Science Communication Under Post-Truth Conditions: The Drowning Effect in a YouTube Live Micro-Public

Abstract

Post-truth conditions describe communication environments in which facts alone rarely stabilise public interpretations; judgments are shaped by affect, group identity, and ideological alignment. In such environments, science communication becomes more difficult because trust is continuously renegotiated and discussions are vulnerable to topic displacement. Lee et al. (2020) term this displacement the drowning effect, in which the primary message is pushed aside as attention shifts to more salient adjacent frames. Research on science communication under post-truth conditions has rarely examined live, platformised broadcasts, where audience re-framing is coupled to the broadcast and can be observed as it unfolds. YouTube Live is analytically valuable because it combines an authoritative narrative with a real-time comment ecosystem, enabling to track when and how audience frames diverge from communicator frames within a single event. We use a comparative single-case qualitative design and apply qualitative content analysis to a 4-hour-and-37-minute YouTube Live watch-party about Türkiye’s first crewed space mission (18 January 2024), hosted by ten Turkish science communicators. We analyse the broadcast transcript and the associated user comments (including replies). We operationalise the drowning effect through (a) systematic divergence between broadcast framing and commenters’ framing and (b) a high prevalence of off-context, opinion-dominant, and polarising contributions. Findings indicate sustained divergence between broadcast framing and the commenters’ framing: while the broadcast foregrounded scientific rationale and mission operations, commenters frequently recontextualised the event through legitimacy contestation, distrust, and interactional noise. Overall, the conversation moved away from sustained technical engagement and toward audience-led reframing, in ways consistent with a drowning effect. Findings suggests that on YouTube Live, the commenters can quickly take over and pull attention away from the science message, so science communicators need to treat live streams as two-layer events and plan framing, moderation, and trust-building accordingly.