100%. We need to stop coming to the wrong conclusions. There are two fundamental questions for me : 1. Do you own your body or does someone else? 2. Is society a natural human state of being or a construct of govt that requires us to “take one for the team” at their behest even if we may be injured in the process?
How their thinking and actions appear to me: I demand you do what I do and make all the same decisions I do, as well. Otherwise I’m not validated and relevant until all fall in line with me. S
The reality is, they’re nothing more than a poiled little b*tches who feel entitled to tell the world how (Self) important they think they are.
When the only evidence that The Science (TM) is based in is the "consensus" (of chosen ideologues) who's only expertise is in soft social and behavioral science, i.e. psychological manipulation, as epidemiological NPI and not the hard natural and medical science that "Skeptics" relied upon to guide their beliefs, actions and pleadings, The Science (TM) will eventually come crashing down.
The leaders of this ongoing catastrophe and their shrill barking dogs in the media and social media never were "following the evidence at the time." They were setting a narrative, participating in psychological manipulation to change behaviors by amplifying fear as pandemic NPI. Scare the bejeezus out of people from socializing with one another and accustom them to sacrificing essential civil liberties. Like only weaponized fear can do.
"Evidence-based" medicine and science today is a synonym for a "consensus of experts." A consensus of hand-picked ideological aligned experts, that is. The consensus of experts at a gathering of collectivist authoritarian Marxists will look a lot different than the consensus of experts at a gathering of individualist liberty Patriots.
In January, 2021 MIT released a study of "Coronavirus Skeptics" seeking to understand the disobedient rubes disseminating dangerous dis- and misinformation. The findings are astonishing. Real, hard, natural and medical science dismissed as unorthodox, thereby wrong. Not that the science was wrong. But that by contradicting the consensus of their experts it was dangerous. Nothing is more dangerous to a top-heavy lie than truth that crashes through the legs it is built upon. When they say they were following The Science (TM) and it's changed so we should get over it they're saying they believed their own lies or willful ignorance.
Enjoy the read, excerpts from the study link below in comments:
Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox
Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 20, 2021
Aug 9, 2022·edited Aug 10, 2022Liked by Mark Changizi
2/2
"Ultimately, anti-mask users emphasize that they need to apply this data to real-world situations....The message that runs through these threads is unequivocal: that data is the only way to set fear-bound politicians straight, and using better data is a surefire way towards creating a safer community.
...
These groups have been incredibly effective at galvanizing a network of engaged citizens towards concrete political action. Local officials have relied on data narratives generated in these groups to call for a lawsuit against the Ohio Department of Health. In Texas, a coalition of mayors, school board members, and city council people investigated the state’s COVID-19 statistics and discovered that a backlog of unaudited tests was distorting the data, prompting Texas officials to employ a forensic data team to investigate the surge in positive test rates.
...
This is a community of practice focused on acquiring and transmitting expertise, and on translating that expertise into concrete political action. Moreover, this is a subculture shaped by mistrust of established authorities and orthodox scientific viewpoints. Its members value individual initiative and ingenuity, trusting scientific analysis only insofar as they can replicate it themselves by accessing and manipulating the data firsthand. They are highly reflexive about the inherently biased nature of any analysis, and resent what they view as the arrogant self-righteousness of scientific elites.
As a subculture, anti-masking amplifies anti-establishment currents pervasive in U.S. political culture. Data literacy, for antimaskers, exemplifies distinctly American ideals of intellectual self-reliance, which historically takes the form of rejecting experts and other elites. The counter-visualizations that they produce and circulate not only challenge scientific consensus, but they also assert the value of independence in a society that they believe promotes an overall de-skilling and dumbing-down of the population for the sake of more effective social control. As they see it, to counter-visualize is to engage in an act of resistance against the stifling influence of central government, big business, and liberal academia. Moreover, their simultaneous appropriation of scientific rhetoric and rejection of scientific authority also reflects longstanding strategies of Christian fundamentalists seeking to challenge the secularist threat of evolutionary biology.
Another point of contention is that of lived experience: in many of these cases, users do not themselves know a person who has experienced COVID, and the statistics they see on the news show the severity of the pandemic in vastly different parts of the country. Since they do not see their experience reflected in the narratives they consume, they look for hyperlocal data to help guide their decision-making. But since many of these datasets do not always exist on such a granular level, this information gap feeds into a larger social narrative about the government’s suppression of critical data and the media’s unwillingness to substantively engage with the subjectivity of coronavirus data reporting.
Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution. As we have outlined in the case study, these groups mistrust the scientific establishment (“Science”) because they believe that the institution has been corrupted by profit motives and politics. The knowledge that the CDC and academics have created cannot be trusted because they need to be subject to increased doubt, and not accepted as consensus. In the same way that climate change skeptics have appealed to Karl Popper’s theory of falsification to show why climate science needs to be subjected to continuous scrutiny in order to be valid, we have found that anti-mask groups point to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to show how their anomalous evidence— once dismissed by the scientific establishment—will pave the way to a new paradigm (“As I’ve recently described, I’m no stranger to presenting data that are inconsistent with the narrative. It can get ugly. People do not give up their paradigms easily. [...] Thomas Kuhn wrote about this phenomenon, which occurs repeatedly throughout history. Now is the time to hunker down. Stand with the data.” For anti-maskers, valid science must be a process they can critically engage for themselves in an unmediated way. Increased doubt, not consensus, is the marker of scientific certitude.
Arguing that anti-maskers simply need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed and inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: users in these communities are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production that they recognize as markers of scientific expertise. If anything, anti-mask science has extended the traditional tools of data analysis by taking up the theoretical mantle of recent critical studies of visualization.
...
In other words, these groups see themselves as engaging deeply within multiple aspects of the scientific process—interrogating the datasets, analysis, and conclusions—and still university researchers might dismiss them in leading journals as “scientifically illiterate.”
In an interview with the Department of Health and Human Services podcast, even Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the US President) noted: “one of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias [...] people are, for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable, they just don’t believe science."
We use Dr. Fauci’s provocation to illustrate how understanding the way that anti-mask groups think about science is crucial to grappling with the contested state of expertise in American democracy.
...
We argue that the anti-maskers’ deep story draws from similar wells of resentment, but adds a particular emphasis on the usurpation of scientific knowledge by a paternalistic, condescending elite that expects intellectual subservience rather than critical thinking from the lay public.
...
While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review, and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist. This study forces us to see that coronavirus skeptics champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy; for them, it is not a body of knowledge certified by an institution of experts.
They are a battleground that highlight the contested role of expertise in modern American life."
"However, despite a preponderance of evidence that masks are crucial to reducing viral transmission protestors across the United States have argued for local governments to overturn their mask mandates and begin reopening schools and businesses. A pandemic that affects a few, they reason, should not impinge on the liberties of a majority to go about life as usual. To support their arguments, these protestors and activists have created thousands of their own visualizations, often using the same datasets as health officials.
This paper investigates how these activist networks use rhetorics of scientific rigor to oppose these public health measures. Far from ignoring scientific evidence to argue for individual freedom, antimaskers often engage deeply with public datasets and make what we call “counter-visualizations”—visualizations using orthodox methods to make unorthodox arguments—to challenge mainstream narratives that the pandemic is urgent and ongoing. By asking community members to “follow the data,” these groups mobilize data visualizations to support significant local changes.
...
However, we find that anti-mask groups on Twitter often create polished counter-visualizations that would not be out of place in scientific papers, health department reports, and publications like the Financial Times.
...
Qualitative analysis of anti-mask groups gives us an interactional view of how these groups leverage the language of scientific rigor—being critical about data sources, explicitly stating analytical limitations of specific models, and more—in order to support ending public health restrictions despite the consensus of the scientific establishment.
...
While previous literature in visualization and science communication has emphasized the need for data and media literacy as a way to combat misinformation, this study finds that anti-mask groups practice a form of data literacy in spades. Within this constituency, unorthodox viewpoints do not result from a deficiency of data literacy; sophisticated practices of data literacy are a means of consolidating and promulgating views that fly in the face of scientific orthodoxy. Not only are these groups prolific in their creation of counter-visualizations, but they leverage data and their visual representations to advocate for and enact policy changes on the city, county, and state levels.
...
