Doctor Mike

So much of it is what's called unconnected content, the algorithm just deciding that this is something serendipitously you might like to see.

And your experience is so fundamentally different than somebody who's sitting right next to you.

So it can be quite different on certain types of issues.

Again, even 10 years ago, when we were doing this vaccine bill in California,

I wrote up, I presented this at the CDC, at a conference at the CDC, when they were like, how did you guys get this bill passed in California?

And we did a little, you know, we gathered a bunch of Twitter data from the hashtag for the bill, which was SB277, the hashtag for the bill.

And, you know, the hashtag was overwhelmingly anti-vaccine.

And yet there were things like, I don't remember the stats off the top of my head now because it was a decade ago, but, you know, some very, very, very small number of accounts produced, you know, 25% of the tweets, right?

Just that there's this like 99-1 rule in social media, 90% of the accounts do nothing, 9% produce some of the content, 1% produce the majority.

So that question of like, who were the highly vocal accounts?

What are they talking about?

that really shapes your sense of where opinions are, what is normal, what is appropriate.

So there's just a lot of different ways in which you can have a perception that is not in line with reality.

When small numbers of accounts shape what you see, algorithms curate and rank it for you, and then large numbers of people either don't talk or, you know,

quietly go about their day and just acknowledge that it happened on their own and yeah and this is where again you see 85 of people um vaccinate their kids and this and in california i think um the senators at the time were doing polling for the bill and it was polling quite high at the time in california

And social media conversation was overwhelmingly negative because again, anti-vaxxers from all over the country were participating in the SB 277 hashtag.

So Texas, you know, all of the, because they were, they're very, very good at galvanizing, yeah, mobilizing.

And so you had a lot of people who were not Californians weighing in on a California bill.

And that also tilts the perception of the conversation.

I think I wrote about that video.