Read on Twitter
Thread, on my twitter COVID campaign experience. My first campaign on twitter really got going on 1st March and was aimed at trying to alert the West to the notion that life would need to substantially change. At the time I had a bit over 1000 followers, mostly scientists.
Despite many being infectious disease geneticists, few had knew what was going to hit them. Sorry to single @AdamRutherford (who works on humans not microbes) out but he doing book tours and posting rather jokey threads until it literally did hit him, and he ended up in hospital.
but full credit to Adam, he was quickly back to his normal form with this tweet: https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1241823316761026560
UK policy was very well summed up at the time by this tweet. https://twitter.com/NorthmanTrader/status/1237393224714481667 I felt that I was entirely out of step with all but a handful of the people in my twitter feed.
My twitter turned gradually in the first two weeks of March, culminating on 15th march with the one and only thread in which I went viral. This was about the folly of herd immunity and got me on @mrjamesob, which is the interview I am definitely most proud of. Dramatic moment.
I had also tripled the number of my twitter followers and attracted my first troll, who was a baroness. https://twitter.com/DanielFalush/status/1239426044085637121 @Baroness_Nichol I wonder what you think of all of this now. Genuinely curious.
Actually, I have to say that my overall experience on twitter has been positive. A great deal of stubborness but not too many committed or persistent trouble makers. Often it is close colleagues who take the most mental energy to cope with...
This was also the time, not uncoincidentally where government attitudes and actions really started to change.
My second twitter campaign began on 2nd April. I could see that the lockdown was agreed upon and up and running but that it was not properly organized to reduce transmission or to facilitate a non-catastrophic relaxation further down the road.
This one has also been a slow sell, with no viral threads but done better with the journalists who now follow me on twitter and this week, appeared in the @Telegraph, and @BBCWorldatOne
And there was a really informative article based on an interview with me in @TheSun https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/11446816/proud of getting into the Sun, especially since I was not called a boffin. Maybe attitudes to science and to scientists will really be changed by this.
And there is a lot more about contact tracing and isolation in my twitter feed at least and UK finally has a plan to recruit lots of teams of contract tracers. The sooner central quarantining followers the better.
A 2-3 week lag between life needing to change and people getting their heads around doing it seems to be a natural feature of current communication networks.
For myself, I try to say something distinctive, so after this thread am still happy to do media interviews explaining the most effective Chinese strategies, especially with @mrjamesob , but will focus more fully on my bacterial genomics research, at least till I have a new angle.
To do science communication really effectively you have to hammer on shamelessly about the same thing for ages, and... its not quite me, or so I like to think. Fin.
