Análise da confiabilidade e credibilidade de afirmações sobre o aquecimento global nas mídias sociais por licenciandos em Física

Abstract

In this work, we carried out a teaching episode that had as main objective to provide a holistic view on how science constructs knowledge and publishes through the media scientific (mis)information about Global Warming. The activity was developed with Physics undergraduate students of a Federal Institution of Higher Education in the State of São Paulo. In these activities, we sought to answer the following research questions: How are constructed the production of meaning of undergraduates about the analysis of reliability and credibility of scientific news about global warming broadcasted in social media? What is the role played by consensus, credibility, expertise, credentials and conflicts of interest as criteria to judge the reliability and credibility of information about Global Warming in the video used in the proposed activities? The information was collected through questionnaires and recordings of the discussions that took place during the classes that were conducted on the Google Meet platform. The analysis of the information was based on notions of Discourse Analysis (DA) from the French Pecheutian school, mainly through the texts produced and published in Brazil by the researcher Eni Orlandi. In this perspective of DA, we seek to understand how students constructed their discourses, observing the influence of historicity, discursive memory, and the historical and immediate conditions of production in the production of meanings. The analysis of the students' speeches suggests that, for them, a scientific statement conveyed by the media is reliable when it presents evidence and data that support it. Moreover, in relation to the theme of global warming, although there is already a consensus about its causes, the undergraduates consider that it is important to present both sides, anthropogenic causes versus natural causes, when it comes to disseminating the theme in the media. We also noticed that criteria such as expertise, credibility and possible conflicts of interest of those who talk about global warming in the media were timidly used by the undergraduates when judging the reliability and credibility of the statements presented in the videos used in our research.