Don’t wait for the influencers.

I'm Chloe Humbert, and this is Don't Wait for the Influencers. I'm recording this on Thursday, September 19th, 2024, and there's a lot from the past couple of years that I'm going to include here. I sat down to write another blog post on it. And after I was finished, I realized it would probably just make sense to record this and then maybe record some of the other things I've written about this overarching problem we have. And my area of interest is public health, but the same problem permeates all sorts of issues regarding the public good. So anything I say is personal opinion or allegedly, unless proven in a court of law. Here we are.

Influencers and the harnessing of relationships as a sales tactic. With some notable and helpful exceptions, you’ll notice that a lot of popular podcasters and youtubers, including ironically political commentators, often steer away from telling anyone how to do effective advocacy or civic engagement. I think this is because if they were doing that, they wouldn’t get the traction they do, because I think all the money and movers and shakers out there that can help propel people in a media career, it all seems to favour people who distract from or even sometimes obscure helpful information. The people who are all critique no action, all theory no praxis, are safe to the status quo, because they give an emotional outlet for dissatisfaction, but they don’t threaten power. And of course most of the money sloshing around out there belongs to the most powerful, and is used for the interests of the most powerful. And if you’re trying to make a living from that money, you can’t be telling people how to thwart it and expect to get paid, boosted, or otherwise helped.

Influencers are often successful if they can deftly deploy high pressure sales tactics, persuasion techniques, or even cognitive attacks and deceptive marketing. Truth with a lie chaser is what I call it when someone leads with something that they know you already believe, to get you on board with where they’re going. Sales professionals call this “The Yes Set” sales technique. It’s described by The International Retail Academy as: “creating a pattern of positive answers by asking questions or making statements with which the other person is extremely likely to agree” and which they openly promote as using a type of hypnotherapy for making sales. In describing “grifters” and “psychological principles that con artists use”, Dr. Jeremy Dean wrote: “Once grifters know what people want, even if it doesn’t exist, they are in a position to manipulate them. They will play on people’s desperation; unfortunately the more desperate people are, the easier they are to con.”

So of course some people will absolutely say things you recognize as true often enough, perhaps making it harder to dismiss them entirely as dishonest, and hard to criticize even when they engage in problematic messaging, play into bad framing, or promote dubious products. But broken clocks are wrong most of the day. And even if a clock was right 4 times a day, would you really recommend it as a timepiece?

Influencers also sometimes harness the effect of parasocial relationships to gain loyalty. Sometimes it’s a cult of personality to some extent, and social media already functions in a rather culty way. One of the things about a cult-like situation is the high pressure sales technique of FOMO (fear of missing out), where you’re made to feel like you’ll lose out on something if you don’t get on board, and that leads many unwitting people to overlook some really problematic or even harmful stuff. Some of these people even reach out personally to their followers to tighten the bond. They may have chat groups or forums where people find community in a group setting. This doesn’t always have to be dysfunctional of course, but it can lead to problems when sometimes people will go along with a lot of groupthink, risky shift and betrayal blindness, just to maintain the connection to a particular community. And this sort of loyalty and relationship building leads to sometimes people white knighting some influencer like she’s their paramour and any criticism is insulting her honor. Sometimes people even develop such an affinity with anonymous and bad behaving social media accounts, despite the fact that many of these popular niche anonymous accounts are bought and sold all the time. I’ve had people argue with me saying that it’s silly, that of course it’s the same person behind this account, they’re just anonymous online, but there are actual trade publications telling you where to buy and sell niche accounts with pre-accumulated followings. And there was this one very sketchy covid twitter account that had tons of red flags back in 2021, but it seemed like nobody else saw them but me. This anonymous account had over 10,000 followers and when they stopped posting in December of 2022, I’d found people months later had been at-ing them asking them if they’re ok. And this was many months after they’d been shown to engage in blatantly plagiarizing other people’s tweets. And even after all that, there were an unusual amount of hotshot prominent professionals on twitter who failed to unfollow this weird account, an account that later started tweeting out unrelated partisan political messaging posts.

