Controversial understandings of the coronavirus pandemic have turned data visualizations into a battleground. Defying public health ofcials, coronavirus skeptics on US social media spent much of 2020 creating data visualizations showing that the government's pandemic response was excessive and that the crisis was over. This paper investigates how pandemic visualizations circulated on social media, and shows that people who mistrust the scientifc establishment often deploy the same rhetorics of data-driven decisionmaking used by experts, but to advocate for radical policy changes. Using a quantitative analysis of how visualizations spread on Twitter and an ethnographic approach to analyzing conversations about COVID data on Facebook, we document an epistemological gap that leads pro-and anti-mask groups to draw drastically diferent inferences from similar data. Ultimately, we argue that the deployment of COVID data visualizations refect a deeper sociopolitical rift regarding the place of science in public life. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in visu alization; Visualization theory, concepts and paradigms; So cial media; Ethnographic studies.

Although expansions of state secrecy and the countervailing leaks of classified documents imbue the anthropology of secrecy with urgent relevance, secrecy has a long-standing status as a paradigmatically anthropological topic. In the ethnographic record, initiatory secrets often stand for the quiddity of culture, and the revelation of concealed realities is an organizing trope in much ethnographic writing. While situating research on secrecy as a reflection of epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural anthropology more broadly, this review simultaneously explores parallels between different anthropological traditions by focusing on descriptions of the media through which social relations involving secrecy are transacted. Attending to ethnographic accounts of the way secrets travel across different media and coexist simultaneously in various mediated states provides both a novel intellectual framework for surveying recent research and a basis for conceptualizing the anthropology of secrecy itself as a practice that involves intermedial and transmedial knowledge flows.

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How do people negotiate commitments to engaging in joint activity