Nicole Vella

"Social media has created a landscape where anyone can be a journalist. Services like Twitter and Facebook allow the individual to spread unchecked, unverified, and false information to the many. When the individual holds a position of power, the false information is given validity. The twitter account of Donald Trump has over 88 million followers. With retweets and sharing, every message he sends out on the platform is seen by hundreds of millions of people. The MAGA Times is a data visualization of #MAGA and Covid-19 data within the USA. Any activity happening on the @realDonaldTrump account is streamed in real time and styled as newsprint. On top of this is an illustration of Donald Trump, blind to what's happening. Every 10 to 30 seconds the current tweet is spoken with text to speech synthesis and highlighted as a headline in the newsprint. We can calculate how many COVID-19 related deaths happen per minute in the United States with data from Open Disease Data. Using this value as a timer, a drop of blood falls onto the newsprint every time someone dies of COVID-19. The result is a jarring visualization of how often people are dying from COVID-19 juxtaposed by a never-ending stream of tweets related to or sent by Donald Trump. An illustration of people continuously spreading #MAGA messaging are seemingly oblivious to the reality around them. Data: Open Disease Data (https://disease.sh) & Twitter (https://developer.twitter.com) Image: ""Under Control"" by Brian Stauffer (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/09)"