Read on Twitter
I feel like the guy on the right some days. I honestly don’t enjoy any of this #COVID19 tweeting. I do see hope, but to reach the light at the end of the tunnel, we need sobering reality of how to fight for daylight, not dismissive downplaying or hiding our heads like an ostrich.
2) We don’t need “sweet little lies” about how it’s just the flu (it’s not), how salvation is natural infection herd immunity (dangerous), or that kids are immune (they aren’t) or that kids don’t transmit the virus (they do, a lot), or that we can have indoor dining (we can’t)
3) I’ve been called “fear monger”, “fear peddler”, “attention seeking charlatan”, or a “Soros paid actor”, or “not an epidemiologist” (Harvard SPH, Dept of Epidemiology 2004-2007), or my favorite- “Dr Feigl-Doom”.
I’ve heard them all. I have zero agenda but to end COVID.
I’ve heard them all. I have zero agenda but to end COVID.
4) People attacked me in Jan-March 2020 when I tried to sound the alarm. It was a difficult few months for my family. People harassed my family and my workplace. It wasn’t pretty. People still feel I’m too “doom-y”. But the COVID deaths today don’t lie. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/amp/2020/03/why-was-it-so-hard-to-raise-the-alarm-on-coronavirus.html
5) With the high volumes of tweets daily, so I make typos / overlook a detail sometimes? Sure. I correct as soon as I can, & apologize when clear error. I don’t have a whole editorial staff or team of writers—I have no ghost tweeters or ghost writers. Just me. 380+ days straight.
6) Do I use ALL CAPS often? sometimes as a headline : subject line declaration. “BREAKING / SCOOP / JUST IN” all caps is used a lot in the DC news world. And sometimes I emphasize to get people to turn heads — in the name of *ACTION* to stop/slow the pandemic.
7) I’ve had twitter for 12 years with <2000 followers. Back in 2008, in early Twitter days, Sean Parker (founder of Napster, founding president of FB, etc) and I once sat late past 2am in his hotel room talking about FB, Twitter & social media. I wasn’t big on Twitter I told him.
8) He asked me why (he was big on Twitter), cuz I then said I thought Twitter was too disorganized and random. FB was at least connections among friends (back then) and more intimate. Twitter was too just open for trolls and random noise I had thought—& told Sean I didn’t get it.
9) But in retrospect, the un-silo’ed nature of Twitter has become the better platform than Facebook in many ways. Facebook’s more insular social network nature has incubated a lot more misinfo than Twitter has in recent years. Twitter has democratized info much more openly.
10) Sean believed the virality of tweets and flatness of Twitter had more power to be an open information disseminator—for obviously good and bad (Trump’s insurrection). And he was right. Twitter does have more influence today in many ways— both good & bad for COVID pandemic...
11) for 11 years, I had begun to realize I was wrong about Twitter. But on Jan 24th, when I was worried about the pandemic and all the signals I saw from China and the new preprint data, I decided I needed to get the word out of the impending “thermonuclear level bad” pandemic...
12) Before I tweeted, I had a feeling it was going to be a rough reaction. I was a relative nobody on Twitter, no real friends or long time allies on here... I knew I was gonna be on my own for a while on here. But I dreaded the pandemic more... https://www.salon.com/2020/03/27/a-thermonuclear-pandemic-harvard-scientists-coronavirus-prediction-ignored-by-officials_partner/
13) But I have spent my much career on social network research and social media. I know how it worked. I had built two prior multi-million person Facebook pages before (with @causes, not defunct), doing cancer Prevention education. https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/a-web-campaign-for-cancer-prevention/
14) I’ve felt the dread before when I was told I had a baseball sized tumor in my chest. It was the same dread of a major 30 year cancer study being potentially cut off that led me to push the envelope for action to save it. (This was an 2007 old Newsweek) https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/tech-philanthropy-facebook-103763%3famp=1
15) I’m here only because I believe sharing info Twitter has the power to change the course of the pandemic— for the good. And to fight the misinformation bad actors like Scott Atlas and others. And data from FAS shows we are making a difference—eg here: https://fas.org/blogs/fas/2020/10/social-media-conversations-in-support-of-herd-immunity-are-driven-by-bots/
16) I’m not paid by FAS (a nonprofit think tank founded by the scientists behind the Manhattan Project decades ago). I’m not paid by Soros or any special interests. I’m here to share info. Sometimes doom-y, fearful, hopeful. But always towards driving action to end COVID.
17) I don’t want to be here tweeting COVID anymore. I don’t want people to suffer anymore. I don’t want my family or anyone else’s families to suffer anymore—nor in some purgatory endemic for years to come. And that why #ZeroCovid is the way. Let’s work together to end this. 
18) These were all headlines from Jan-March 2020. I had wanted to scream during those days in which many were still “playing it down”. I had thought about pulling back after the Jan 2020 big tweet—but after seeing these, I decided I couldn’t lean back. I had to lean in deeper.