Advice on becoming an influencer from Florida Realtors states it outright: “you'll notice that influencers create a sense of community around a brand.” Even if you’re only on social media pretty casually it’s hard not to bump into these product cults. People who seem to be absolutely obsessed with a particular product and promoting it online. And I’ve noticed that well-meaning people who are probably not getting paid for this are being trained up to hype products too, with a woke-washing reasoning, that you’re doing this for the public good, to promote this product, and sell this product. The entire social media internet landscape is a rather dysfunctional ecosystem that is set up with everything to promote all this, and people have learned to harness it to make money within niches, there are even guides on how to do so on platforms such as subReddits. Going viral is rarely an accident. There are just so many automated systems - “the algorithms” of the platforms themselves that are being wrangled by marketers, but also botnets and troll farms. It’s all real and well documented. And it often takes money to make money. And sometimes people don’t even know who is paying them, or whose side they're on in this information gig economy as Mark Galeotti describes it in his book The Weaponisation of Everything: A Field Guide to the New Way of War from 2023: “Outsourcing goes beyond direct warfare and into non-kinetic contests. This century has also seen the explosion of the gig economy. Individual freelancers and temporary workers, sometimes recruited directly, sometimes through online platforms or third party matchmakers. It may seem ridiculous to draw comparisons with the cycle courier that brings you your pizza. But this is less fanciful than might appear in an age when conflicts may be fought through the medium of carefully curated newspaper articles highlighting a grievance or attacking a government. And when online influencers can pivot from hyping a hair product to pushing a political cause.”

The tragedy is that often people hoping to reach other people for real action and advocacy and organizing, are instead drawn into a void of distraction and sabotaged into inaction. Informational learned helplessness is a known quantity, disinformation has been described in Psychology Today as “censorship by noise,” and they say that being overloaded with misinformation mixed in with good information and not being able to easily sort through it “leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore.” The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle leads to inaction. If it’s too much effort to counter a firehose of lies, or sort through deciding what really matters, people often give up.

People also become trapped on the platforms, because that’s what they’re designed to do, keep people on the app. Even well-meaning people can get wrapped up in clout chasing for larger audiences, likes, and dopamine hits, engaging in problematic messaging because that’s how you get attention. And this can be a huge time sink that takes away from more effective activities like writing letters to representatives - instead of just shouting dissatisfaction into a crowd - or a void.

I wrote about this at the time and I'll read it here. I didn't even name names in this because I had hoped at the time to help people who were doing this unwittingly. So I didn't mention that I was talking about Kristen Panthagani and Your Local Epidemiologist at the time. But I no longer, I'm no longer sure that these people want to do better on messaging. I just don't feel like wrapping anyone in cotton anymore about this. They don't want to hear it. So I'm just going to warn others about the problems I see with this.

If you lead by repeating a lie you wish to debunk — that’s the first, possibly the only thing that the audience sees or remembers while scrolling through social media. People may never even click to see the second tweet in a tweet thread. They may not even read the second sentence! This is why it’s so important in the current media environment to lead with the takeaway you want delivered, and if you’re honest of course — something truthful.

The combined psychological marketing whammy of resilient first impression, the halo effect, mere exposure effect, illusory truth effect6 anchoring bias, and reiteration effect, all work together in promoting whatever gets out in front. If that something is a lie, that means promoting the very thing meant to be debunked. In which case it may be better not to post about it at all.

Even famous scientists, serious doctors, and experienced educators sometimes fall into bad communication habits on social media. These pitfalls are alarming. And I can’t help but notice the adversaries pushing lies never seem to mess this up. They lead with whatever they want you to believe and put it on repeat. They aren’t promoting their opposition, but they are experts in getting hate followers and rage clicks for loads of engagement for themselves. Of course the big money is behind the lies, and they pay for expert marketing and advertising, savvy influencers, and paid social media operatives who know how this psyops game is played.