In approaching anti-maskers as a counterpublic (a group shaped by its hostile stance toward mainstream science), we focus particular attention on one form of agentive media production central to their movement: data visualization. We define this counterpublic’s visualization practices as “counter-visualizations” that use orthodox scientific methods to make unorthodox arguments, beyond the pale of the scientific establishment. Data visualizations are not a neutral window onto an observer-independent reality; during a pandemic, they are an arena of political struggle.
...
Indeed, anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naive realism about the “objective” truth of public health data. Quantitative data is culturally and historically situated; the manner in which it is collected, analyzed, and interpreted reflects a deeper narrative that is bolstered by the collective effervescence found within social media communities. Put differently, there is no such thing as dispassionate or objective data analysis. Instead, there are stories: stories shaped by cultural logics, animated by personal experience, and entrenched by collective action. This story is about how a public health crisis—refracted through seemingly objective numbers and data visualizations—is part of a broader battleground about scientific epistemology and democracy in modern American life.
...
As David Buckingham has noted, calls for increased literacy have often become a form of wrong-headed solutionism that posits education as the fix to all media-related problems. Danah Boyd has documented, too, that calling for increased media literacy can often backfire: the instruction to “question more” can lead to a weaponization of critical thinking and increased distrust of media and government institutions.
...
Second, users also believe that state and local governments are deliberately withholding data so that they can unilaterally make decisions about whether or not lockdowns are effective. During a Facebook livestream with a Congressional candidate who wanted to “use data for reopening,” for example, both the candidate and an anti-mask group administrator discussed the extent to which state executives were willing to obscure the underlying data that were used to justify lockdown procedures
...
4.2.5 Appeals to scientific authority.
Paradoxically, these groups also seek ways to validate their findings through the scientific establishment. Many users prominently display their scientific credentials (e.g., referring to their doctoral degrees or prominent publications in venues like Nature) which uniquely qualify them as insiders who are most well-equipped to criticize the scientific community. Members who perform this kind of expertise often point to 2013 Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt’s assertion that lockdowns do nothing to save lives as another indicator of scientific legitimacy. Both Levitt and these anti-mask groups identify the dangerous convergence of science and politics as one of the main barriers to a more reasonable and successful pandemic response, and they construct their own data visualizations as a way to combat what they see as health misinformation. “To be clear. I am not downplaying the COVID epidemic,” said one user. “I have never denied it was real. Instead, I’ve been modeling it since it began in Wuhan, then in Europe, etc. [...] What I have done is follow the data. I’ve learned that governments, that work for us, are too often deliberately less than transparent when it comes to reporting about the epidemic”. For these anti-mask users, their approach to the pandemic is grounded in a more scientific rigor, not less.
4.2.6 Developing expertise and processes of critical engagement
The goal of many of these groups is ultimately to develop a network of well-informed citizens engaged in analyzing data in order to make measured decisions during a global pandemic. “The other side says that they use evidence-based medicine to make decisions,” one user wrote, “but the data and the science do not support current actions”
...
Additionally, followers in these groups also use data analysis as a way of bolstering social unity and creating a community of practice. While these groups highly value scientific expertise, they also see collective analysis of data as a way to bring communities together within a time of crisis, and being able to transparently and dispassionately analyze the data is crucial for democratic governance. In fact, the explicit motivation for many of these followers is to find information so that they can make the best decisions for their families—and by extension, for the communities around them. “Regardless of your political party, it is incumbent on all of us to ask our elected officials for the data they use to make decisions,” one user said during a live streamed discussion. “I’m speaking to you as a neighbor: request the data. [...] As a Mama Bear, I don’t care if Trump says that it’s okay, I want to make a decision that protects my kids the most. This data is especially important for the moms and dads who are concerned about their babies” As Kate Starbird et al. have demonstrated, strategic information operations require the participation of online communities to consolidate and amplify these messages: these messages become powerful when emergent, organic crowds (rather than hired trolls and bots) iteratively contribute to a larger community with shared values and epistemologies.
Group members repost these analyses onto their personal timelines to start conversations with friends and family in hopes that they might be able to congregate in person. However, many of these conversations result in frustration. “I posted virus data from the CDC, got into discussion with people and in the end several straight out voiced they had no interest in the data,” one user sighed. “My post said ‘Just the facts.’ People are emotionally invested in their beliefs and won’t be swayed by data. It’s disturbing.”"
