"...imagine if a team of researchers from a prestigious scientific institution infiltrated the COVID skeptic community to expose their scientific ignorance . . . and instead ended up discovering that the skeptics by and large care more about science—and are more knowledgeable about the scientific process—than their critics?..."
"...Guess what? You can stop imagining, because that's exactly what just happened.
In this case, the researchers are from MIT, and their paper, "Viral Visualizations: How Coronavirus Skeptics Use Orthodox Data Practices to Promote Unorthodox Science Online," was published with little fanfare this past January...."
..."Arguing that anti-maskers simply need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed and inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: users in these communities are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production that they recognize as markers of scientific expertise. If anything, anti-mask science has extended the traditional tools of data analysis by taking up the theoretical mantle of recent critical studies of visualization."...