Quando a divulgação científica é feita às avessas: negacionismo científico e pseudociência por meio do YouTube.

Abstract

Currently, with the use of digital information and communication technologies (TDIC), information circulates easily and quickly. However, the ease of dissemination of knowledge also allows misinformation and false claims about science to be spread. More broadly, we can understand these contents as being pseudoscientific, denialist or even Fake News of a scientific nature, and all of them bring negative contributions to the development, understanding and knowledge of science. This research sought to understand, from the analysis of videos on the YouTube platform, how these themes are presented, what discourse they use and what audience reach they have. The research was divided into two interrelated stages. In the first, we carried out a survey of academic works on the subject in the journal portal CAPES, in a cut of the last 5 years (2017 to 2021), in order to better understand how research has approached the subject. This search provided the formation of a database, resulting in 32 selected works, which guided the second stage of the research, that is, the search for videos on YouTube. of which 24 were selected for analysis, as the theme of these videos was related to the central themes of this research. Thus, the research is of a double nature, qualitative and quantitative, based on an exploratory study bias. The materials constructed in the research were organized and analyzed based on content analysis. As a result, we could observe that the videos are more argumentative, both to challenge pseudoscience or denialism, and to support nonscience. While academic works are concerned with describing the terms pseudoscience and denialism they use, videos rarely present these descriptions. It is also interesting to point out that many videos are presented by non-specialists, showing the space they have in the publicization of non-science. If themes are presented in critical videos, then they are accompanied by the appropriate sources. These results with critical positions are positive for science, indicating that scientific dissemination remains firm, although the dissemination of science to the contrary, which supports non-science, is still expressive on YouTube.