November 29th, 2016 | RESEARCH
Social media is increasingly being used by science communicators, journalists and government agencies to engage in discourse with a range of publics. Despite a growing body of literature on Twitter use, the communication of science via Twitter is comparatively under explored. This paper examines the prominence of scientific issues in political debate occurring on Twitter during the 2013 and 2016 Australian federal election campaigns. Hashtracking of the umbrella political hashtag auspol was used to capture tweets during the two campaign periods. The 2013 campaign was particularly relevant as a major issue for both parties was climate change mitigation, a controversial and partisan issue. Therefore, climate change discussion on Twitter during the 2013 election was used as a focal case study in this research. Subsamples of the 2013 data were used to identify public sentiment and major contributors to the online conversation, specifically seeking to see if scientific, governmental, media or ‘public' sources were the more dominant instigators. We compare the prominence of issues on Twitter to mainstream media polls over the two campaign periods and argue that the potential of Twitter as an effective public engagement tool for science, and for politicised scientific issues in particular, is not being realised.
Document
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Team Members
Merryn McKinnon, Author, Australian National UniversityDavid Semmens, Author, University of Melbourne
Brenda Moon, Author, QUT Digital Media Research Centre
Inoka Amaraseka, Author, Australian National University
Lea Bolliet, Author, Australian National University
Citation
Identifier Type: ISSN
Identifier: 1824-2049
Publication: Journal of Science Communication
Volume: 15
Number: 6
Related URLs
Tags
Audience: Administration | Leadership | Policymakers | General Public | Scientists
Discipline: Climate | History | policy | law
Resource Type: Peer-reviewed article | Research Products
Environment Type: Media and Technology | Websites | Mobile Apps | Online Media