Opinion | What We Pretend to Know About the Coronavirus Could Kill Us - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-fake-news.html
disinformation pandemic propaganda extremism conspiracy theory
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Public health experts like Dr. Emanuel tend to be cautious about predictions and transparent about what they don’t know. In the case of the coronavirus, that can cause a dearth of definitive information — and an opportunity for reckless information that’s partly true but politically skewed.
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The dynamic is on display during the daily White House news conferences, where President Trump’s claims are often hedged or corrected by public health officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
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much of the pernicious false news about the coronavirus operates on the margins of believability — real facts and charts cobbled together to formulate a dangerous, wrongheaded conclusion or news reports that combine a majority of factually accurate reporting with a touch of unproven conjecture.
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The prime example is a Medium blog post titled “Covid-19 — Evidence Over Hysteria” by Aaron Ginn, a Silicon Valley product manager and “growth hacker” who argued against the severity of the virus and condemned the mainstream media for hyping it.
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Conservative pundits, who’d spent weeks downplaying the seriousness of the virus, were drawn to Mr. Ginn’s conclusion that “shuttering the local economy is a distraction and arbitrary with limited accretive gain outside of greatly annoying millions and bankrupting hundreds of businesses.”
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The Fox News political analyst Brit Hume tweeted the post, and then so did the anchors Bret Baier and Laura Ingraham. Within hours, the blog post was amplified across conservative media.
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“I am seeing this playbook more and more,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “Secondhand data showing a crisis narrative that feels just a bit too well crafted. Mixing the truth with the plausible and the plausible with that which seems plausibly true in a week.”
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Epidemiologists disagreed, pointing to some of Mr. Ginn’s assumptions as “unsubstantiated” and ignorant of “first-chapter-of-the-epidemiology-textbook stuff.”
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After a 31-tweet thread from the infectious-disease expert Carl Bergstrom debunking Mr. Ginn’s data as cherry-picked, Medium took the post down, prompting a backlash in conservative spheres. More than two million people had already viewed it.
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Mr. Ginn’s post, which seems informed by his reflexive skepticism of the mainstream media, filled two needs for readers: It offered a scientific-seeming explanation that real scientists would not provide. And it provided a political foil, the media.
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This, according to Dr. Bergstrom, is what makes armchair epidemiology so harmful. Posts like Mr. Ginn’s “deplete the critical resource you need to manage the pandemic, which is trust,
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“When people are getting conflicting messages, it makes it very hard for state and local authorities to generate the political will to take strong actions downstream.”
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At first glance, the piece looked quite convincing. Mr. Ginn drew heavily from charts from the C.D.C., Johns Hopkins and the Financial Times. “You don’t need a special degree to understand what the data says and doesn’t say,” he claimed.
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Dr. Bergstrom argues that the advances in available data make it easier than ever for junk-science peddlers to appear legitimate.
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“Statistical analysis is a black box to most of us,” Dr. Bergstrom said. “And it’s like, ‘I can’t challenge a multilinear statistical regression because I don’t know what that is,’
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“And so a form of authority gets imposed on a reader and we tend not to challenge data the way we’ve learned to challenge words.”
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Mr. Evans is concerned that ultimately important nuance will be lost and pro-Trump pundits will use the news to exclusively scapegoat China and divert blame away from domestic failings. “What’s scary is how smart the false stuff is,” he said.
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Covid-19 and the immediate threat to public health means that networks like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been unusually decisive about taking down misinformation. “In a case of a pandemic like this, when we are seeing posts that are urging people not to get treatment,” Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said recently, “that’s a completely different class of content versus the back-and-forth of what candidates may say about each other.”
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The Trump administration and right-wing media watchdogs will weaponize changing facts about the virus, pointing to them as proof of a deep state bent on damaging the president or a media apparatus trying to swing an election
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What we don’t know about Covid-19 will degenerate into ever more intricate conspiracies — some almost believable, some outrageous but all dangerous.
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“We’re in a stream of ever-evolving data, and it’s being shaped around cognitive biases, partisanship and preferences embedded in our cultural identities,”
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I called Mr. Pomerantsev because the information vacuum around the virus made me think of the title of his earlier book on Russia — “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.
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In the absence of new, vetted information, reckless speculation takes its place, muddling our conception of the truth.
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in crisis situations — especially early on — our desire for information exceeds our ability to accurately deliver it. Add to this the complexities of epidemiology: exponential growth; statistical modeling; and the slow, methodical nature of responsible science.
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Together, they create the ideal conditions for distrust, bad-faith interpretations and political manipulation, the contours of which we’re only beginning to see.
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“The really big question that haunts me is, ‘When do we return to reality?’” Mr. Pomerantsev mused over the phone from his own quarantine. “Or is it that in this partisan age absolutely everything is chopped, cut and edited to fit a different view? I’m waiting for society to finally hit up against a shared reality, like diving into the bottom of swimming pool. Instead we just go deeper.”