Truth decayVirality Project (US): Marketing Meets Misinformation

Pseudoscience and government conspiracy theories swirl on social media, though most of them stay largely confined to niche communities. In the case of COVID-19, however, a combination of anger at what some see as overly restrictive government policies, conflicting information about treatments and disease spread, and anxiety about the future has many people searching for facts…and finding misinformation. This dynamic creates an opportunity for determined people and skilled marketers to fill the void - to create content and produce messages designed to be shared widely.

One recent example was a video called “Plandemic”, a slickly-produced video in which a purported whistleblower mixed health misinformation about COVID-19 into a broader conspiratorial tale of profiteering and cover-ups. Much like the disease it purports to explain, the video traveled rapidly across international boundaries in a matter of days.

Plandemic was one step in a larger process to raise the profile of its subject. SIO had begun to observe an increasing number of posts about Plandemic’s subject, Judy Mikovits, beginning on April 16. For two and a half weeks, we observed a series of cross-platform moments in which Judy Mikovits – a scientist whose work was retracted by journal editors – was recast as an expert whistleblower exposing a vast government cover-up. While it was the “Plandemic” video that propelled her to global notoriety, weeks of planned activity led to its rapid virality.

We analyzed 41,662 posts on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter starting April 15, when anti-vaccine and natural health Facebook pages began to promote Mikovits and her new book. While she had been an anti-vaccine conference speaker for years, social media dynamics suggested that Mikovits’s narratives were now being marketed for far larger mainstream audiences. While most of the early content related to Mikovits stayed within these echo chambers, a well-oiled PR machine propelled the discussion of her claims into larger communities like MAGA and QAnon, which eventually eclipsed the anti-vaccine and natural health communities in sheer volume of posts.

The “Plandemic” trailer was released on May 4th. We gathered data until May 17; by that point, news media and fact-checking organizations had addressed the misinformation for U.S. audiences, but it had begun to spread internationally. In this post, we discuss not only the community dynamics of the spread, but some dynamics of the debunking, offering a look at the lifecycle of a coordinated campaign to create a counter-authority figure and drive a political and economic agenda.