COVID-19 INFLUENCERS

Social media is one of the most powerful tools we have to course-correct the Covid-19 pandemic. Absent clear or adequate risk-assessment tools from leadership, social media facilitates a way to share accurate and non-judgmental information to the wider public so people can begin to truly understand Covid-19 risks and what they actually can do about it, right now. What's more, social media can give the communication of difficult information a human face, and a compassion so desperately needed when so many are being ignored, left behind, made to seem disposable, or forgotten about entirely. All in an information environment that's determined to gaslight at-risk (and even low-risk) communities, communities that are only growing as a result of pandemic denial. Social media facilitates us to fight disinformation with humor and facts, to reach a dizzyingly wide spectrum of people of all ages and abilities in the way they prefer to consume information; to model prevention, safety successes, and hope; and to show an increasingly divided and isolated public that they're not crazy, and they're definitely not alone. That their fear, their suffering, their worries about what Covid-19 inaction means for our futures, and their grief is all real. Making sense of Covid-19 information is impossible for many. It's not their fault. But it gives bad actors from all quarters an attack surface ripe with easy opportunities -- and we can change this. For communicating Covid-19 facts and safety, social media has been underestimated at every turn; from the power, reach, and sway of disinformation, to the vastly, abysmally underused potential of social media to do the opposite -- to turn this pandemic around, to unite people around shared goals, and to be the tool with which we can forge an inclusive path to the other side of Covid-19, together.