Original Message

Coronavirus Skeptics Promote Unorthodox Science Online

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.07993.pdf

Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government’s pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decisionmaking used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes