YouTube doctors confronting COVID-19: Scientific–medical dissemination on YouTube during the outbreak of the coronavirus crisis

Abstract

The coronavirus crisis has highlighted the consumption of social media and online video platforms in search of an alternative discourse to that provided by traditional media. The objective of this article is to find an approach to education and scientific dissemination on COVID-19 present in the Spanish context of YouTube, focusing on the content analysis of audiovisual texts generated by creators from the medical and biomedical fields. A methodological orientation was used for this based on the Grounded Theory, which was applied to five case studies whose informative material on SARS-CoV-2 exceeded ten million views as of March 2021. The results reveal the existence of a group of medical professionals in the Spanish YouTube sphere who, since the COVID-19 outbreak, have been involved in the construction of an alternative discourse around the health crisis and its evolution that pursues a high standard of audiovisual quality, scientific rigor, and educational ability.