The platforms aim at providing citizens with a participatory science-based tool that can help them distinguish science-based statements and hoaxes about gender and/or education. The egalitarian dialogue on which they are based helps overcome the dichotomy between top-down and bottom-up approaches to citizen engagement in science. On the one hand, top-down approaches imply that researchers decide on their own what kind of evidence citizens need. On the other hand, promoting bottom-up actions that do not consider the scientific evidence might lead to populism. Citizen engagement needs to be tackled through co-creation, in which scientists provide scientific evidence of social impact and citizens provide their own perspectives and experiences.
The platforms contain these categories: Scientific evidence, Hoax, Needs more evidence, Scientific controversy, and Under review. Depending on the number of scientific evidence provided to support different statements, the posts will be categorized into one of the 5 categories. To be categorized as Scientific evidence, a post needs to include at least 3 scientific articles published in journals indexed in JCR or Scopus.
