Sharing an article, post, or meme on social media with the intent to influence public perception to perceive a statistically rare event as a common event. The cognitive bias behind this fallacy is the availability heuristic that causes us to have a skewed perception of reality based on specific examples that easily come to mind.
Examples:
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, there was much debate on reopening schools. Like with many issues, there was a strong partisan split where liberals were mostly against sending kids back to school, and conservatives were mostly for sending kids back to school. Several of my liberal friends commonly shared stories about kids getting sick, including this story posted with no comment nor argument: Health officials in Georgia confirmed this week that a 7-year-old boy with no underlying health conditions has died from the coronavirus, the youngest fatality from the pandemic in the state so far.