In my recent blog post Sun Tzu, CoVid, And Healthcare Executives, I suggested that healthcare executives don’t understand the current CoVid battlefield. We are no longer fighting CoVid in the lab, we are fighting it on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.
Here are two recent articles to demonstrate this:
The first, The online competition between pro- and anti-vaccination views, published in May 2020, suggests that activists against vaccination are dominating this space because of their network architecture: “Although smaller in overall size, anti-vaccination clusters manage to become highly entangled with undecided clusters in the main online network, whereas pro-vaccination clusters are more peripheral.”
The second article, a smaller one (still in pre-publication), AstraZeneca vaccine disinformation on Twitter, suggests that professional sources (possibly country actors?) are actively amplifying concerns about vaccines within the social media digital space as they displace trusted media sources.
Although the Nature article is the stronger of the two, both of them have one thing in common. They are using terms such as coordination networks, edges, nodes, clusters, Jaccard similarities, and snowballing methodology—terms used in network theory and topology, not terms commonly employed by most healthcare executives.
And that’s a problem.
Why?
Because these terms of topology and network theory represent the weapons being used on the current Covid battlefield.