I’m well aware of a lot of pandemic research and have a background in advertising art and marketing, and have spent the past couple of years reading about propaganda, disinformation, information wars, and influence strategies. But nobody is completely immune. Social media executives and tech experts often avoid social media themselves, and very often go out of their way to prevent their children from using it.

The tweet that got to me was from a doctor — MD PhD who unfortunately led with the lie on the first tweet of a tweet thread. I was momentarily fooled into thinking fictitious research took place. The initial tweet went viral — hopefully because later in the tweet thread she debunks the claims. BUT THE FIRST TWEET ONLY CONTAINED THE LIE AND THE BOGUS INFORMATION — and that’s the tweet that went viral. An irony is that the doctor also publishes a debunking blog, yet seems unaware of this basic strategy for fighting misinformation. If you only saw the first tweet, especially the first sentence, you could easily have believed untrue claims. After all, an MD PhD who’s pro-vax was presenting this scary anti-vax stuff.

Several people I’ve talked to since said they would not have even seen this garbage at all — had it not been for the many twitter stars shouting it out in their timelines —dozens or more decided to prove their big shot debunking chops on this one. The tweet I saw was not the only one where someone decided to lead with the lie. Some people quote-tweeted, driving engagement. So the disinfo was repeated, highlighted, and promoted by both anti-vax AND pro-vax accounts, doing the social contagion work of aiding the propagandists.

Social media is addictive. Not just for the average user, though that’s bad enough. It also seems intoxicating to people with a lot of followers and fans — since they get tons more feedback. It could be people who have longed for approbation or they may have incidentally found that going viral scratches an itch maybe they didn’t know they had for reaching people with science education. Unfortunately, the algorithms involved don’t have anyone’s best interest in mind, only promoting engagement, and keeping people on the app. Leading with the truth and doing good public information won’t please the algorithms as much as rage fodder and fake news, and so there is no built-in incentive producing mechanism to teach people to do things with science communication best practices, at least not within the social media itself. In fact, quite the opposite.

Effective public health messaging will probably require mindfulness, self training, and practice with repetition by motivated scientists, doctors, public health professionals, activists, and yes the randos out here. Even some people with the best of intentions may not have the time to invest, or maybe not the inclination or ability. But Planck’s Principle isn’t the only route forward — progress does not depend solely on funerals or replacing all the pundits & public speakers — as Planck himself demonstrated, people are capable of change. And the truth sandwich is a low effort and simple method that we can all use to avoid this common pitfall. And anyone can get familiar with other marketing and influence strategies. This is needed against a very cognitive savvy opposition. The big shots should especially consider it because of their own potential halo effect. And because the side of truth, science, equity, and salubrious ideals, really needs to do better — lives depend upon it.

I was a lot more... I was a lot more idealistic when I wrote that. I now think that most of these people are media savvy and they're harnessing what they know will get them promoted. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's a lot of recklessness and haplessness. I hope. But that's just my opinion, two years later. So here we are.

I also found an old voicemail I sent to someone almost a year ago when I was angry, and I'll include it here. The voice quality isn't going to be as good because I was recording it on my phone. I'll try to remove the sound of coffee cups clanging or cats howling or whatever, but here it is. Oh, and a note, I'm not sure I say Kristen Panthagani correctly in the voicemail. In fact, I'm not sure if I'm saying it right now. So, I apologize, but I think it's Panthagani, and this is the Yale MD PhD science influencer. Okay.

