Once we received the New Media Ventures email, we sent out a quick, informal survey on social media to understand how people were relating to COVID-19 media. We asked them what narratives they had seen about COVID, which narratives they thought were most believable, and which they thought were least believable. We asked them where they got their news media, and we asked them about their consumption habits.

Within this survey, we also asked people what could the pros/cons of consuming the same/different information about COVID-19 could be. The questions were open-ended, some of the surveys used a lot of the same language, for example the % of “same page” responses actually used the term “same page.” Others were responses that fit into the categories below.

Overall, people see more unity, better decisions, and collective understanding can be achieved if we’re consuming the same information, but that information - if wrong - could lead to collective bad decisions, limited diversity of ideas, and other bad outcomes. The benefit of consuming different ideas includes increased diversity of ideas and the ability to discover what’s right, while consuming different information could lead to confusion, susceptibility to misinformation, and lack of cohesiveness.