Fact-Checking and Verification in Platformized Science Communication

Science communication is undergoing an unprecedented process of platformization, spanning search engines, social media, Q&A communities, and, more recently, AI-mediated platforms. These decentralized infrastructures have enriched science communication by empowering content creators, enabling more direct scientist–public interaction, diversifying access to scientific information, and potentially democratizing the practice. At the same time, they have also intensified polarization, facilitated conspiracy narratives, and accelerated the circulation of misleading or false scientific claims. In this environment, the verification of scientific claims has become increasingly distributed across actors, platforms, and technological systems. Professional fact-checking by journalists, scientists, and specialized organizations now coexists with individuals’ self-directed verification, peer-to-peer correction within online communities, and AI-assisted verification through search engines, conversational agents, and generative AI systems. This distributed verification has become a critical ‘last mile’ of contemporary science communication, yet its practices, infrastructures, and consequences remain insufficiently understood.Research on scientific misinformation has shown that corrective interventions can reduce false beliefs, although their effectiveness varies according to source credibility, message design, prior beliefs, digital literacy, and platform context. Yet platformization is transforming verification from a discrete corrective intervention into a distributed communicative process involving professional fact-checkers, individual users, online communities, platform infrastructures, and AI systems. This Research Topic seeks to understand how these actors and practices interact across platforms and cultural contexts. Particular attention will be paid to how epistemic authority is distributed among experts, trusted intermediaries, peers, platforms, AI systems, and diverse knowledge communities during digital scientific fact-checking process; how trust shapes the acceptance or rejection of corrective information; and how verification operates when scientific evidence is evolving, probabilistic, contested, or characterized by legitimate uncertainty. The Topic welcomes quantitative, qualitative, computational, comparative, and mixed-method approaches.This Research Topic welcomes contributions from researchers and practitioners worldwide, with particular attention to the Global South and other underrepresented contexts. Digital scientific fact-checking practices are shaped not only by media systems and technological infrastructures, but also by culturally and institutionally specific configurations of trust, expertise, epistemic authority, and access to knowledge. We encourage research that moves beyond Western, platform-specific, and institution-centered models of fact-checking and examines locally situated verification practices and plural knowledge systems.Key thematic areas include, but are not limited to:• forms of and actors in scientific verification, including professional fact-checking, individual self-verification, peer correction, and AI-assisted verification, as well as their conceptual boundaries and distinctive communicative functions• platformization and fact-checking infrastructures, including how search engines, social media, online communities, scientific databases, open-science resources, and generative AI shape cross-platform fact-checking practices and information-seeking strategies• trust, expertise, and scientific uncertainty, including competing forms of epistemic authority, source credibility, institutional trust, and the verification and communication of evolving, probabilistic, or legitimately contested scientific evidence• trusted intermediaries and plural knowledge systems, particularly in the Global South and other underrepresented contexts, including interactions among institutional science, local expertise, experiential knowledge, indigenous knowledge, and community-based knowledge• contexts, audiences, and consequences of scientific fact-checking, including differences across scientific domains, controversial and non-controversial issues, cultural contexts, and audience groups, as well as post-verification behaviors such as sharing, correction, endorsement, rejection, and further information seeking• other theoretical, empirical, methodological, or comparative studies related to user-centered fact-checking in platformized science communication.Information and Instructions for AuthorsManuscript summaries (Frontiers' name for abstracts) of up to 500 words will be considered until 30 January 2027. Authors are strongly encouraged to submit a manuscript summary before submitting a full manuscript. Topic editors: Zheng Yang, Chen Luo Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85908/fact-checking-and-verification-in-platformized-science-communication