Early in the COVID-19 pandemic—well before much of the public understood the extent of the crisis—large numbers of mainstream Facebook users had already become entangled with online communities opposed to best-science guidance, undercutting confidence in expert guidance on everything from masks to vaccines.
That’s the finding of a new study led by Neil Johnson, a physics professor at GW’s Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, that mapped global Facebook conversations starting in December 2019. The researchers also found almost identical online behavior in the case of monkeypox.