Oh, and I don't know if you remember, I don't know if you saw my post describing the problem of the truth sandwich and how all of these twitter influencers, these people who, you know, want to prove they're debunking chops, debunking anti-vax stuff and whatever. And they get on twitter and they do a twitter thread and they lead with the lie. They lead with the lie. I mean, they do. It's like, oh, I'm going to ask the question, will this save me from covid? Are the vaccines terrible? You know, and then they start with that. Like, they just start with the lie, the bad thing. And of course it gets a bunch of anti-vax or whoever botnets and troll farms to boost the shit out of it because it's the first tweet is actually promoting the lie. And after I wrote that post after Kristen Panthagani tricked me, she tricked me. In my twitter scroll, I saw that she was posting the Florida study, that infamous, now infamous Surgeon General Florida study. And, you know, she started out by just posting the study. And I thought, oh my god, she's pro-vax, a debunking blog. And I'm like, if she's posting this, it must be true. Well, you know, of course, if you go down three tweets, you know, no, of course not. She's, she’s debunking it. And I'm telling you, that freaked me out for a few days because it was like a brain worm it got in. It was just very... Yeah, very bad because a lot of people probably only saw that Kristen Panthagani, pro-vax person, was posting the Florida Surgeon General's study without comment on the first tweet. It was just, here it is. And so I wrote that post. Well, I've sent that to people. You know what happens when I send that to people who do this and make this mistake? They block me. They block me. Because I'm annoying. They're like, I'm getting tons of views, I'm doing lots of good. It's like, yeah. And then today I saw a twitter thread. Okay. And this just proves my point because as soon as I saw it, I'm like, oh no. So the first tweet says something like, are these nose plug filters like a good idea? Are they effective or whatever. And I'm like, no, of course they're not. Nose plug filters are not going to be effective. Maybe they're better than nothing and I mean I could see the temptation to use them at the dentist or something where people are like oh my god anything. But like I'm sure that people are passing these this idea around as a way to go to parties maskless because that's what it's all about is all of these products are being promoted to target market people who feel ashamed for masking and afraid to mask and want anything to just not have to embarrass themselves and mask. But of course they don't want to get covid and die because they're high risk or whatever. And then these people sell them these products that might even cause more harm than good. Now, in this case, I don't, at least not like the UV stuff, I don't think it's not going to blind them or give them skin cancer 10 years from now. But, um, It's not going to do anything. They're going to get covid because these nose plug filters are not going to... Just even looking at them, I don't even need a test. Well, so anyway, this twitter thread, about six tweets down, the person comes out and it's an order of magnitude less filtering than N95s. Well, of course, because it wouldn't be breathable. Like with that tiny amount of space, the filter can't be that good because like you wouldn't get enough air through. Anyway. So it was a debunking thread, right? But here's the thing. The first tweet floating the idea and getting people familiar with the product. Something like 50,000 views. The posts where they say it's not effective and that it's orders of magnitude less filtering, and probably not any good, 5,000 views. So everybody sees the promotional first tweet that's leading with the lie, like basically promoting the product, 50,000 views. The rest of the thread explaining why you shouldn't depend on this shit. 5,000 views. Talk about orders of magnitude. And I've been warning people about this for, I think, two years now, and nobody will listen to me. They block me when I try to explain this, too, because, of course, the hot shots. Here's the thing, is if they're promoting the bad, it's a gift to rivals. This is a known infosec problem. It's a known problem. It's a known problem. The botnets come and they boost them because they know they're just helping to sell their product or they're helping to push anti-vax. So of course, these hotshots think they're doing all this good and really they're just spreading lies.

So here we are. And here's a story where I think it's a well-meaning scientist had a fairly useful study being published and wanted to hype it because that's what people do. And he's a covid twitter hotshot, so he leveraged that audience to promote his objectively important study. But he did so by wholly misrepresenting the implications of it and giving a lot of people false hope. So things went sideways. And so this was obviously, obviously absurd. And I'll just read what I wrote.

Hyping for Godot. Michael Hoerger’s clout chasing molehill.For a month in July 2024, Mike Hoerger was hyping something planned for release August 1st, building excitement among his 34,000+ followers on twitter, many disabled, immunocompromised, and desperate to avoid covid in healthcare settings where mitigations have often been abandoned. The promised coming revelation was hinted at, Mike Hoerger replied to someone on twitter speculating that it might be a product, “a surveillance win”, or “peer reviewed research that will convince elected officials to resume caring” and he more or less answered positively, saying they were close on the research that will convince, with shades of a surveillance win and a non-pharmaceutical mitigation product.

