“It has all the elements of what we warn people about,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “People yelling and screaming, chanting, exerting themselves all of those things provide opportunity for the virus to spread, and this virus takes those opportunities.”
“If you wanted to organize an event to maximize the spread of covid it would be difficult to find one better than the one we witnessed yesterday,” said Jonathan Fielding, a professor at the schools of Public Health and Medicine at UCLA. “You have the drivers of spreading at a time when we are bearing the heaviest burden of this terrible virus and terrible pandemic.”
Listen • 5:47
:gos of US social networking websites Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, displayed on smart-phone screen. (Denis Charlet/AFP via Getty Images)
Twitter and Facebook have blocked Trump’s accounts for 12 hours after the president’s baseless claims of a stolen election stoked insurrectionists to storm the Capitol on Wednesday.
Those insurrectionists also used social media far-right message boards, like Parler to organize the violence, as many critics wonder why warning signs were not taken more seriously.
Host Tonya Mosley speaks with
Ramesh Srinivasan, professor at the University of California Los Angeles’ Department of Information Studies, about the president’s connection to social media.
December 11, 2020
UCLA In the News lists selected mentions of UCLA in the world’s news media. Some articles may require registration or a subscription to view. See more UCLA In the News.
The year 2020 has been the worst in the lives of pretty much everyone you know. Imagine, then, in this darkest of clouds, spending your days studying silver linings. That’s the job of Daniel Fessler and Stacey Freeman, two academics who head UCLA’s Bedari Kindness Institute, a new multi-disciplinary program.
“The state has higher unemployment than in the U.S. overall, and the state is due to grow faster than the U.S. once restrictions are lifted and the pandemic is in the rear-view mirror,” UCLA Anderson Forecast economists Jerry Nickelsburg and Leila Bengali wrote. (Also: City News Service, MyNewsLA, Bloomberg, KCRW-FM and KPCC-FM’s “AirTalk.”)