The Role of Epistemic Drift in Online Civic Discourse about Science

Our societies are experiencing an epistemic drift, that is a changing understanding of what it means to be “honest” and how to arrive at “truth”. This drift has increasingly replaced reliance on evidence and facts during truth-seeking with reliance on beliefs, feelings, and intuitions alone. This is especially important in civic discourse about science, which by its very nature relies on evidence over intuition and feelings. We posit that the role of epistemic drift in civic discourse about science is observable in online discussions and can be analyzed through their digital traces. Building on observational and experimental work, we propose a model in which epistemic drift fuels low-quality information sharing through its interplay with emotions. In this view, epistemic drift also drives online toxicity, which creates apparent polarization and erodes the quality of online civic discourse on scientific topics like health and climate change.