Thread by @kakape

Some scientists have become twitter celebrities in this pandemic - bringing power as well as hate.
I talked to @devisridhar - a constant presence in my twitter feed the last two years - about her experience

Story here,short thread to come:
science.org/content/articl…

First of all: This story is part of a @NewsfromScience series on the “new normal” and just a brief peek at some of the issues scientists are grappling with in this time of viral posts and a pandemic virus. It’s a huge topic and I want to hear more stories and see more research…

But briefly:
One of the most amazing things early on in this pandemic was watching science (and policy) debates play out in real-time online. Some researchers have helped hundreds of thousands of people make sense of what’s going on and make informed decisions. They saved lives.

One reason for this was the poor communication from many governments and public health agencies, @LawrenceGostin told me. “They’ve made so many misjudgments in terms of health communication,” he says. That left a gap that some researchers filled.

Sridhar was one of these and she was perfectly eequipped for it, says Gostin, who has known her for many years, because she can “explain what we know, what we don’t know, and what we’re doing to find out what we don’t know”.

But twitter is a messy place at the best of times. “Whenever I open Twitter, I’m so overwhelmed by how angry it is,” Sridhar told me. “I’m very privileged to have such a large platform, and at the same time it’s a complete and total exhausting shitshow”, @angie_rasmussen told me.

The hatred and abuse that so many scientists, but particularly women and women of colour, experience here, has been one of the most disgusting and depressing features of my personal experience these last two years.

There are different ways of dealing with this and Sridhar’s has been - not sure how else to phrase this - “relentlessly sunny”.
Here is just one little example:

https://twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1440750606424035330?s=21

But clearly we need to tackle the larger issues here: racism, polarization, misinformation to name just three. We need to talk way more about the way our information ecosystem is structured and who pays the price. (I intend to make that a bigger part of my work going forward.)

And if you all wanna start right now in a small way, feel free to drone out all that hate by tweeting some appreciation at the researchers that helped you through this pandemic on here… #thankyouthursday