Illustration by Grayson Blackmon

On March 20th, an article about the novel coronavirus started to spread. “Evidence over hysteria — COVID-19” crystallized a viewpoint conservatives had been hawking for some time: the hysteria over the virus was overhyped. The United States needed to reopen the economy.

To a non-expert, the argument sounded compelling. The author, Silicon Valley growth hacker Aaron Ginn, used Johns Hopkins data to make his point. On Medium, the piece blended in with fact-checked articles from doctors and epidemiologists, until it was debunked in an eviscerating tweet thread by an actual infectious disease expert, Carl T. Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington. Shortly after, it was taken down.

In many ways, this was Medium working…

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