The Fake News about Georgia and Covid-19 is a Study in Clickbait Journalism and Regional Prejudice
By: Bj Campbell
Tags: Media Criticism, Covid 19, Fake News, Politics

The Fake News about Georgia and Covid-19 is a Study in Clickbait Journalism and Regional Prejudice BJ Campbell Follow May 20 · 11 min read

At this point it is just about peddling clicks.

Georgia reopened first. It shocked the country. There was a great wailing and gnashing of teeth over the decision, despite the numbers solidly supporting it.

On April 24th, the New York Times published a scathing opinion piece claiming that Georgia was not ready to open, and supported their article with graphs that were verifiably wrong, based on bad data that was scraped with web scrapers. HWFO exposed that then, explaining how the Georgia numbers were being drawn up in a more responsible way than the NYT’s numbers were, which originated at The Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project.

But the outcrop of Georgia bashing in the news today and yesterday is even more malicious, and even more poorly supported, which is to say, not supported at all. It is pure, obviously untrue clickbait. It is definitive Fake News. So definitive in fact, that it offers a much more interesting window into the financial dynamics of Fake News than it even says about Covid-19 policy.

How To Draw A Graph

To understand where this vicious Fake News circle jerk came from, we must first understand how the Georgia Department of Public Health compiles their data, and how every other state department of health probably should compile it. When you go to the GA DPH website, you’ll see a graph that looks like this:

Image captured 3:52 PM 5/19/2020

And another one that looks like this:

Image captured 3:52 PM 5/19/2020

Let’s explain each of these graphs, in detail, for data muggles. The blue dots are instantaneous confirmed cases on the day they were tested. Some of these are back-dated to symptom onset. The red dots are instantaneous Covid-19 deaths on the day that they died. The orange dots are a “seven day running average” for each graph, which means they take the prior seven blue or red dots and average those out and stick an orange dot there, to smooth the graph and give you a sense of the trend that’s not so wild and erratic.

Where do these dots come from?

Someone down in Atlanta is watching a fax machine, and answering a phone, and receiving emails, that come in from many hundreds of disparate sources of testing within the State of Georgia, from Grady Memorial to some back woods clinic in Coffee County, with Covid-19 data. The data includes a test date, a death date, an age of the dead person, what county the person lived or died in, their sex, and whether they had any comorbidities. Possibly more information. When the fax comes off the fax machine, the poor intern tasked with this gruesome job then goes into the database and puts the death into it on the day that the person died, or the day that the test was administered. This is important. They do not put the data point in for the day they read the fax. A hospital might have a week’s worth of tests they fax in all at the same time. They might have had a few day lag getting results back. A fax or email that comes in today, on May 19th, might have data that gets stuck into May 17th, May 12th, even perhaps May 3rd. This is the correct way to do things, because it gives us as accurate a snapshot of the infection curve as is possible.

There are two problems with this representation of the data. One is that muggles might look at the last few days of orange dots and come to the conclusion that the infection is zeroing out very fast, when in fact that steep decline is merely a result of not all the tests being in. These muggles might share their deeply held opinions in “#REOPEN” groups on Facebook.

The other problem with this representation of the data is that since the dots keep changing, muggles who don’t understand why they might keep changing freak out and think that the government is trying to hide the infection, possibly even on purpose to serve some evil political agenda of opening too early. These muggles might share their deeply held opinions in “#STAYATHOME” groups on Facebook.

And since these two batches of muggles spend all day screaming at each other on social media as their chief hobby, they feed back upon each other’s efforts and the graphs themselves become a culture war battleground.

Georgia DPH has been fabulously clear about their methodology from day one. Inspect this earlier snapshot, of a prior version of the webpage:

You’ll notice an important similarity between the older graph presentation and the current one. There is a shaded range of 14 days, where they state explicitly that some data in that range has not yet been reported. I’ve been watching these graphs every day for two months, with my morning coffee, as part of my duty as a son to let my mother know when she can safely leave the farm and return. The data in the shaded box changes a lot, always upward, before it becomes solid. Some of the data outside the shaded range even changes sometimes, as some very laggy clinic finally reports in, but not by very much at all, and never enough to really change the trends. Outside this 14-day window, the data is almost completely concrete.

To glean meaning from the graph, we must do three things:

Accept that the data inside the grey box is incomplete, by which we mean unreliable, and Accept that the data outside the grey box is complete, by which we mean reliable, and Not get our panties in a wad when the dots change, because this whole effort is being run by some overworked underpaid GA DPH employees doing they best they can during an epidemic they didn’t sign up for.

The muggles aren’t doing any of those three things, and by extension, neither are the media.

The Freakout

The freakout began when either an overworked underpaid GA DPH employee or some government subcontractor mixed up a couple of data points in a bar chart, related to but not directly derived from the charts above. Someone in social media caught it, and screamed “gotcha,” after which time Governor Kemp’s office issued an apology for misplacing a couple of points on the bar chart and reissued the chart. This now nationwide infamous bar chart is so obscure I can’t even find it on a Google search, but it has been referenced by the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, the LA Times, the New York Post, and even Reason.com. None of the articles showed the erroneous bar chart, nor the fixed one. But the fact that this bar chart was released, and then fixed a few hours later, led the AJC to drop tweets like this:

Look at the tweet. “Wrongly reported a downward trend.” That’s a pretty heinous accusation, especially considering the trend is in actual fact measurably downward. The best they could have reasonably said was that the chart showed a different downward trend than the actual downward trend.

