Thread by @GidMK

@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom My favorite part of this is that we can actually do a fairly basic empirical test of whether the idea that twitter royalty is required to be a FB fact-checker is true, or whether it's simply a correlation due to pandemic expertise by looking at pre-pandemic follower counts

@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom Of the people quoted for the healthfeedback piece, the median number of twitter followers was 4,514, with two people having well below 1,000 prior to COVID-19. The mean is skewed up to 35k by Topol

@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom The mean/median increase in followers for these 6 accounts is 3,100/1,500%, with @angie_rasmussen and @BillHanage both having a >50x increase in their follower counts since 2019 according to wayback.org

@VPrasadMDMPH @CT_Bergstrom @angie_rasmussen @BillHanage While they were probably active on social media prior to the pandemic, it's pretty clear from even a casual examination that these people were generally not twitter celebrities prior to COVID-19