Any doctor or scientist who allows their fans to continue to believe, unremarked, that peer reviewed research is going to “convince elected officials to resume caring” is in my opinion committing science messaging malpractice. Any scientist or doctor with half a clue not born yesterday would of course be well aware of how long health threats can go incontrovertibly proven by science yet unaddressed by lawmakers.

I’m all for more science. We definitely need more studies and more data, advancing science-based preventions and treatments. I’ve been shouting from the rooftops for years that we need more good science out there being published, considering all the pseudoscience product purveyors and the anti-vaxxers keep pumping out their publishing, even if some of them keep having work retracted.

But information alone will not bring change, clearly, as demonstrated about the worsening climate situation we’re in. In July 2024 there was a New York Times article about ultraprocessed foods and why they’re so hard to resist. There was also a New York Times article published way back over a decade ago — in February 2013 explaining the science of addictive junk food. And yet, you can find a science publication in 2022 pointing out that ultraprocessed food is still offered in schools despite it being associated with a higher risk of all-cause mortality.

Awareness is not change. Publishing is not political praxis.

Mike Hoerger didn’t just neglect to engage on the point of science not working unprompted miracles on politicians — he doubled down on the hype, allowing people to believe that a revelation was coming, apparently in the interest of promoting his paper.

I found out about this because ordinary people, not in the medical field or with any professional connection to Hoerger or any of the other authors, were going around to advocacy groups, email lists, group chats, facebook groups, discord forums, and on social media with volunteer labor promoting the expected paper on the grounds that it was good news for desperate people with high risk with covid. They were building excitement for this for weeks, because they believed the claims that this would be a huge game changer — that help was coming. I was skeptical, but understandably, many people wanted to believe a change was just around the corner.

Mike Hoerger cast himself in a leadership role in this bit of theatre. On July 3rd 2024, someone said on twitter said: “One of the big Covid doctor accounts posted that there will be some mysterious good news coming out on the Covid front round about August 1st. Hopefully there is some type of improvement coming.” Hoerger replied on July 4th with a quote tweet with an incredibly bold statement, saying: “Big Dr. Mike here. It will empower patients and families and put substantial pressure on health administrators. Well timed for the ‘teachable moment’ of the late summer wave. No excuses by winter. Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”

Anyone who trusted and listened to Hoerger could be forgiven for thinking that whatever was coming would be a revelation. But when the science article was finally unveiled, it turns out it was basically a survey reporting which cancer units at hospitals around the country had masking policies, their geographical locations and wealth levels, but with no conclusions to be drawn at all about the effects. It was just an analysis of which hospital cancer centers had masking policies and which ones didn’t. No evidence was included regarding any consequences of such policies, and Hoerger, et al, are aware of that being a relevant point because they mention it in the article saying “More research funding and studies are needed to examine the implications of mitigation policies for infection rates among patients and medical personnel, treatment discontinuities, hospitalizations, long COVID, and mortality.”

Having called this a teachable moment that will “put substantial pressure on health administrators” and promising things will change in hospitals by winter, is quite frankly an embarrassing demonstration of hubris and clout chasing hype. It seemed over the top initially to me frankly, but people were passing around screenshots of this tweet as a message of hope and final vindication they expected was coming. And they were had.

I realize analyzing for possible effects like mortality in cancer treatment programs with or without mask requirements might not be within the purview of the same people doing this particular research. But it seems almost a bit premature to release just a report on data that some cancer units required masks and others didn’t with zero information about hospital acquired infection rates, or any data about deaths in those cancer units, that may have correlated with these policies. It’s a worthwhile analysis even without that, and to people who understand the likely implications it’s disturbing and incredibly sad. And it further highlights the horrible effects of politicization of pandemic issues with a geographical report that seems to line up with red states where right-wing propagandists did more to successfully persuade people early on that covid mitigations were bad. (Conservative interests later had to do further targeted campaigns to persuade liberals against masking.)

