University science journalism: practice on social media platforms during the pandemic

The study focused on how Brazilian public universities acted in the dissemination of scientific knowledge, through the practice of scientific journalism on social media platforms, during the Covid-19 pandemic. In the context of the dissemination of disinformative content, the research analyzed the content of scientific journalism on health, published by the ten selected universities, between March 11, 2020 and May 5, 2023. The corpus gathered 2,615 publications from 20 accounts, corresponding to ten Instagram profiles and ten Facebook fanpages of the universities. The analysis adopted a mixed-methods approach, articulating content analysis, netnography, Social Network Analysis, Set Theory. The results showed that the scientific journalism of the universities was guided by the contextualization, institutional validation and presentation of evidence in the epistemological dispute for the production of meanings in the face of the dissemination of disinformation in the platformized environments.