Abstract Crises are a moment of high information scarcity contrasted by an immense information need. This study examines the potential of scientists as sense-giving actors on social media, exploring the ethical and strategic challenges they face. To this end, 16 semi-structured interviews have been conducted with German and US experts from the fields of science communication, crisis communication, information systems, and science journalism. A qualitative content analysis highlighted ten major challenges: Content preparation, dealing with the public, knowledge gap of society, lack of incentives and resources, attention, time pressure, trust and credibility, politicization and conflicts of interest, technical limitations, and lack of (social media) communication skills. In the second part of the study, requirements and responsibilities for an improvement of scientific communication on social media have been derived for multiple actors, including academia, journalism, politics, social media operators, and individual users, which are presented in a model.
Jung et al. (Sat,) studied this question.