The LA Times headline:

But the current, fixed, undisputed numbers also make reopening look safe, because some amount of phased reopening is safe according to the accurate numbers. The graphs above wholly meet the counts required for the CDC Phase 1 gating criteria for reopening, possibly Phase 2. The LA Times article goes on to strongly infer that anyone who thinks the numbers are dropping is guilty of “mass delusion,” when in fact we know the numbers outside the 14 day reporting window are solid as concrete, and show a drop. Scroll up, it’s right there.

Who’s deluded again? It is all easily verifiable Fake News.

Why the False Narrative?

Identifying false narratives is boring. If that’s all we did here, we’d have ten articles a day and they wouldn’t be particularly interesting to read. What’s much more interesting to analyze, is why these false narratives take hold, from a social dynamics standpoint.

First, remember the media are not paid to tell the truth. They are not paid by the fact, they are paid by the click. The most clicks come from viral traffic, which means the stories get shared on Facebook, within echo chambers whose human members signal their virtue by sharing articles. This is not a behavior specific to the red or blue tribes, it is universal. The most traffic comes from articles which are maximally controversial, which divide the nation into equal halves, because they will create the most arguments. In this way, social media acts as an analogue to an artificial neural network which tunes the news itself to make people mad at each other, and the news obliges because that is how the news makes money. This ugly self-reinforcing system has been unpacked here many times in the past few years, so for more reading on that topic, pick a link:

Put simply, the media are arms dealers in the culture war. To understand why today’s spat of fake news erupted, we need to understand the culture battle landscape.

In March, everyone in the western world was sold a bill of goods called “flattening the curve,” wherein we quarantine the healthy (a brand new thing humans have never done before) to make sure that intensive care units weren’t so flooded we would end up in triage. Most of us bought into this during the Italy wave, thinking that we’d be tamping the curve down some but would probably still end up in some amount of triage, as the wave washed through the public and the dust settled by the end of the year. Nobody thought it would work as well as it did, given the early dire projections, including me.

A very large number of people bought into a short term lockdown to keep from having to watch stacks of bodies pile up on TV, but significantly fewer people bought into a lockdown that would last the one to two years necessary to develop a vaccine. And once the economic impacts started to flow in, and we suddenly found ourselves in an unemployment hole that could take 17 years to dig out of, the number of “lockdown for a year” supporters really dwindled.

Don’t believe me on 17 years? Just do it graphically:

The recovery slope for unemployment is about the same for the last three recoveries, 1990, 2001, and 2007. If we started recovering today at the same slope, it would take 8.5 years. If unemployment doubles from here, as the Fed thinks it might, 17 years. Mankind may not have experienced this level of economic uncharted territory since the flooding of Atlantis.

But the “stay at home” crowd has two big problems which prevent them from changing their opinion. First, they hate Trump, and anything Trump says must automatically be wrong, so as soon as Trump says something like “Open up!” they equate it with other things he says, like “Bleach” and “Covfefe.” In this way, Trump leads them around on a leash without them realizing it.

The other problem is this. Since the invention of social media, opinions have become sticky. You can’t change your mind about anything because changing your mind is hypocrisy, and that’s the highest sin in the internet, cancel culture world. Further, our ingroup and outgroup are now signalled with agreeance with a prevailing group narrative, and nobody wants to get kicked out of their group. Instead, they have to double down, and find some article to virtue signal to their tribe that they’re still loyal to it.

Again, this is not specific to the red tribe or blue tribe. They both behave this way.

In this environment people are either choosing “reopen” because the curve has been verifiably flattened and they don’t abide by the goalposts being moved, or are choosing “reopen” because the economic impacts are legitimately terrifying, or are choosing “reopen” because they understand that running this thing for 18 months is impossible, or perhaps even choosing “reopen” because they like Trump. A “stay at home” person is going to have a tough time of it on Facebook as the curves flatten, so they desperately need something to share to signal their loyalty to the group. Two weeks ago they were all sharing The Atlantic’s “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice!” article, which I won’t bother to link because The Atlantic doesn’t deserve the traffic for that salacious garbage. What to share today? They can’t share the GA DPH numbers.

The AJC and LA Times and NY Post and (curiously) Reason.com gave them something to share. Because real or fake, the job of the “news” is to generate clicks. I can’t even criticize them for it at this point, quite honestly. They’ve got to keep food on their table with fake news or they’ll be scrounging for breadcrumbs while the unemployment funds run out. It’s getting scary out there — don’t be a player hater.

Epilogue

Covid-19 isn’t going to go away, and the slope of the decline in Georgia is probably going to gradually flatten out as people return to normal activity. It might even go back up some, especially as testing becomes more prevalent. The ICUs are probably going to get a bit of a bump sometime soon, but won’t become full or in triage. The trough before this bump could be as soon as May 10 in the Georgia DPH numbers. With any luck, some combination of government and voluntary efforts will settle on a new normal of reduced vector transmission without insane overreactions. All of that is pretty positive.

The “stay at home” crowd are going to scream bloody murder on social media the moment the cases per day flatten out to a steady state, and blame a bunch of dead people on the “reopen” crowd. The “reopen” crowd is going to point at the tremendous economic damage done, and blame it all on the “stay at home” crowd. Some people in third world countries will probably starve to death because of the USA cratering our food exports, but we won’t pay any attention to them because they don’t drive clicks. In the event of domestic food shortages or hyperinflation due to our reaction, some people might take up arms to feed their kids or defend their bags of rice from looters, in which case the “reopen” crowd will blame the violence on staying at home, and the “stay at home” crowd will blame the guns, or capitalism itself. There’s your Summer Facebook Feed.

And then once all those horses are in the barn, we get to have the most divisive election of our lives. That should be a hoot.