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CJR: The many coronavirus conspiracy theories (good read)
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/coronavirus_conspiracy_theories_plandemic.php
By Jon Allsop, CJR
MAY 15, 2020
ON FEBRUARY 2, more than a month before the World Health Organization deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, it declared that the virus had led to a “massive infodemic.” WHO observed “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A few months later, the infodemic has only intensified. Conspiracy theories are sloshing around the internet, alleging, among other wild claims, that China deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, that the US military implanted the virus in China, that Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to microchip the world’s population, and that the virus is spreading via 5G technology. Often, right-wing media outlets have boosted the signal; last week, for example, One America News Network, an outlet beloved of Trump, implicated Gates, George Soros, and the Clintons in a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.” Sometimes, the White House has been the booster. We all remember bleachgate.
Early this month, a viral YouTube video brought some of these strands together. The video—a clip from a “documentary” called Plandemic—starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims, among other things, that wearing a face mask can actively make you sick, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suppressed her work on the harms of vaccines. (There is zero evidence for any of this.) The video was promoted aggressively by anti-vaccination activists and by adherents of QAnon, a convoluted deep-state conspiracy theory; the Epoch Times, a right-wing media outlet with ties to Falun Gong, also boosted Mikovits’s message. This week, Davey Alba, of the New York Times, reported that mentions of Mikovits on social media and TV have “spiked to as high as 14,000 a day.” Facebook and YouTube eventually removed the video, but not before it reached millions of users. Erin Gallagher, a social-media researcher who charted the video’s spread, concluded that “both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.” According to Anna Merlan, of VICE, Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube and Google staffer who now has ties to QAnon and anti-vaxxers, helped orchestrate the video’s virality.
The Mikovits video reached at least eight million people, and it may only be a small taste of conspiracies to come. Kevin Roose, who covers technology for the Times, writes that he was watching the clip from Plandemic when a “terrifying thought” struck him: “What if we get a COVID-19 vaccine and half the country refuses to take it?” Roose sees a number of reasons why a future COVID vaccine could play into the hands of propagandists—it’ll likely have been fast-tracked, adding rocket fuel to existing vaccine-safety fears; it’ll likely be mandatory, at least for certain groups, boosting anger about perceived government overreach; and anti-vaxx boogeymen, including Gates and the WHO, may end up being closely involved in its development. The anti-vax movement, Roose writes, is highly organized and media savvy. By contrast, the messaging of authoritative official health sources can be clunky and poorly suited to online discourse. As Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote in a recent column for The Atlantic, “All too often, the people responsible for protecting the public do not appear to understand how information moves in the internet era.”
The pandemic is particularly fertile ground for conspiracists. There is not, as yet, an authoritative, established scientific consensus about the virus and its spread, leaving wide informational gaps for nonsense to fill. And the fact that the coronavirus is, as I wrote in March, an “everything story,” affecting every single aspect of our lives, lends itself conveniently to a conspiracist’s habit of thinking in terms of sweeping theories with unifying explanatory power. Yesterday, The Atlantic launched “Shadowland,” a series of pieces, on themes broader than the coronavirus, examining America’s vulnerability to paranoid thinking. In an introductory note, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes that “the conspiracy theorists are winning.” That, he believes, poses an “existential threat.”
</snip>
By Jon Allsop, CJR
MAY 15, 2020
ON FEBRUARY 2, more than a month before the World Health Organization deemed the spread of COVID-19 a pandemic, it declared that the virus had led to a “massive infodemic.” WHO observed “an overabundance of information—some accurate and some not—that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it.” A few months later, the infodemic has only intensified. Conspiracy theories are sloshing around the internet, alleging, among other wild claims, that China deliberately engineered the virus in a lab, that the US military implanted the virus in China, that Bill Gates wants to use vaccination to microchip the world’s population, and that the virus is spreading via 5G technology. Often, right-wing media outlets have boosted the signal; last week, for example, One America News Network, an outlet beloved of Trump, implicated Gates, George Soros, and the Clintons in a “globalist conspiracy to establish sweeping population control.” Sometimes, the White House has been the booster. We all remember bleachgate.
Early this month, a viral YouTube video brought some of these strands together. The video—a clip from a “documentary” called Plandemic—starred Dr. Judy Mikovits, a discredited scientist who claims, among other things, that wearing a face mask can actively make you sick, and that Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, suppressed her work on the harms of vaccines. (There is zero evidence for any of this.) The video was promoted aggressively by anti-vaccination activists and by adherents of QAnon, a convoluted deep-state conspiracy theory; the Epoch Times, a right-wing media outlet with ties to Falun Gong, also boosted Mikovits’s message. This week, Davey Alba, of the New York Times, reported that mentions of Mikovits on social media and TV have “spiked to as high as 14,000 a day.” Facebook and YouTube eventually removed the video, but not before it reached millions of users. Erin Gallagher, a social-media researcher who charted the video’s spread, concluded that “both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral medical misinformation.” According to Anna Merlan, of VICE, Zach Vorhies, a former YouTube and Google staffer who now has ties to QAnon and anti-vaxxers, helped orchestrate the video’s virality.
The Mikovits video reached at least eight million people, and it may only be a small taste of conspiracies to come. Kevin Roose, who covers technology for the Times, writes that he was watching the clip from Plandemic when a “terrifying thought” struck him: “What if we get a COVID-19 vaccine and half the country refuses to take it?” Roose sees a number of reasons why a future COVID vaccine could play into the hands of propagandists—it’ll likely have been fast-tracked, adding rocket fuel to existing vaccine-safety fears; it’ll likely be mandatory, at least for certain groups, boosting anger about perceived government overreach; and anti-vaxx boogeymen, including Gates and the WHO, may end up being closely involved in its development. The anti-vax movement, Roose writes, is highly organized and media savvy. By contrast, the messaging of authoritative official health sources can be clunky and poorly suited to online discourse. As Renée DiResta, a researcher with the Stanford Internet Observatory, wrote in a recent column for The Atlantic, “All too often, the people responsible for protecting the public do not appear to understand how information moves in the internet era.”
The pandemic is particularly fertile ground for conspiracists. There is not, as yet, an authoritative, established scientific consensus about the virus and its spread, leaving wide informational gaps for nonsense to fill. And the fact that the coronavirus is, as I wrote in March, an “everything story,” affecting every single aspect of our lives, lends itself conveniently to a conspiracist’s habit of thinking in terms of sweeping theories with unifying explanatory power. Yesterday, The Atlantic launched “Shadowland,” a series of pieces, on themes broader than the coronavirus, examining America’s vulnerability to paranoid thinking. In an introductory note, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, writes that “the conspiracy theorists are winning.” That, he believes, poses an “existential threat.”
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