Science is losing the room. Winning it back isn’t about going viral
Science is losing the room. Winning it back isn’t about going viral
The future of science communication is not louder. It is clearer, more useful, and built on trust.
At the 2025 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the opening session turned into a call and response. “Who eradicated smallpox?” “Science!” “Memory foam?” “Science!” Thousands of researchers, rallying to stand up for their work. It is genuinely moving to watch. It also raises a quieter question the field has circled for years: does rallying like this actually change anyone’s mind?
A few weeks ago, Nature argued that researchers must follow their audiences onto social media and short video or lose them. The audience really has moved. But the more useful question is not which platform to post on. It is what science communication is actually for.
The audience has already moved
The numbers are blunt. Younger readers now meet the news inside short, visual, algorithm-sorted feeds, and they tend to trust individual creators over institutions. At the same time, the old way of being found, ranking on Google and waiting for the clicks, is fading as people ask an AI chatbot instead.
Sources: Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025; VoxDev (O. Hanney, 2026).
When no one credible shows up, the gap fills itself
This would matter less if the feed were trustworthy. Often it is not. In a study in JAMA Network Open, Brooke Nickel and colleagues examined nearly 1,000 posts about five medical screening tests, posts that together reached about 200 million followers. Almost all sold the upside. Very few mentioned the harms, most cited no evidence, and many promoters stood to gain financially.
How posts about medical screening tests described them. Source: Nickel et al., JAMA Network Open, 2025.
A related study by Ricardo Morais and Clara Fernandes found that science videos on TikTok often fail to credit their sources, leaving viewers no easy way to check a claim. When the expert is not in the room, the seat does not stay empty. It's filled with someone confident, well-lit, and often selling something.
Showing up is not the same as lecturing
So the instinct to stand up and set the record straight is understandable. The trouble is that it often does not work and can even make things worse.
A recent commentary in the Journal of Science Communication by Anne Toomey and Kevin Elliott gathers the evidence. Facts alone rarely change minds, and messaging aimed at skeptics can backfire. One 2024 study even found that warning banners on misinformation reduced trust in accurate claims as well as false ones. Skepticism is frequently not about the science at all. It is about values. Someone wary of a new technology may understand the evidence perfectly well and still weigh the trade-offs differently. The scoreboard is sobering: despite years of corrective campaigns, the United States recently saw its highest number of measles cases in more than three decades.
From persuading people to empowering them
Toomey and Elliott propose a different goal. Rather than winning an argument, science communication should aim for scientific empowerment, giving people the ability and agency to use science in their own lives. None of it depends on persuading anyone of a fixed conclusion. It depends on welcoming questions instead of treating them as problems to be corrected.
Three dimensions of scientific empowerment. Framework adapted from Toomey & Elliott, JCOM 2026.
Something as simple as “sidewalk science,” where researchers set up in the street for open conversations, often does more for trust than a polished rebuttal ever could.
The medium can change. The craft cannot.
There is a risk hiding in all this. “Go where the audience is” can quietly become “cut every corner to fit the format.” That is the wrong lesson.
The biologist Ran Blekhman makes the case that writing is not the chore at the end of a project; it is the thinking itself. Forcing a fuzzy idea into a clear sentence is how you learn whether it holds up. He notes an analysis of more than 700,000 abstracts showing that the readability of scientific writing has declined for over a century. Clarity, in other words, is the rarest skill in the room and the one most worth protecting. The same caution applies to AI: lean on it to polish and check, but if you let it do the thinking, you have skipped the part that mattered. What survives, as content floods every channel, is the work a machine cannot cheaply fake: real curation, honest long-form writing, people on camera, and accurate, beautiful data visualization.
What good looks like in practice
For readers in Norway and the wider Nordics, none of this is exotic. The instinct here already leans toward clean design, plain language, and letting good data speak. A handful of habits carry most of the weight.
Five habits that bring rigor to reach.
One more belongs on the list: the screen is not the only room. Across Europe, interest in live talks and open discussion is growing again, and a conversation in person still does something a feed cannot.
Why this is where Formidla begins
Formidla exists for this moment. The name comes from the Norwegian word formidle, to convey, to communicate, and to pass knowledge on. My own background is in soil science, so I know how many careful hours sit behind a single figure in a paper and how easily that work disappears once it leaves the journal.
The shift nature describes is real, but the answer is not to be louder or more viral. It is to be clearer, more useful, and more generous with people’s questions. Researchers should not have to choose between being rigorous and being understood. Good science communication makes those the same choice and leaves people not just informed but able to use what science offers.
If you have research that deserves a wider audience, that is the problem we love to solve. Let’s talk.
Sources
• Editorial: “Scientists in the future will not read articles like this.” Nature 654, 8 (4 June 2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01723-1
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Digital News Report 2025. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2025
• Nickel, B. et al. JAMA Network Open 8, e2461940 (2025). https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2830758
• Morais, R. & Fernandes, C. E. Journal of Science Communication 25, A03 (2026). https://jcom.sissa.it/
• Toomey, A. & Elliott, K. C. Does science communication have its goals wrong? JCOM 25(1), C07 (2026). https://jcom.sissa.it/article/pubid/JCOM_2501_2026_C07/
• Williams-Ceci, S. et al. Scientific Reports 14, 10977 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-61645-8
• Hanney, O. The future of communicating science (2026). https://olihanney.substack.com/p/the-future-of-communicating-science
• Blekhman, R. Just start writing (2026). https://blekhman.substack.com/p/just-start-writing
• Plavén-Sigray, P. et al. eLife 6, e27725 (2017). https://elifesciences.org/articles/27725
• ALLEA & Wissenschaft im Dialog. Future of Science Communication. https://allea.org/future-of-science-communication/