Communicating online in an ongoing pandemic
I have a fear that people will take amateur articles or trolls at face value and go party because getting sick is supposedly inevitable. Or make decisions on whether to follow expert advice based on random text on the internet. Both the Dunning-Kruger crowd and foreign govt trolls are trying to incite people to follow the wrong path. It seems containing the spread of wrongful information on a hard to understand topic is very difficult in a time like this. And that people are even more willing to listen to any news than usual.
There are things that people want to hear. Like, that there is an easy solution and they do not need to be afraid anymore. Or even that we are all doomed and at least we can party one last time. The governments can not say it's all going to be ok by next Tuesday, if it is not certain. They do not have the luxury of speculation, like all the trolls. So officials will remain conservative in their statements and the trolls will have the benefit of being able to promise anything in exchange for the effects and behaviours they are looking for ultimately.
There is great potential in this situation, for manipulating economies of entire countries or their technical capabilities. Like we see in UK where people have been incited to burn cell towers out of fear by 5G-corona conspiracies. Similarly getting people to break quarantine will have a massive effect on a countries ability to recover their economy and way of life.
Whether it's on purpose or not. Spreading bad information can have very real consequences in a time like this. Please be responsible and research what you are posting. Think critically, it will benefit you and others.
Let's elaborate
The uncertainty of an evolving pandemic and the need for people to find all the information they can to survive has given more power to several phenomenons in online communication. Some are instinctual and some are the familiar malicious trolling in a new package.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect 2020 or DKE-20
People who normally need to read and learn many things, who may have a bit of ADD or are just very interested in everything, have a heightened risk to start thinking of themselves as experts in any field. So much so that some are comparing the social media trend to an epidemic of its own.
People end up reading a respectable amount of articles and possibly even many scientific papers or publications. At some point in the middle of that flood of information everything starts coming together and a coherent picture forms. That picture is true, because it comes form all that data. So it is easy to think that you now know the truth about this topic. The problem with this picture is that it does not account for all the other data. By this point any subject that requires a degree, has generated enough information and expertise that it actually does require years of study and most likely some years of practice to start to understand the nuances and how seemingly different bodies of information connect. Or otherwise why have experts at all, we could just read in some IT or marketing people during a week and be done.
Yet, the feeling of everything clicking together and the misleading absence of contradictions on the surface of the ideas is very convincing. It takes quite a lot of introspection to hold back the drive to share that newly found wisdom and be the hero who solved all the problems. Because many times it works. Many issues in life can be solved with Google or reading the manual, like setting the time on your oven or fixing your bike. Why not a global pandemic?
A thinker once said, "The smartest man is the one who knows what they don't know". Today we are faced with online personalities who have no idea of what they may not know. So what you would expect, for a beginner, to be in the land of known unknowns, is now hidden with the unknown unknowns.
Epidemiology, statistics and other easy topics
Understanding a global pandemic requires knowledge form various disciplines. It involves statistics, medicine, psychology, and many others. One way I see people commenting is from behind years of knowledge in any single one of the required disciplines. Some even write something like, "I'm not an epidemiologist, so do not take this at face value, but I do know statistics, so this is how it all goes..". And then they proceed to make a very well thought case for some end result that answers what society should do next or how well the government experts are doing their job. Based on good reasoning, but lacking in information and experience.
Again, these people are not exactly wrong in their statements and they may have years of experience in some field of science. However if you are a compulsive reader of online data and are battling your own case of DKE like me, you will easily find information people are lacking or grossly oversimplifying. This inaccuracy usually comes from one of the other areas of expertise required. There would be no issue with this normally, as it is one part of learning a new skill. Only now, people are commenting on a critical situation to other people who are just waiting to grab at any advice that will make it end without much thought. Because everyone is in a race to solve this thing. So what was meant to be commentary, ended up being advice after all. It seems people can not be precisely controlled by disclaimers at the start of uninformed commentary. So, should we control this by decision of the informed writer or shall we leave it to the masses to correctly parse our thoughts from commentary and make informed decisions on partial data? Were they not supposed to make a decision - why do you keep giving people choices?
It's just harmless commentary...
People like to discuss interesting things and even some of the insane stuff you see online, can be fascinating to talk about. The problem is that there is a thing called confirmation bias, which is a relative of the DKE. This means that people are likely to interpret information in a way that reinforces their preconceptions. This makes nuanced commentary very difficult, because people are almost instinctively going to misunderstand anything that requires conscious effort to understand on an important topic.
This is the reason why online trolls are so effective in their mission. Once you find people who are already leaning toward something, pushing them over the cliff is easy. You can even pivot from one topic like vaccines and get people to attack public infrastructure. As long as the narrative supports the subjects favourite avenue of thought and especially if it makes them feel like the underdog hero or martyr in a battle for good.
So what may seem like purely academic or hypothetical discussion on the supposed origin or potential spreading of a virus, can end up fuelling a whole different kind of shit storm in your neighbourhood.
I'm not trying to censor anyone or limit any topics, but would help if people put a little more thought into how their comments may end up affecting other people. So try not to assist the conspiracy theorists or government trolls in their job.
You could say that in the links section, I'm also giving people choices. I hope you choose to understand how complex this situation is and how much knowledge is required for smart decisions. I bet you will find many new bits of information in these links, there are a ton more of them that you do not know about. So keep in mind that I have not included most of the information you need to make good decisions on this topic. The best decision you can make is to #StayTheFuckHome and listen to professionals, not people on social media.
Sources
- https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/a-comic-strip-tour-of-the-wild-world-of-pandemic-modeling/
- https://medium.com/@noahhaber/flatten-the-curve-of-armchair-epidemiology-9aa8cf92d652
- https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/5g-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory-driven-coordinated-effort-200410182740380.html
- https://trib.al/bO6MDq5
- https://medium.com/datadriveninvestor/known-knowns-unknown-knowns-and-unknown-unknowns-b35013fb350d