We absolutely should be analyzing this type of data and recording it. But this study isn’t a game changer and I don’t see how anyone would have thought it could, itself, put substantial pressure on administrators or take away their excuses — or even change anyone’s mind who doesn’t already see that it’s a problem for healthcare workers to be unmasked in cancer wards. Without any evidence of consequences, contrarians and minimizers could just claim that the hospitals in the northeast U.S. are a bunch of rich liberal coastal elites making people put on face diapers at hospitals for no reason, since all these other cancer units didn’t mask after all — that’s what they’ll point out. I don’t get how Hoerger thought this could help advocates push for change. It’s possibly making the case for loosening up general infection protocols all over hospitals everywhere. They will say, “If all these high risk patient serving cancer centers threw caution to the wind, why do we need any precautions anywhere?” More studies on the implications aren’t just needed, they’re imperative to preventing this report from potentially becoming damaging.

These kinds of false promises make people complacent about advocacy, activism, and regulations, thinking that the big doctors are going to take care of everything for us. And the truth is most doctors often refuse to get political — even though their whole profession hinges upon good political policies, as demonstrated in stark terms in the Project 2025 plans for Medicaid. There’s no saviour coming to do the work. There’s no survey or study that’s going to be the tipping point where people just start doing the right thing simply because they become aware of something. Many people are fully aware that covid is a problem — especially if they keep getting sick and they’re out of sick time at work — they’re just being told that’s just the way it is, and most people are just trying to get by. I’m particularly skeptical of any suggestion that businesses will do the right thing] even if it benefited them in the long run, because it just seems to me like most business incentives tend to run counter to public health.

Because of this hype coinciding with some introduced indoor air legislation for schools, and expected long covid legislation, some people were imagining that Hoerger’s big reveal would be some groundbreaking revelation about propelling legislation already in the works from behind the scenes - because everyone always hopes the people in charge are getting with movers and shakers and going to announce that everything is okay now. Probably because for years now there have been doctor pundits and scientist influencers name-dropping their elite connections, or visiting the White House, or letting their selected fan base see their emails with high level officials — giving the impression they’ve got this inside track and will soon fix everything. And yet, year after year that’s not materialized at all, and things have gone backwards in some cases. Nevertheless it worked again. For about a month, some people were distracted by this.

And another month it’ll be a different decoy that takes up the time, energy and attention, of the would-be activist who could’ve spent that time writing to representatives or getting out the vote, or volunteering with a public health or patient advocacy organization and actually getting acquainted with the levers of power, what is and isn’t happening and how, and who is actually trying to make change, without fanfare or a celebrity spotlight.

Hoerger’s study nods too much to right-wing framing. The article says: “With 8 waves of elevated COVID-19 transmission, health care system–acquired COVID-19 infections are highly preventable, with debates surrounding prevention pros and cons.” What is there that is debatable about preventing more infections? Why even include a phrase like “debates surrounding prevention pros and cons”? Talking about whether or not a technician seeing a chemotherapy patient might see a downside to masking? These healthcare workers take great care to protect their own skin from the patient’s chemotherapy treatment. So, healthcare workers that are donning PPE to protect themselves from the toxic treatments they’re giving to the cancer patients, but apparently according to Mike Hoerger, et al, there are downsides that need to be debated on whether they should put on a little piece of fabric on their face to protect the cancer patients from infectious diseases? Seriously? Why even consider that a legitimate debate to have?

