I've been working in science communication since 2006. In that time I've collaborated with over 14,000 academics, built brands across magazines, podcasts, video and animation, and helped generate more than half a billion social media impressions for the researchers I've worked with.
And I can tell you this: public trust in science is in worse shape now than at any point in the last two decades.
I know that sounds dramatic. We've got more tools, more platforms, more ways to reach people than ever before. But the gap between what scientists know and what the public believes keeps widening. Something is fundamentally broken.
Three Forces That Are Making It Worse
It isn't a shortage of good research. The science exists. The expertise exists. What's missing is a credible route from the lab bench to the general public.
That void has been filled by three things, and none of them are helping.
First: AI-generated content.
The internet is flooded with shallow, often inaccurate science summaries churned out by language models that don't understand the source material. They look polished. They read well. And they're frequently wrong in ways a non-specialist can't spot. The sheer volume of this stuff is drowning out the real thing.
Second: governments and institutions treating science communication as a political instrument.
I've watched it happen over and over. Data gets cherry-picked. Findings get reframed to support policy positions that were decided before the evidence was even collected. People aren't stupid. They can sense when they're being managed rather than informed, and it corrodes trust in everything that follows. Including the legitimate science.
Third: social media algorithms that reward engagement over accuracy.
The algorithm doesn't care whether something is true. It cares whether it gets clicks. Pseudoscience wrapped in a slick Instagram carousel will outperform a peer-reviewed study shared by a university press office every single time. Not because the pseudoscience is better. Because it was designed for the platform. Most scientific institutions haven't got a clue how to compete in that environment. Most of them aren't even trying.
The People With the Least Expertise Have the Loudest Platforms
This goes deeper than communication. It's an authority problem.
The researchers who spend years gathering evidence and subjecting it to rigorous peer review are almost never the ones telling their own story. That job gets outsourced to press officers, journalists, politicians, and now AI chatbots. Each one introduces their own distortions.
When a government minister misrepresents a dataset on breakfast television, there's no mechanism for the scientist who produced that data to correct the record at the same scale. When an AI chatbot confidently delivers a half-truth about vaccine safety, the original researcher has no way to intervene. The public ends up making decisions based on third-hand interpretations that the scientists themselves would barely recognise.
That's the crisis. The people with the most expertise are essentially invisible to the general public. The people with the least expertise have the biggest megaphones.
Why I Built Scrolly Science
Scrolly Science isn't a design agency that makes science look pretty. It isn't a PR firm that rewrites research into press releases. We exist to do something that almost nobody else in this industry does properly: put the scientist back at the centre of their own story, and then make sure that story actually gets seen.
We work directly with researchers to create content in their voice. Not a sanitised, corporate-friendly version. Their actual voice, with their actual expertise, their opinions, and the nuance that makes real science valuable. We do this across video, animation, audio, interactive content and editorial.
But here's the part most agencies get wrong, and it's the thing I feel most strongly about after nearly two decades in this work. Creating great content is only half the job. The other half, the half almost everyone ignores, is getting it seen.
A university will spend thousands on a beautifully produced video and then post it to their YouTube channel with 300 subscribers. I'm sorry, but that isn't dissemination. That's decoration.
We actively promote the content we create across all major social media platforms. We don't hand researchers a finished product and wish them luck. We run the campaigns. We manage the channels. We get the work in front of real audiences. That's how we've generated over half a billion impressions for the scientists we serve. Not through tricks or paid hype. Through sustained, strategic, platform-native promotion of real science told by real scientists.
Why This Matters More Now Than It Ever Has
The information environment is getting noisier by the month. AI content is accelerating. Political manipulation of science isn't slowing down. Algorithms aren't going to start prioritising accuracy over engagement any time soon. Every trend making science communication harder is intensifying.
If the scientific community doesn't learn to communicate with the same sophistication that misinformation operators already use, the gap between evidence and public belief will keep growing. That's not abstract. It affects public health decisions, climate policy, food safety, technology regulation, and dozens of other areas where the public deserves access to trustworthy information from the people who actually produced it.
This isn't a problem you solve by hiring one more social media officer or adding a 'public engagement' checkbox to grant applications. It requires dedicated, specialist infrastructure built by people who understand both the science and the communication.
That's what Scrolly Science does. Strategy, creation, dissemination, impact. All integrated, all informed by deep experience. The scientific community has the expertise. It has the evidence. What it needs are partners who know how to get that expertise to the people who need it, without distorting it along the way.