Death threat, profanity led this KY health agency to stop COVID-19 Facebook updates
Three months after Joshua Embry became Grayson County’s public health director, COVID-19 besieged Kentucky, upending daily life for everyone and shoving him into a public-facing role he hadn’t planned for.
But Embry, who had just left a behind-the-scenes corporate health care job, leaned in. Almost overnight, many in the community of roughly 27,000 started deferring to his department’s social media for information and guidance. How fast was the virus spreading in their county? How many people were dying? Were there any local hot spots?
Like many other local health departments across Kentucky, his team began releasing daily coronavirus dispatches on its official Facebook page. In the spring, Embry, himself, started appearing in front of the camera to give those updates and answer questions. Literally putting his face out there seemed to offer some comfort to his neighbors, many of whom were stuck at home, anxious about what was happening outside.
But that began to veer earlier this summer, when it seemed like virus fatigue gave way to frustration and, in some cases, aggression. After a run-of-the-mill video update in late August in which dozens of offensive and explicit comments had to be deleted by staff, one commenter cussed Embry and his team out, accused them of “fear-mongering,” and then threatened to “come kill people like you.”
In this video, Embry gave the number of new cases, said it likely indicated community spread, and reminded everyone to keep social distancing and masking up in public.
With full staff support, Embry decided to stop most daily social media updates about COVID-19. “Due to aggressive comments toward staff at GCHD, inappropriate comments unsuitable for others to read, the GCHD will cease releasing COVID-19 data on our social media accounts,” he wrote on Facebook on Aug. 21. It’s now given daily to local media outlets to share.
“It’s definitely not the way I would have envisioned [this job] to be,” Embry said last week on the phone.
Persistent underfunding dogged Kentucky’s public health system — which is, by nature, non-political — long before the coronavirus, forcing Embry, like dozens of other directors, to make do with available resources. But as the virus has become more politicized and fringe theories are fanned, including by President Donald Trump, many in public health are finding themselves bumping up against a new, time-consuming demand: correcting the record for people peddling misinformation and, at times, policing their threatening and offensive language.
In a Facebook post on Aug. 1, staff at Three Rivers District Health Department, which covers Carroll, Gallatin, Owen and Pendleton counties, wrote, “It is a real slap in the face to our exhausted folks to accuse us of deception.”
It continued, “Three Rivers’ understaffed, overworked workforce is trying really hard to respond to the public’s request for information in the format requested, only to be accused of misrepresentation of the data no matter how we report it!”
Jenny Cummings, community health educator on Embry’s team, oversees the department’s social media presence. Pre-COVID, she poured her energy into information campaigns, including school abstinence and safe-sex programs, raising awareness about human trafficking, and the importance of vaccinations.
Now, her work revolves mostly around the coronavirus. It was her job to post these updates to social media and then monitor the posts for profane content. It took up a lot of her time.
“Any time we made a post, it would be a whole day’s worth of fielding comments, even into the next day,” she said last week by phone. “That’s not time well spent. For us, emotionally, it was a distraction, and we have so much work to do.”
Cummings was monitoring comments on the day the death threat was made. She ultimately decided to delete Embry’s update because of the stir it was causing.
“I did it off and on for a couple of hours. I would just delete and delete, and then finally I sent a text to Josh saying, I don’t want to step out of bounds at all, but I’m going to delete this post because the comments we’re getting are terrible,” she said.
Throughout the pandemic, the majority of commenters on the Grayson County department’s Facebook page have been encouraging — “I so very much appreciate you & your staff keeping us informed,” one woman recently wrote.
But in June, amid that gratitude, Embry and his team started noticing simmering anger from others; some people had grown weary of kowtowing to an invisible virus while others refused to believe it posed a threat.
“That’s when people really started to turn sour towards a lot of things that had to do with COVID,” Embry remembers. “Their willingness to tolerate [the virus] definitely vanished,” and it became “too political.”
Around that time, many people began widely protesting the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. By July, as protests continued and Kentucky’s economy reopened, more people questioned without cause the credibility of state and local health department data.
Others baselessly claimed Embry’s team was in political cahoots with the state, lying as part of a larger conspiracy to hide the real truth: that Democrats are embellishing the severity of the virus for political gain. As one commenter recently put it, “There is only one cure for the election infection, and that’s waiting till after November 3rd.”
Embry and Cummings found themselves the gatekeepers of hyper-politicized, oftentimes flat-out false accusations. Since it was time-consuming to monitor these posts, Embry developed a tiered numerical ranking system to help his staff decide when to engage with a commenter, when not to, and when a comment was egregious or offensive enough to warrant deleting.
Tier one meant it was a legitimate question easy enough for the department to respond to; two was more skepticism from a commenter who wasn’t hostile and still potentially could benefit from a staff response.
If a comment was blatantly baseless and it didn’t seem much would be accomplished from engaging, staff deemed it a tier three and left it alone. Tier four was “not only a hostile comment, but it was offensive, and if Facebook hadn’t removed it yet, we were going to remove it,” Embry said.
He isn’t alone in this balancing act of needing to inform the public while monitoring social media trolls intent on sowing discord and distrust. At the Lake Cumberland District Health Department, which includes 10 counties in Southern and Eastern Kentucky, Director Shawn Crabtree said he finds that “people are often driven by misinformation.”
“We get trolled everyday,” Crabtree said, and though he tries to tune it out, “it’s amazing how many people think I’m in some worldwide conspiracy right now.”
In Grayson County, since the daily updates stopped nearly three weeks ago, the department’s social media is “less toxic,” Embry said. But the rancor isn’t gone completely.
Last week, the department logged a record number of new COVID-19 cases from community spread. On Sept. 9, staff posted a link to the health department’s website on Facebook to highlight the difference between quarantine and isolation. A person who tests positive must isolate, while an individual with direct exposure to a person who’s positive is quarantined.
Below that post, before it was deleted, a commenter wrote, “Kentucky dept of health is run by Andy puppets, piss on all of you.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2020 at 2:08 PM.