The article also mentions masks being “contentious” twice, using that word, and the inclusion of that comment seems curious as well. In the Introduction it’s mentioned: “Although people with cancer have above-average risk of COVID-19 vaccine antibody nonresponse, breakthrough infections, hospitalizations, long COVID, infection-associated treatment delays, and mortality, health care masking policies remain contentious.” and it’s again mentioned at the end in the Discussion: “Although contentious, universal masking precautions were common at NCI-designated cancer centers during the winter 2023 to 2024 surge, especially at more established, better-funded, and higher-ranked centers.” I almost feel like they are helping the opposition by reminding everyone about the people protesting state mandates and masks in schools mainly as part of the Moms for Liberty weirdos. Those people have moved on; they're focused now on trans panic and Black history book bans. Saying masks in healthcare is contentious makes it sound like the people who are resisting saving lives have some legitimacy. Like there’s a legitimate debate — when that’s false. It would be like if some healthcare workers wanted to start reusing needles with multiple patients — you wouldn’t call it “contentious” you would say some fringe misguided people are resisting science and reason and want to endanger patients. Why not just say “despite some resistance to precautionary measures” which is more clinically and scientifically accurate.

And it is only some fringe resistance along with big money interests. Even in Project 2025 they curiously limit their anti-mask agenda in healthcare to complaining about “general” mandates for staff at facilities because I bet even the most staunch conservatives and covid minimizers don’t want surgeons putting spittle in their open body cavity during surgeries, and probably don’t want someone with the flu coughing on them during their chemotherapy visits. Republican Steve Scalise wore a N95 mask while working at the U.S. Capitol after getting chemotherapy, and yet Democratic politicians are failing to resist actual mask bans. Masking isn’t personally contentious for most ordinary people in their day to day lives — it’s merely been made into a go-to political football on purpose with deliberate propaganda. The people who benefit from this are industry interests who have seen in reports on labor participation and surveys on the social patterns of older adults, that some people are still reluctant to engage fully in the economy, and these PR and marketing people seem to have really believed taking away the reminder of masks would fool enough people into feeling safe. Another big industry that benefits from pushing anti-mask sentiments are hospital corporations who from the get-go have been shown as not wanting to pay for PPE for their staff or patients. We can’t keep buying into the bad actor pushed framing — that this is a culture war by ordinary people when it’s really a war against patient safety by big money interests and a few on the fringe.

Social media won’t save us from viruses. If you stay on Elon Musk’s twitter with the huge botnets that are still programmed with programming set to attack people who advocate for masking, and the few weirdos who feel rubber stamped for approval by that inauthentic bandwagon, you might think that this represents most people. In reality most people in most places don’t actually have a problem putting a mask on at a hospital. There were masks in the waiting room at doctors offices for sick people long before the pandemic, I remember that. There’s something called pluralistic ignorance — people thinking they’re in a minority when they’re not or thinking they’re a majority when they’re not — and it’s a really big problem in our borked information landscape. it would be nice if scientists would realize that, get the hell off social media for five minutes, break out of the covid twitter dopamine hits information silo, touch grass, and stop opting forever into this perpetual anti-mask vs pro-mask extremely-online food fight. Because the baddies aren’t letting social media confuse them this way. They’ve already won the battle by demoralizing so many with lies and fear tactics.They go attack people on social media with their message bombs and all the bullying garbage for you to see, and then they go back to their safe spaces. That’s where they are getting politically organized, fired up, and maybe writing a dozen letters to sway your Democratic senator to reach across the aisle.

And what do we get from the pro-mask crowd who aren’t covid contrarians? Influencers looking for clout, people selling nonsense, and Mike “Hashtag Salting The Vibe” Hoerger.

