"What a waste of taxpayer money!": Why are people so angry on science social media?
Comment sections on social media tend to be emotional places – and our Science at ANU Facebook page is no exception.
I have spent the past year moderating comments on this page, watching on as our followers delight in research about shooting space junk with lasers, despair over climate change warnings, and debate whether magpies are actually mean.
But there’s one emotion which comes up time and time again: anger at how taxpayer dollars are being “wasted” on our researchers.
I wanted to know more about the motivation behind this emotion. Is it just a misunderstanding about how science is funded in Australia? Or is there something deeper going on?
Dr Merryn McKinnon is a researcher at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science at ANU, where she explores the relationships between science, the media and different groups of people.
She suggests that one reason for the disgruntled comments might be the tendency for people to value applied research with a real-world purpose, over basic research, which doesn’t have an immediate practical application. It’s about knowing for the sake of knowing.
But there is still value in that, Dr McKinnon says.
“You never know when that understanding could actually become this pivotal piece of information we need in the future.”