100%. We need to stop coming to the wrong conclusions. There are two fundamental questions for me : 1. Do you own your body or does someone else? 2. Is society a natural human state of being or a construct of govt that requires us to “take one for the team” at their behest even if we may be injured in the process?
How their thinking and actions appear to me: I demand you do what I do and make all the same decisions I do, as well. Otherwise I’m not validated and relevant until all fall in line with me. S
The reality is, they’re nothing more than a poiled little b*tches who feel entitled to tell the world how (Self) important they think they are.
When the only evidence that The Science (TM) is based in is the "consensus" (of chosen ideologues) who's only expertise is in soft social and behavioral science, i.e. psychological manipulation, as epidemiological NPI and not the hard natural and medical science that "Skeptics" relied upon to guide their beliefs, actions and pleadings, The Science (TM) will eventually come crashing down.
The leaders of this ongoing catastrophe and their shrill barking dogs in the media and social media never were "following the evidence at the time." They were setting a narrative, participating in psychological manipulation to change behaviors by amplifying fear as pandemic NPI. Scare the bejeezus out of people from socializing with one another and accustom them to sacrificing essential civil liberties. Like only weaponized fear can do.
"Evidence-based" medicine and science today is a synonym for a "consensus of experts." A consensus of hand-picked ideological aligned experts, that is. The consensus of experts at a gathering of collectivist authoritarian Marxists will look a lot different than the consensus of experts at a gathering of individualist liberty Patriots.
In January, 2021 MIT released a study of "Coronavirus Skeptics" seeking to understand the disobedient rubes disseminating dangerous dis- and misinformation. The findings are astonishing. Real, hard, natural and medical science dismissed as unorthodox, thereby wrong. Not that the science was wrong. But that by contradicting the consensus of their experts it was dangerous. Nothing is more dangerous to a top-heavy lie than truth that crashes through the legs it is built upon. When they say they were following The Science (TM) and it's changed so we should get over it they're saying they believed their own lies or willful ignorance.
Enjoy the read, excerpts from the study link below in comments:
Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox
Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, January 20, 2021
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf
2/2
"Ultimately, anti-mask users emphasize that they need to apply this data to real-world situations....The message that runs through these threads is unequivocal: that data is the only way to set fear-bound politicians straight, and using better data is a surefire way towards creating a safer community.
...
These groups have been incredibly effective at galvanizing a network of engaged citizens towards concrete political action. Local officials have relied on data narratives generated in these groups to call for a lawsuit against the Ohio Department of Health. In Texas, a coalition of mayors, school board members, and city council people investigated the state’s COVID-19 statistics and discovered that a backlog of unaudited tests was distorting the data, prompting Texas officials to employ a forensic data team to investigate the surge in positive test rates.
...
This is a community of practice focused on acquiring and transmitting expertise, and on translating that expertise into concrete political action. Moreover, this is a subculture shaped by mistrust of established authorities and orthodox scientific viewpoints. Its members value individual initiative and ingenuity, trusting scientific analysis only insofar as they can replicate it themselves by accessing and manipulating the data firsthand. They are highly reflexive about the inherently biased nature of any analysis, and resent what they view as the arrogant self-righteousness of scientific elites.
As a subculture, anti-masking amplifies anti-establishment currents pervasive in U.S. political culture. Data literacy, for antimaskers, exemplifies distinctly American ideals of intellectual self-reliance, which historically takes the form of rejecting experts and other elites. The counter-visualizations that they produce and circulate not only challenge scientific consensus, but they also assert the value of independence in a society that they believe promotes an overall de-skilling and dumbing-down of the population for the sake of more effective social control. As they see it, to counter-visualize is to engage in an act of resistance against the stifling influence of central government, big business, and liberal academia. Moreover, their simultaneous appropriation of scientific rhetoric and rejection of scientific authority also reflects longstanding strategies of Christian fundamentalists seeking to challenge the secularist threat of evolutionary biology.
Another point of contention is that of lived experience: in many of these cases, users do not themselves know a person who has experienced COVID, and the statistics they see on the news show the severity of the pandemic in vastly different parts of the country. Since they do not see their experience reflected in the narratives they consume, they look for hyperlocal data to help guide their decision-making. But since many of these datasets do not always exist on such a granular level, this information gap feeds into a larger social narrative about the government’s suppression of critical data and the media’s unwillingness to substantively engage with the subjectivity of coronavirus data reporting.
