Late last month I did an interview with GQ about technology and the coronavirus pandemic. “This is a little bit flippant,” I told the reporter, “but in terms of closing things down for public health, one of the big boosts they could make would probably be shutting down Twitter.” I don’t fully believe this anymore. Though Twitter is still overrun with toxic anger and fear-based nonsense (now more than ever), it is also, in one crucial way, beginning to play an important role in our response to the pandemic. But it needs help.
Let’s start with what’s going right: So-called Expert Twitter seems to be rising to the occasion. Pandemics are immensely complicated, and understanding them requires knowledge from obscure technical fields, like epidemiology, genetics, virology, and immunology. Identifying smart ideas and leading experts in these niche subdisciplines is a daunting objective. Twitter is helping.
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Cal Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University and the author of Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (2019).
The platform’s commercial success is built on its eerily effective ability to filter through the avalanche of content generated by its 330 million users to find those gems that prove irresistible. It accomplishes this in a manner that’s largely agnostic to what the tweets actually say. The service’s timeline algorithm takes into account your relationship to the tweet’s author—not just whether you follow them, but also how often you like or retweet them—as well as the engagement the particular tweet has been generating from others. It combines these metrics to find tweets that fall into that perfect intersection of your affinities and sticky communication. In normal times, this algorithm serves to make Twitter almost destructively addictive. During the pandemic, however, when our affinities have turned toward a desperate craving for useful information, the dynamics of this algorithm now serve a crucial purpose: helping to surface otherwise hard to find niche experts.
It’s how, for example, so many now know about Trevor Bedford (@trvrb), a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute, who’s usi
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