Donald Trump is biggest single source of coronavirus misinformation researchers say

Donald Trump is biggest single source of coronavirus misinformation researchers say

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/trump-coronavirus-misinformation-report-cornell-university-covid-19-b742810.html

Donald Trump is the biggest individual source of coronavirus misinformation, according to a new study.

Researchers at Cornell University found that mentions of the president were responsible for 38 per cent of the overall “misinformation conversation” and the single largest factor in what they branded an “infodemic.”

“The biggest surprise was that the president of the United States was the single largest driver of misinformation around Covid,” Sarah Evanega, the director of the Cornell Alliance for Science and the study’s lead author told the New York Times.

“That’s concerning in that there are real-world dire health implications.”

Now that's pretty damning.

Your avatar sums up this whole situation so perfectly.

Anyone surprised by this?

Yes the researcher herself, it says so in the OP. She was shocked that the research she choose to publish one month before the election would turn out to be critical of Trump. Clearly that was not at all what she intended.

Are you insinuating that she shouldn't have released it?

And now it may have bitten him in the ass, as Trump has been tested positive for COVID 19.

I hope the COVID 19 infodemic can end soon. People not taking the disease seriously is a threat to society.

I'm not surprised by this TBH..........

He is responsible for so many dying, it's sad so many lives could have been saved.

Now he's a source of the virus too.

I think it’s super important that the general public has confidence in science. For example if we are going to solve climate change we need a big fraction of the population to believe it’s real.

Some researchers in the humanities have a tendency to call their political hit pieces “research” to give them more weight. I think that’s bad. It leads to some people on the right writing off all science as “leftist propaganda”.

She can publish what she wants. But I think it’s better if journalists do this type of research to preserve the integrity of science.

My two cents 🤷🏻‍♂️

Science is peer reviewed, isn't it?

I have very mixed feelings about this.

At this point I need to forget Trump and just think of the office he holds.

Either way, I really hope we don't see celebrating from progressives, liberals, protestors and so on. That would not help Biden, and it is very poor form in either case.

Yes, I think so.

Even political "science"?

More traditional science--physics, biology, chemsitry, etc--is highly objective and fact-based, but politics is pretty easy to manipulate as it's an analysis of history (which is prone to interpretation, lies, and so on) and statistics (which are easy to manipulate).

I think so. But if all “peers” have the same biases it doesn’t really do much.

I have little confidence in poli-sci for the reasons you just mentioned bojangles, i think its ridiculous it uses the word science at all to be honest. Some people do look at political science the same way they look at actual science like chemisty and i find that to be ludacris and not realistic.

Trump has been terrible on Covid response. Calling the medical community "fake news" because he thinks his three brain cell crowd knows more. Trump supporters, who do you trust more? Doctors Or Trump? Tell me.

I see no reason to distrust this study, seems about right tbh.

In donnie they trust.........

Anybody that looks to Trump as a source of intelligence has never finished reading a book.

To be fair, many probably never finished school.

It's no coincidence that the more educated a person is, the more left leaning they become.

White House strategy is herd immunity:

https://news.yahoo.com/trump-admin-admits-embrace-disputed-055703044.html