When more Covid-19 data doesn’t equal more understanding | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
▻https://news.mit.edu/2021/when-more-covid-data-doesnt-equal-more-understanding-0304
“An initial hypothesis was that if we had more data visualizations, from data collected in a systematic way, then people would be better informed,” says Lee. (...) The researchers found that antimask groups were creating and sharing data visualizations as much as, if not more than, other groups.
And those visualizations weren’t sloppy. “They are virtually indistinguishable from those shared by mainstream sources,” says Satyanarayan. “They are often just as polished as graphs you would expect to encounter in data journalism or public health dashboards.”
“It’s a very striking finding,” says Lee. “It shows that characterizing antimask groups as data-illiterate or not engaging with the data, is empirically false.”