  Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data
visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health officials,
coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data
visualizations showing that the government's pandemic response was excessive
and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic
visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust
the scientific establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven
decision-making used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes.
Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an
ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook,
we document an epistemological gap that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw
drastically different inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that
the deployment of COVID data visualizations reflect a deeper sociopolitical
rift regarding the place of science in public life.
