Study on how coronavirus skeptics and anti-maskers use sophisticated graphs and charts--MIT

When more Covid-19 data doesn’t equal more understanding MIT researchers found that Covid-19 skeptics on Twitter and Facebook — far from being “data illiterate” — often use sophisticated data visualization techniques to argue against public health precautions like mask mandates. MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, charts and graphs have helped communicate information about infection rates, deaths, and vaccinations. In some cases, such visualizations can encourage behaviors that reduce virus transmission, like wearing a mask. Indeed, the pandemic has been hailed as the breakthrough moment for data visualization.

But new findings suggest a more complex picture. A study from MIT shows how coronavirus skeptics have marshalled data visualizations online to argue against public health orthodoxy about the benefits of mask mandates. Such “counter-visualizations” are often quite sophisticated, using datasets from official sources and state-of-the-art visualization methods.

The researchers combed through hundreds of thousands of social media posts and found that coronavirus skeptics often deploy counter-visualizations alongside the same “follow-the-data” rhetoric as public health experts, yet the skeptics argue for radically different policies. The researchers conclude that data visualizations aren’t sufficient to convey the urgency of the Covid-19 pandemic, because even the clearest graphs can be interpreted through a variety of belief systems.  

“A lot of people think of metrics like infection rates as objective,” says Crystal Lee (the lead investigator). “But they’re clearly not, based on how much debate there is on how to think about the pandemic. That’s why we say data visualizations have become a battleground.” ...