The problems didn’t end there, though. Feigl-Ding hadn’t known that by the time he tweeted about the paper, the researchers had already lowered their estimate to 2.5. And R0, for that matter, is not the be-all and end-all of the danger of a virus. Some highly transmissible diseases are not actually that dangerous. Other experts chimed in to chide his characterizations (and some of his Harvard colleagues talked directly to him, he told me). One epidemiologist, Michael Bazaco, quote-tweeted Feigl-Ding and proclaimed, “This is fearmongering hyperbole, and borderline public health malpractice.” The tone was clearly not straight out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nor was the form of the tweets.
When Jabr began to add up all the issues, he realized that he should create his own corrective thread. “I decided to counter with a thread that filled in the missing context and collated some of the known facts at the time, along with their sources,” he said. “By the next morning, both our threads had been amplified, but his had still been RTed and liked at least twice as many times.”
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Source: China Coronavirus: How Misinformation Spreads on Twitter – The Atlantic