For almost two decades, as our politics fractured and misinformation flourished, multiple social media networks were emerging to provide a lightning-fast pathway for even the most asinine propaganda to spread.

Social media has enabled widespread deceit to infect the bloodstream of American society, poisoning our politics and enabling pathological collective delusions that are shared by millions of people on obscure conspiracy theory platforms as well as mainstream networks like Facebook, X and all the rest.

This super-spreader superhighway changed everything. There is the false antifa narrative that shot through social media during and after the insurrection of January 6th, which showed that social media is unrelenting even on our darkest days.  This was also proven in the agonizing weeks in 2020 when Americans — during the Covid-19 crisis and subsequent economic turmoil — were enraged and broken-hearted over the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis.  Instead of bringing the country together in the midst of chaos and grief, social media firms enabled what is the equivalent of bomb-throwing.  Instead of promoting productive discourse, they allowed hundreds of false, inflammatory posts to metastasize.

Some posts said George Floyd wasn’t even dead at all.  Others claimed that Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota police officer charged in Mr. Floyd’s death, was actually an actor paid by the “deep state” and that George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, was funding the protests.

This poor guy.  We don’t know where the conspiracy crazies got hold of his name, but for years he has been one of their favorite villains. Sid Miller, the agriculture commissioner of the great state of Texas, seemed to speak for all of them when he said, “I have no doubt in my mind that George Soros is funding these so-called ‘spontaneous’ protests.  Soros is pure evil and is hell-bent on destroying our country!” 

During the week after Mr. Floyd’s death, George Soros was mentioned in 34,000 tweets.  On YouTube, over 90 videos in five languages were posted detailing various Soros conspiracy theories.  He was mentioned in 72,000 posts on Facebook.  Together, the ten most active Facebook posts about George Soros were shared over 110,000 times.

To see exactly how these lies spread, let’s take a look at what happened with the 26-minute video called Plandemic.

Plandemic is a video that promotes misinformation about the coronavirus, falsely blaming a shady ring of scientific and political elites for manufacturing the virus to increase their power and bank accounts.  The goal of the film, in the filmmaker’s words, is to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system” (think big pharma, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization — and, naturally, poor George Soros).

In a grave tone, the Plandemic narrator says, “Now, as the fate of nations hang in the balance, Dr. Mikovits is naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all human life in danger.”  Dr. Mikovits is Judy Mikovits, who the filmmaker calls “one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation.”  In reality, Judy Mikovits is a long-discredited virologist who claims that the aforementioned shadowy elite cabal is trying to bury her brilliant scientific theories.

In the video, Mikovits says that face masks actually “activate” the virus and that Covid-19 vaccines will surely kill millions of people — never mind that none had even been introduced at that time the video was filmed.

She also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci — the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and another favorite villain of the crazies — of killing millions of people during the HIV/AIDS crisis.  Mikovits claims that it was she who was instrumental in discovering HIV but was put in jail for her scientific research by…wait for it…the aforementioned shadowy cabal of elites.  In reality, she was put in jail for stealing proprietary information from a laboratory that had fired her.

Among many (many) others, Science magazine “fact-checked the video.  None of these claims are true.”  The article then walks through every discredited claim — exhaustively, point by point — to prove it.

When Plandemic was first posted on May 4, 2020, it stayed on the fringes of the Internet for a few hours, circulating through conspiracy theory and anti-vaccine forums.  However, pretty quickly, it crossed over into the mainstream.  The New York Times analyzed how exactly Plandemic blasted its way across the Internet.  Here’s what they found: In less than a day after the video’s creator Mikki Willis uploaded the video, a QAnon Facebook group posted the video for its almost 25,000 members.  From there, 1,660 people shared the video to their own pages.

 

At around the same time, Dr. Christiane Northup jumped into the fray. Northup is an obstetrician-gynecologist who was once a “medical expert” on Oprah but who now encourages her followers to look into QAnon and continues to insist that Covid-19 was nothing more than a plot by the “Deep State” to depopulate America. She considers vaccines “crimes against humanity” and calls the Centers for Disease Control a “death cult.”  In one of her podcasts, she told her audience that “we are, indeed, at war. It is good versus evil. Dark versus light.”

 

After watching Northup’s nightly ten-minute videos at the height of the pandemic, Jonathan Jarry — a biological scientist at McGill University, a research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada — said, “In this parallel universe, there are Indigo children, time travelers from the future, and geomancers performing acupuncture on Mother Earth by moving rocks around. Rarely have I witnessed such a smorgasbord of gobbledygook from someone who once had an active medical license.”

 

In any event, Northup shared the Plandemic video with her nearly 500,000 followers. From there, over 1,000 people shared the video.  By the evening of May 4th, Plandemic hit the Reopen Alabama Facebook page.  Reopen Alabama is a group that was, in the early days of the pandemic, advocating for shelter-in-place orders to be lifted.  At the time, the group had 36,000 members and was linked with other Reopen America groups around the country.  From there it spread like wildfire.