Most fundamentally, the groups we studied believe that science is a process, and not an institution. As we have outlined in the case study, these groups mistrust the scientific establishment (“Science”) because they believe that the institution has been corrupted by profit motives and politics. The knowledge that the CDC and academics have created cannot be trusted because they need to be subject to increased doubt, and not accepted as consensus. In the same way that climate change skeptics have appealed to Karl Popper’s theory of falsification to show why climate science needs to be subjected to continuous scrutiny in order to be valid, we have found that anti-mask groups point to Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions to show how their anomalous evidence— once dismissed by the scientific establishment—will pave the way to a new paradigm (“As I’ve recently described, I’m no stranger to presenting data that are inconsistent with the narrative. It can get ugly. People do not give up their paradigms easily. [...] Thomas Kuhn wrote about this phenomenon, which occurs repeatedly throughout history. Now is the time to hunker down. Stand with the data.” For anti-maskers, valid science must be a process they can critically engage for themselves in an unmediated way. Increased doubt, not consensus, is the marker of scientific certitude.
Arguing that anti-maskers simply need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed and inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: users in these communities are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production that they recognize as markers of scientific expertise. If anything, anti-mask science has extended the traditional tools of data analysis by taking up the theoretical mantle of recent critical studies of visualization.
...
In other words, these groups see themselves as engaging deeply within multiple aspects of the scientific process—interrogating the datasets, analysis, and conclusions—and still university researchers might dismiss them in leading journals as “scientifically illiterate.”
In an interview with the Department of Health and Human Services podcast, even Anthony Fauci (Chief Medical Advisor to the US President) noted: “one of the problems we face in the United States is that unfortunately, there is a combination of an anti-science bias [...] people are, for reasons that sometimes are, you know, inconceivable and not understandable, they just don’t believe science."
We use Dr. Fauci’s provocation to illustrate how understanding the way that anti-mask groups think about science is crucial to grappling with the contested state of expertise in American democracy.
...
We argue that the anti-maskers’ deep story draws from similar wells of resentment, but adds a particular emphasis on the usurpation of scientific knowledge by a paternalistic, condescending elite that expects intellectual subservience rather than critical thinking from the lay public.
...
While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review, and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist. This study forces us to see that coronavirus skeptics champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy; for them, it is not a body of knowledge certified by an institution of experts.
They are a battleground that highlight the contested role of expertise in modern American life."
(1/2)
"However, despite a preponderance of evidence that masks are crucial to reducing viral transmission protestors across the United States have argued for local governments to overturn their mask mandates and begin reopening schools and businesses. A pandemic that affects a few, they reason, should not impinge on the liberties of a majority to go about life as usual. To support their arguments, these protestors and activists have created thousands of their own visualizations, often using the same datasets as health officials.
This paper investigates how these activist networks use rhetorics of scientific rigor to oppose these public health measures. Far from ignoring scientific evidence to argue for individual freedom, antimaskers often engage deeply with public datasets and make what we call “counter-visualizations”—visualizations using orthodox methods to make unorthodox arguments—to challenge mainstream narratives that the pandemic is urgent and ongoing. By asking community members to “follow the data,” these groups mobilize data visualizations to support significant local changes.
...
However, we find that anti-mask groups on Twitter often create polished counter-visualizations that would not be out of place in scientific papers, health department reports, and publications like the Financial Times.
...
Qualitative analysis of anti-mask groups gives us an interactional view of how these groups leverage the language of scientific rigor—being critical about data sources, explicitly stating analytical limitations of specific models, and more—in order to support ending public health restrictions despite the consensus of the scientific establishment.
...
While previous literature in visualization and science communication has emphasized the need for data and media literacy as a way to combat misinformation, this study finds that anti-mask groups practice a form of data literacy in spades. Within this constituency, unorthodox viewpoints do not result from a deficiency of data literacy; sophisticated practices of data literacy are a means of consolidating and promulgating views that fly in the face of scientific orthodoxy. Not only are these groups prolific in their creation of counter-visualizations, but they leverage data and their visual representations to advocate for and enact policy changes on the city, county, and state levels.
...
