Viral misinformation misinformation

I wasn’t going to post about this, but I’ve seen two good Kiwi journalists retweet versions of this today already and I’m having a sense of humour failure about it.

A US public relations company did a phone survey. They don’t describe the methodology very clearly (a bad sign), but suppose we assume for the sake of argument that it was competent.  They don’t given the exact question they asked (also a bad sign), but their conclusion was

• 38% of beer-drinking Americans would not buy Corona under any circumstances now

Ten years ago, I lived in the US and would have counted as a ‘beer-drinking American’ for phone survey purposes.  I would probably have answered ‘Never’ to a question on whether I would buy Corona.  Strictly speaking, that might have been an exaggeration (and let me point you to one of the great 1980s Australian beer ads as a possible counterexample), but as far as I recall I didn’t ever buy Corona.

Lots of ‘beer-drinking Americans’ don’t buy Corona because they don’t like the flavour or because it’s advertised for a different social group, or whatever. It wouldn’t be surprising if that came to 38% who always preferred Bud or Molson or Coors or Mirror Pond Pale Ale or PBR.

The survey also asked people who usually drank Corona (clearly a minority of the respondents) whether they would still drink it. 4% said no. Unless your survey is exceptionally well conducted, that’s down at the level of alien abductions and lizard people.

The CNN story also referred to a YouGov survey that said the ‘intent to buy Corona’ was at the lowest level in two years. Here’s the graph

Intent to buy Corona is down about one percentage point from Christmas and maybe two-tenths of a percentage point from October.

While I’m on the topic, I’d like to point out the Infodemic blog. It goes into great detail (with animated gifs and so on) on simple ways to fact-check claims about coronavirus — or anything else.   It’s the same sort of techniques that I use in writing StatsChat, but Mike Caulfield explains them patiently and carefully and I just try to show how I use them.