Public construction of evidence: Rethinking scientific evidence in social media environments

Abstract

This essay proposes a conceptual framework that reconceptualizes scientific evidence as a process of public construction in contemporary media environments. In social media contexts, scientists, journalists, influencers, NGOs, lay publics and AI agents participate in the circulation and interpretation of evidential claims. The essay’s contribution is to explain how evidential status itself is publicly assembled, circulated, internalized, and fed back into further communication. We distinguish two analytically coupled layers of this process: amalgamated evidence , the publicly visible circulation and recombination of claims across posts, comments and shares, and internalized evidence , the individual representations through which users interpret and evaluate these claims. Their reciprocal “circle of evidence” is driven by three recurring communicative behaviours—consumption, participation and generation—and shaped by platform logics that amplify, recontextualize and remix information. Under these conditions, evidential status emerges from communicative interaction rather than solely from scientific procedures, creating potential divergences between scientific records and what publics perceive as evidence. By conceptualizing evidencing as a socio-technical and communicative process, the framework aims to stimulate debate and outlines a research agenda for examining how public circulation and individual internalization mutually shape the authority of science in digital media environments.