught. Informed by the intermediate agenda setting theory, framing theory, and research on flows of information, our chapter examines how scientific information about masks was disseminated and interpreted by the mainstream media and Twitter users during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study revealed that neither news media nor Twitter were securely in the lead when it comes to disseminating scientific articles. The analysis also demonstrated that both mainstream media and Twitter users cited the same scholarly articles in support of opposite positions regarding masks, and that media publications were more likely to communicate the uncertainty of the science than Twitter posts.