Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online

TL;DR

This paper examines how coronavirus skeptics use data visualizations on social media to challenge official narratives, revealing a sociopolitical divide in interpreting pandemic data.

Contribution

It uncovers how skeptics deploy similar data visualization rhetorics as experts to promote unorthodox views, highlighting the role of visualizations in sociopolitical conflicts.

Findings

Skeptics circulate visualizations to argue against government measures.

Different groups interpret similar data in drastically different ways.

Visualizations reflect underlying sociopolitical divisions.

Abstract

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 decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes. Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook, we document an epistemological gap that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw drastically different inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that the deployment of COVID data visualizations reflect a deeper sociopolitical rift regarding the place of science in public life.