In approaching anti-maskers as a counterpublic (a group shaped by its hostile stance toward mainstream science), we focus particular attention on one form of agentive media production central to their movement: data visualization. We define this counterpublic’s visualization practices as “counter-visualizations” that use orthodox scientific methods to make unorthodox arguments, beyond the pale of the scientific establishment. Data visualizations are not a neutral window onto an observer-independent reality; during a pandemic, they are an arena of political struggle.
...
Indeed, anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries, who espouse naive realism about the “objective” truth of public health data. Quantitative data is culturally and historically situated; the manner in which it is collected, analyzed, and interpreted reflects a deeper narrative that is bolstered by the collective effervescence found within social media communities. Put differently, there is no such thing as dispassionate or objective data analysis. Instead, there are stories: stories shaped by cultural logics, animated by personal experience, and entrenched by collective action. This story is about how a public health crisis—refracted through seemingly objective numbers and data visualizations—is part of a broader battleground about scientific epistemology and democracy in modern American life.
...
As David Buckingham has noted, calls for increased literacy have often become a form of wrong-headed solutionism that posits education as the fix to all media-related problems. Danah Boyd has documented, too, that calling for increased media literacy can often backfire: the instruction to “question more” can lead to a weaponization of critical thinking and increased distrust of media and government institutions.
...
Second, users also believe that state and local governments are deliberately withholding data so that they can unilaterally make decisions about whether or not lockdowns are effective. During a Facebook livestream with a Congressional candidate who wanted to “use data for reopening,” for example, both the candidate and an anti-mask group administrator discussed the extent to which state executives were willing to obscure the underlying data that were used to justify lockdown procedures
...
4.2.5 Appeals to scientific authority.
Paradoxically, these groups also seek ways to validate their findings through the scientific establishment. Many users prominently display their scientific credentials (e.g., referring to their doctoral degrees or prominent publications in venues like Nature) which uniquely qualify them as insiders who are most well-equipped to criticize the scientific community. Members who perform this kind of expertise often point to 2013 Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt’s assertion that lockdowns do nothing to save lives as another indicator of scientific legitimacy. Both Levitt and these anti-mask groups identify the dangerous convergence of science and politics as one of the main barriers to a more reasonable and successful pandemic response, and they construct their own data visualizations as a way to combat what they see as health misinformation. “To be clear. I am not downplaying the COVID epidemic,” said one user. “I have never denied it was real. Instead, I’ve been modeling it since it began in Wuhan, then in Europe, etc. [...] What I have done is follow the data. I’ve learned that governments, that work for us, are too often deliberately less than transparent when it comes to reporting about the epidemic”. For these anti-mask users, their approach to the pandemic is grounded in a more scientific rigor, not less.
4.2.6 Developing expertise and processes of critical engagement
The goal of many of these groups is ultimately to develop a network of well-informed citizens engaged in analyzing data in order to make measured decisions during a global pandemic. “The other side says that they use evidence-based medicine to make decisions,” one user wrote, “but the data and the science do not support current actions”
...
Additionally, followers in these groups also use data analysis as a way of bolstering social unity and creating a community of practice. While these groups highly value scientific expertise, they also see collective analysis of data as a way to bring communities together within a time of crisis, and being able to transparently and dispassionately analyze the data is crucial for democratic governance. In fact, the explicit motivation for many of these followers is to find information so that they can make the best decisions for their families—and by extension, for the communities around them. “Regardless of your political party, it is incumbent on all of us to ask our elected officials for the data they use to make decisions,” one user said during a live streamed discussion. “I’m speaking to you as a neighbor: request the data. [...] As a Mama Bear, I don’t care if Trump says that it’s okay, I want to make a decision that protects my kids the most. This data is especially important for the moms and dads who are concerned about their babies” As Kate Starbird et al. have demonstrated, strategic information operations require the participation of online communities to consolidate and amplify these messages: these messages become powerful when emergent, organic crowds (rather than hired trolls and bots) iteratively contribute to a larger community with shared values and epistemologies.
Group members repost these analyses onto their personal timelines to start conversations with friends and family in hopes that they might be able to congregate in person. However, many of these conversations result in frustration. “I posted virus data from the CDC, got into discussion with people and in the end several straight out voiced they had no interest in the data,” one user sighed. “My post said ‘Just the facts.’ People are emotionally invested in their beliefs and won’t be swayed by data. It’s disturbing.”"
...