Mike Hoerger uses the hashtag “Salting The Vibe” in his post about his twitter Spaces session about his paper on healthcare masks. We need to change vibes, and change the priorities, not lean into babyish suggestions to “salt the vibe” of people who aren’t masking — by masking. Whoever said that about masks salting a vibe was silly, and Kamala Harris didn’t take it seriously because many days later, there were people behind her wearing N95 masks at the big rally in Pennsylvania presenting. So influencers getting clicks and views from hyping outrage over that foolish comment are kind of unhelpful. There’s absolutely no public health value in luxuriating in childishly to rain on someone’s parade by wearing a mask. Trying to trigger the covid contrarians doesn’t help anything, and that’s assuming they even authentically give a shit — and I really don’t think they do. Retribution is a moral quandary game of smoke and mirrors typically dreamed up by the odious and rude. This is the entirely wrong direction to promote public health and patient safety. I want anti-maskers and right-wingers to have healthcare and avoid covid too. Not just to be magnanimous, or because Bernie Sanders asked me to fight for somebody I don’t know, but because in practicality it’s what’s best for everyone because we’re all in this together. That’s public health.

We need to get past these bad frames and normalize masks as protective equipment and a personal hygiene tool, like surgical gloves, toenail clippers, sunscreen, or sunglasses. Masks in healthcare are normal. But the perpetual social media machine demands controversy, and keeping it going only benefits the internet company platforms.

Big shots are no less likely to spread misinformation, even unwittingly. I would’ve confronted Mike Hoerger personally about this and better ways to promote public health activism and change, if I had that access, but I don’t. I’ve tried before when he had a bit of a misstep on social media. Back in April, Hoerger was platforming a very questionable zine that was promoting weird right-wing covid remedies, unproven nasal sprays, and advertising an expensive concierge clinic.I went so far as to privately email Mike Hoerger on April 11th, because in the past he’d warned against unproven nasal sprays. But got no answer. His retweet stayed up weeks after when I followed up, and perhaps until now — the zine author’s account is locked to private right now so there’s no way to know at present. So I don’t know if Mike Hoerger even knew or cared that he was promoting colloidal silver as a covid treatment, or advertising a high priced concierge clinic target marketing to long covid sufferers, or promoting things like unproven nose sprays or potentially damaging UV as DIY health solutions.

Several other people I alerted privately about their retweeting this zine responded with thanks and undoing their posts, because indeed, they hadn’t looked through the entire zine or further down in the tweet thread before reposting, and certainly had no intention of promoting a concierge clinic, and especially not colloidal silver, which is dangerous and not recommended for any health condition according to the NIH. This sort of thing happens so often on social media, and it’s typical of how misinformation spreads, with people just reposting things that catch the eye out of habit.

These particular debacles, like so many others, are just data points on a huge storyboard that is the problematic activities and terrible inaction in the pandemic. Influencers and hotshots clamor for fans among people who could otherwise be productively engaged in effective advocacy but instead scientist influencers and doctor pundits take them on hype trains stuck spinning on social media and the internet of fakes, disappointed when the “leaders” don’t live up to the virtues of their cult of personality or put attention above good public health messaging, and the temptation comes to go spiraling in gloom.

Having hyped a mystery and allowed people to believe in an open-ended promise of something that would never materialize, Mike Hoerger, is also into prediction punditry with mystery data models he simply can’t share for analysis.

The science soothsayers so often ask you to just accept the future as if it’s immutable. Sit back and relax, it’s just around the next corner. Enjoy the horse race. See what you want to see, because people like being told they can have what they want, even if it’s not on offer in reality. And even the gloom can become complacency. In an essay by A.R. Moxon about the spectacle of political punditry predictions titled The Seagulls Descend this is well-described: “It’s just as freeing in a way to believe everything is doomed as it is to believe that everything will be fine; either way you don’t have to do much thinking or work, or even take the next step that will allow us to take the next step, however easy or hard or palatable or unpalatable that next step might be.”

And this way leads so many high-risk patients, hashtag waiting for a masked Godot.

So I think that whole episode is demonstrative of why we're endlessly waiting for people with connections or people with expertise to save us, save us from the pandemic, save us from disinformation, save us from climate change or fascists or whatever it may be. And we can't wait on these people because they have their own priorities. Maybe next time I'll record something on the issue of elite panic and the PR landscape. Until next time, I guess, be seeing you.