Social media's booming 'armchair expert' culture is dangerous

• Since the start of the pandemic, more and more people are acting like 'armchair experts' on Twitter.
• Social media has democratized our access to information.
• But the prevalence of fake experts and educated guesses can spread harm when those guesses are wrong.
• Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist and the author of the upcoming book "TikTok Boom: China, the US and the Superpower Race for Social Media."
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

The twists and turns of the coronavirus pandemic have been a frantic enough ride as it is, but trying to imagine what it would have been like in a pre-social media era seems mind-boggling.

While the ability to connect with friends has helped me through the darkest days of the pandemic, it isn't what I'm most grateful for on social media. Rather, social media has kept me aware of the epidemiology and the general direction of the coronavirus throughout the last 12 months. Without it, that careening journey full of hairpin turns would have been done blindfolded.

My Twitter feed has changed since March 2020; it is now populated by a small cadre of scientists with tangential expertise in the field of coronaviruses who confidently tweet out threads full of graphs that provide a general sense of where we're at in the progression of the pandemic. The reams of information I've consumed have turned me, like many others, into an armchair epidemiologist. But this is worrying because a false little information can do a lot of harm.

Rise of armchair experts

Access to science and experts is good. As a journalist, I've long told friends the best part of the job is the ability to call up anyone in the world - no matter how big their cachet - and ask them to talk under the premise of a professional conversation. Social media, and the public service many of the world's experts on infectious diseases have provided through it, allows the public to plot their own course through the pandemic.

The problem, however, is that all the compasses are calibrated differently. I realized this when I followed a new scientist expostulating on the pandemic last weekend - a statistics professor at Bristol University in the UK. I followed him because mutual friends on the platform had shared some of his tweets, and his common sense approach to the pandemic - promising to share things whether they were good news or not - seemed smart.

But then I realized the real reason I followed him is that I was feeling particularly buoyant about the progress of the UK's fight against the pandemic, and he had tweeted a chart that reflected my thoughts at that given moment with the requisite amount of caution that things could change quickly. Bluntly, I was picking my expert to suit my mood at the time.

Had I felt more pessimistic, I could undoubtedly have found a virologist, an epidemiologist, or a statistics professor who matched my sentiment at the time and found reassurance in their thoughts. That's the point of science: people theorize about how the world works and then test those theories to see whether they hold up. But historically, we've not seen the behind-the-scenes conversation. Educated guesses are being made in public, to massive audiences without enough evidence to prove their merits.

Sometimes scientists are right, and sometimes they're wrong - which is why scientists follow the scientific method before presenting their research. But when they're wrong in the middle of a massively transmissible pandemic, the stakes are pretty high. Because there's still so little we know for sure about COVID-19, scientists more often than not are at least partially wrong.

For example, pity the followers of the British cancer specialist with an abnormally large Twitter profile who has proclaimed almost as many times as I've had hot meals over the last year that the pandemic is nothing to worry about, is almost over, or has disappeared - always to be proven wrong, but never to be silenced from making his next bold prediction from the pretense of 'expertise.'

We're all just guessing

I've changed my own horse in the race multiple times over the pandemic. Some people's predictions are too pessimistic for my mood at the time, while others appear too buoyant as I watch people begin to mingle and case rates begin to rise. In my heart I know that we're all guessing - albeit many of these Twitter experts are guessing from a position of far superior knowledge than the random reply guy. But when you're entering your 13th month without real human contact, it can be easy to get carried away and take predictions as gospel.

Navigating the pandemic's cruel progression without any kind of lodestar would be almost impossible. Governments, particularly in the UK, have shown themselves willing to sacrifice human lives for the health of the economy, and so can't be trusted to tell the truth about where the science sits on things like transmission and health outcomes. But the range of predictions from the scientific community, including many who have expanded their area of expertise beyond the subject that gave them the letters "PhD" or "MD" after their name, is equally bewildering.

As a tech journalist I've long reported on the worries of political polarization, and the role social media plays in that. For several years now we have had people on either end of the political spectrum, who get their news and information from social platforms, living in entirely parallel universes, unmoored from the anchor of reality and objective fact. The ability to pick your own news to suit your own opinions, even if it isn't actually true, is a development that helped cause the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol.

The sheer breadth of opinions on the progression of COVID-19, all accessible within a single click on Twitter, allows people to choose their own path through the pandemic. It's possible to find experts who think the risk is real and those who believe we should be out and socializing - both of whom are presented as equally valid and experienced in the eyes of Twitter and its audience.

While the ready availability of this information is in many ways a major boon, it is also a considerable worry because like many of those who marched on the Capitol, the COVID deniers, armed by "scientific fact" on Twitter are also carrying a deadly weapon. But it's not slung over their shoulder, it's within their lungs.

We're in this mess of conflicting information because of the ability for people to pick their own experts and chart their own course for how the pandemic is progressing. The next time this comes around, we should ask why we're selecting certain experts to retweet to millions of users on our timelines, and whether we're doing so because we believe what they're saying is scientifically right, or just what we want to hear.