Paper short abstract:

Drawing on a comparison between Twitter citizen science in Japan and the hydroxychloroquine controversy, along with ethnographic data collection in a Japanese bioscience laboratory in Tokyo, this paper will explore virtual disruptions to scientific truth-making in the time of a pandemic.

Paper long abstract:

Typically, science moves through well-worn channels of competence building, data collection and peer reviewed publication in scientific journals. Online formats such as Twitter, along with blogs, and even preprint servers, however, are circumventing these more established tracks of scientific communication and production. During the COVID-19 outbreak, discussions on Twitter in particular reflected changing modes of discourse about scientific practice, and biological and epidemiological discoveries, as well as public engagement with the facts of science. These were heightened by a public health emergency in which scientists had a privileged position to create and substantiate knowledge that would guide global policy decisions and shape daily human behavior around the world.

But as amateurs began doing and distributing science more visibly, and discrete datasets circulated with ever increasing speed online, scientists debated the disruption of entrenched methods for fixing quality, consensus and truth in full view of, and in conversation with, the public sphere. Even so, this process of disruption was shaped by established disciplinary networks, just as it was largely contained in linguistic, national and disciplinary communities. What then do these online contentions tell us about the taken-for-granted practice of science? What might they reveal about the possibility for a more interconnected public and global science in the future? Drawing on a comparison between Twitter epidemiological citizen science in Japan and the hydroxychloroquine controversy, along with ethnographic data collection in a Japanese bioscience laboratory in Tokyo, this paper will explore virtual disruptions to scientific truth-making in the time of a pandemic.