Advertisement
Supported by
the media equation
Dr. Tufekci, a PC programmer who became a sociologist, issued an initial warning about the need for protective masks. It’s not the first time you’ve been right about something big.
By Ben Smith
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans in January that they didn’t want to wear masks, Dr. S. Vincent Rajkumar, professor at the Mayo Clinic and editor of the Blood Cancer Journal, could not hear . . .
But he remained silent until Zeynep Tufekci (pronounced ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee), a sociologist he had met on Twitter, wrote that the CDC had made a mistake in saying that face protectors deserve to be worn by fitness workers, but not through people.
“Here I am, editor-in-chief of a newspaper at a high-level institution, but I didn’t have the courage to say it just didn’t make sense,” Dr. Rajkumar told me. “Everyone wears masks. “
Dr. Tufekci, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Bibliotechology with no epidemiology scores, opposed the CDC’s recommendation in a tweet storm on March 1 before presenting his reviews in a March 17 opinion article for the New York Times.
The C. D. C. replaced his brain in April, advising all Americans over the age of 2 to wear a mask to stop the spread of coronavirus. Michael Basso, a senior fitness scientist at the firm who had pressed internally to present the mask, told me that Dr. Tufekci’s audience complains about the company’s “turning point. “
In recent years, many public voices have been wrong about the important things: election forecasts, the effects of virtual media on American politics, the threat of pandemics. Tufekci, a forty-year-old woman who speaks a mile consistently with minutes with a slight Turkish accent, has none of the attributes of a prominent education or pro-existence, but long before she became consistent with perhaps the only intelligent amateur epidemiologist, she had quietly become accustomed to being right about the important things.
And the good fortune of Dr. Tufekci and others like her to see, obviously, in our troubled age, represents a kind of revenge of the nerds, because the foreigners of American politics and the tension of Silicon Valley to align the cash and ideology see what those inside do not see. .
In 2011, he opposed the current by saying that arguments in favor of Twitter as an engine of broad social movements had been simplified to the extreme, and in 2012 he warned the media that his school shooting policy could motivate more. In 2013, he argued that Facebook could only boost ethnic cleansing, and in 2017 he warned that youTube’s council rule set could be used as a tool for radicalization.
And when it comes to the pandemic, he sounded the alarms early as he struggled to keep parks and beaches open.
Advertisement