6533b7d1fe1ef96bd125cd4f

RESEARCH PRODUCT

A Twitter campaign against pseudoscience: The sceptical discourse on complementary therapies in Spain

Lorena Cano-orón

subject

Communicationmedia_common.quotation_subject05 social sciencesPseudoscience050801 communication & media studies050905 science studiesEpistemologyPolitics0508 media and communicationsArts and Humanities (miscellaneous)Political scienceDevelopmental and Educational Psychology0509 other social sciencesSkepticismmedia_common

description

The main objective of this article is to analyse the sceptical movement’s discourse on complementary therapies in Spain, as well as comprehend its mobilisation against these therapies. Over the past 2 years, the Spanish sceptical movement, constituted by citizen’s associations against unconventional therapies and in favour of evidence-based medicine, has increased its activism which, as a result, is now more familiar to the public. To perform this study, three sources of information were selected: (a) the #StopPseudociencias campaign, with a corpus of 6252 tweets; (b) 153 news articles published during the study timeline and (c) 7 interviews with members of the sceptical movement, journalists and politicians. The results of the content and discourse analyses have shown that the sceptical movement occupies a dominant discursive position on Twitter, while the perspective is more balanced in digital dailies.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662519853228