Data Manipulation & the Media
Activism by Twitter "experts" drives media narratives
Michael Mina & China’s Numbers
Michael Mina tweeted this morning, comparing recent Covid deaths in the US to recent deaths reported by China in the New York Times. He calculated rates of Covid deaths per 100K, claiming US deaths were higher than China’s reported deaths. Most people on Covid Twitter probably remember Michael Mina from his obsession with rapid testing during the pandemic, which ultimately led to his role as Chief Science Officer at telehealth testing company, eMed.
The issue is that almost everyone, including Michael Mina, knows that China’s numbers are vastly underreported — to the point that they are essentially meaningless. Yet that didn’t stop Michael from comparing them to US data as if they were accurate. Even though in the next tweet, he admits that China’s numbers are “very likely to be underestimates - probably by large margins.”
So why share the data, and do calculations with it, when you know it’s garbage? Many people challenged him on this, and he admitted repeatedly that we know China’s numbers were wrong, but that his point is that big numbers are “more impactful” and that it’s “what [makes] headlines” and “motivates [people]”. I find these follow-up tweets to be a stunningly honest admission of his goals. He wants the media to push “big numbers” to scare people and “compel more action from congress (sic)” to approve more funding for pandemics. Of course, this funding would have a direct benefit to the company where he is an executive, so his motives are important here.
Twitter Drives the Media Narrative
This is one of the issues with Twitter driving the media narrative so often. Michael Mina has a huge Twitter following, and is often quoted by the media, and he knows this. He tweeted out a completely false and misleading comparison of US data to Chinese data, knowing it was false (by his own admission), but that doesn’t matter to him. What matters is that the tweet gets a lot of attention, because the point is that he wants to perpetuate fear in the media. He wants the journalists who follow him to write stories with big numbers to scare politicians into actions that directly benefit his company. He actually acknowledges that he’s trying to push the media to manipulate people by reporting monthly totals instead of daily numbers to spur Congress into approving more funding for things like Covid testing.
Many experts have used Twitter in this way to drive the media narrative over the past three years. They know that their tweets with misleading numbers or heartbreaking anecdotes get attention from journalists who write uncritical headlines, amplifying whatever narrative the “expert” thinks will manipulate people into their desired action. We saw this repeated over and over again throughout the pandemic, with regard to things like school closures, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, more government funding, etc. Influential Twitter accounts drive media narratives, which in turn, drive government action and feed people’s fears.
Various forms of Twitter activism by so-called Covid “experts” have scared many people in irresponsible ways. Many parents have been afraid to send their kids to school or let them play with friends because of unrelenting media narratives about harms to children. Some of this media attention was likely initially designed to drive more funding to schools and teachers in the name of Covid mitigations, and then later to push childhood Covid vaccination.
Jerome Adams on Monkeypox & Schools
We saw many supposed experts try to drum up this same type of fear all over again with children and monkeypox. Jerome Adams, former US Surgeon General, was one of the people who tweeted multiple times warning of monkeypox spreading when schools and colleges started back in Fall 2022. He wrote an op-ed in USA Today on August 8, arguing that monkeypox should be a concern for schools and colleges, saying “It's not whether but when we will see monkeypox cases (and likely outbreaks) among returning students.”
It turns out that his op-ed was published two days after monkeypox cases peaked in the US, based on CDC data.
When challenged about his monkeypox fearmongering two months later, Jerome admitted that his real goal was to get more government funding for monkeypox prevention. He claimed that “raising the alarm did what it was supposed to do … encouraged the administration to massively increase availability of vaccinations and testing.”
But according to CDC data, first doses of the monkeypox vaccine peaked the following week, so it’s unlikely his fear-mongering activism had much, if any, effect on vaccination efforts. And as I mentioned, cases had already peaked when he wrote his op-ed. His op-ed and alarmist tweets probably did nothing more than scare many parents and school staff that monkeypox was going to spread in the school setting, while further hurting the credibility of public health for those who didn’t believe his monkeypox fear-mongering.
We Need Honest Journalism
I’m not sure how we fix this, but we need journalists to understand that tweets by their favorite Twitter experts aren’t necessarily an honest assessment of the data, but are often an intentional narrative being fed to them to push in their stories in order to advance a desired result. In Michael Mina’s case, he’s was surprisingly honest that he wants the media to report on Covid deaths in a way that will make more money for his company (though he didn’t say it quite that directly). And Jerome Adams seems to think he’s a hero for ringing alarm bells about kids and monkeypox in order to boost vaccinations.
But we’ve seen too often over the past few years that the main result of these media crusades is further polarization - making already fearful people even more afraid, while making skeptics even more aware of the dishonesty among public health and the media. And this isn’t specific to Covid. These same tactics are used for a variety of causes. How do we get back to journalism where stories in the media are actually driven by an investigation into the facts, instead of just parroting the latest thing that media darlings are tweeting about?