Watching the #coronavirus tweets over the last few days, I worry that some people end up reading every news event as a live show. The urge is not to be informed, but entertained. Viral producers that kick up the drama win. theatlantic.com/technology/arc…
I think a lot of the most effective ploys fall *right* into the part of the curve that's a step in from total craziness or outright banned. Zuck posted this chart in 2018 about how people optimize their content to be just-short-of-prohibited. 
Even if there isn't an official content policy that creates this dynamic. All you have to do is create a THEY who won't say what you're saying. It works *really* well if there *are* real transparency problems as with the Chinese government or Facebook's algorithmic actions.)
People have played attention games around disease for a long time. (E.g.: books.google.com/books?id=vRF2B…) But the networks that form here on Twitter are astonishingly weird. You get people with no expertise or experience who become central nodes in a major global crisis!
This guy (or I should say "entity" because who knows!) is an extremely good example. Went from tweeting anti-Trump memes to all-Wuhan, all-the-time. Probable pseudonym, no known other journalistic work or Chinese experience. Very defensive, odd tactic, and yet: SO MUCH ENGAGEMENT
Another dynamic: A splintered internet creates new opportunities for attention rustling. Videos from Chinese social media can be arbitraged into Twitter, devoid of their context, and slipped into the new apocalyptic movie frame. A few clips get repeated endlessly.
You can debunk or (as importantly) recontextualize those videos, like @JaneLytv. But it's so hard to stay ahead of the viral spread.
All these systems are designed for virality! The would-be public health workers are *trying* to infect more people. buzzfeednews.com/article/janely…
All these systems are designed for virality! The would-be public health workers are *trying* to infect more people. buzzfeednews.com/article/janely…
@JaneLytv And yet there *are* great people on here for pretty much every topic. Scholars like @mlipsitch, @gmleunghku, and Neil Ferguson at @Imperial_IDE, reporters who covered SARS like @Laurie_Garrett, science journos like my colleague @edyong209, and many others.
Can any lay consumer of news be expected to sort all this out in real time? Especially when the most qualified people are providing *intentionally* less engaging or dramatic commentary, which interrupts the cosplay of being someone learning about a disease outbreak?
The only real answer, in my mind, is a ground-up redesign of Twitter's core mechanisms. Attention should be spread around more evenly and negative feedback applied to spiking things. Tune it all down. More on that from @robinsloan: platforms.fyi
@robinsloan And of course it is not just Twitter but all these platforms designed around the same principles of virality. (Cybernetics was/is a weird field but they got some things right!) mediamatters.org/fake-news/tikt…
