Well this article is couched in terms of the pandemic. It would be interesting to see some studies to tease out political biase media outlits during election season. Does the size of a crowd influence the perception of popularity?
Same for protests. Watch them on the news vs. the twitch streamers. looks like a war zone at 6PM but at 2:30 AM it looks like a few people in an intersection.
People are extremely bad at estimating how many people there are in crowds (respectively in pictures of crowds). Traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc.) tend to be pretty honest about it from my experience but on social medias pictures of protests are almost always instrumented to make it appear as though something had way more support than it actually has.
And I'm not talking about sligh misjugdments, I'm talking being off by one order of magnitude.
In your typical picture of a protest taken with a smartphone from a high-rise building there is at most 5 to 10k people in the shot. Yet you'll often find such pictures on social medias labeled "100s of thousands in the street protesting for [whatever]".
And for someone who's not particularily paying attention it's easy to be manipulated because we really have no frame of reference for what thousands of people look like, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands.