Soon, the video hit the Facebook page of Nick Catone, a professional mixed martial arts fighter and vocal anti-vaccine activist.  Over 2,000 of his almost 70,000 followers “liked” the video.

The following day, Melissa Ackison, a candidate who ran in the Republican primary for Ohio’s 26th District Senate seat (she lost), posted the video on her Facebook page for her 20,000 followers.  Now the video was in the political mainstream, making its way to Republican groups around the Web.

By May 7th, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook had removed Plandemic for violating their misinformation policies but, once again, the damage was done.  In a little more than a week after Mr. Willis posted the video, it had been viewed over 8 million times across social media networks.

The story of how Plandemic stormed the Internet shows just how fast misinformation can spread — and just how difficult it is to get the toothpaste back in the tube — but nothing illustrates this better than what was discovered after Donald Trump got kicked off the social networks.  This is actually pretty hard to believe, but it’s true.

After Donald Trump and several of his closest allies were booted from Twitter two days after the January 6th Capitol riots, Zignal Labs found that online misinformation about election fraud fell — get this! — 73 percent.  SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT.

“Election fraud” mentions plummeted from 2.5 million to 688,000 across social media platforms.  The hashtag #FightforTrump fell 95 percent, and #HoldTheLine and the phrase “March for Trump” dropped over 95 percent.

During the week of November 16, 2020, every single one of the twenty most-engaged Facebook posts that included the word “election” came from Donald Trump.  Every single one of them were also slapped with a false or misleading warning by independent fact checkers.

Over a four-week period beginning in mid-October 2020, Avaaz — a nonprofit organization that promotes global activism — analyzed 95,546 Facebook posts that included “voter fraud” in some way.  Collectively, these posts were liked, shared or commented on almost 60 million times.  Their analysis revealed that only 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of the 60 million interactions. That’s just extraordinary.

After analyzing over 55,000 online media stories, 5 million tweets, and 75,000 posts on public Facebook pages, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University found that “Fox News and Donald Trump’s own campaign were far more influential in spreading false beliefs than Russian trolls or Facebook clickbait artists.”

 

In another analysis, the Election Integrity Partnership found that “posts from just 20 users were the source (original tweet) for approximately 20 percent of all of the retweets in their dataset.  This means that a small number of accounts was responsible for a large portion of the spread of misleading election-related information.”

And the Donald Trump disinformation train didn’t stop at elections.  A study by Cornell University found “that media mentions of Donald Trump within the context of Covid-19 misinformation made up by far the largest share of the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation.  Trump mentions comprised 37.9 percent of the overall misinformation conversation, well ahead of any other topics.”

The researchers concluded that former president Donald Trump “was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation infodemic. Only 16.4 percent of the misinformation conversation was ‘fact checking’ in nature, suggesting that the majority of Covid misinformation is conveyed by the media without question or correction.”

These results are even more telling given that many conservatives are convinced that social media networks are drowning in political bias — against them.  That’s just false.  Right-wing users drove far more engagement than left-wingers in the 2020 election, a fact that a Facebook executive acknowledged in an interview with Politico weeks before the race. The reason the political right has higher interactions rates is simple, the Facebook executive said.  Their content is better at hitting visceral trigger points:  “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” the executive said, because the content triggers “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by engaging on such topics as “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.”

The Politico article continues, “In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, the Facebook posts with the most engagement in the United States most days — measured by likes, comments, shares and reactions — were from conservative voices outside the mainstream media: Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, David Harris, Jr., Franklin Graham and ‘Blue Lives Matter,’” according to the Facebook-owned tool Crowdtangle.  “Trump’s personal page also regularly made the top of the list, in effect allowing him to become a publisher in his own right and navigate around the traditional media.”

The level of this impact is greatly enhanced by people like Guo Wengui, the Chinese real estate developer whose yacht Steve Bannon was on when Bannon was arrested for fraud.  

At the time, a report from Graphika (a social media intelligence firm) called Ants in a Web revealed that “Wengui is at the center of a vast network of interrelated media entities which have disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns. Graphika has identified thousands of mostly-authentic social media accounts associated with this network which are active across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Gab, Telegram, Parler, and Discord.”

Although the network primarily focuses on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and anti-CCP dissidents, it also “acts as a prolific producer and amplifier of mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about Covid-19, and QAnon narratives.”  The report says that “in the second half of 2020, content from the Guo media network was increasingly prevalent in the American right-wing social media environment.  Activity within the Guo network spiked in the run-up to the November 2020 U.S. presidential election.”  Read the report here.

There are real-life consequences to this reality.  Research conducted by the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce found that “the more time someone spends on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes...What’s more, Facebook usage is five times more polarizing for conservatives than for liberals.  This evidence suggests Facebook indeed serves as an echo chamber, especially for its conservative users.”

“Facebook and Reddit shape the news consumption of their conservative users in dramatically different ways.  In months when a typical conservative visited Facebook more than usual, they read news that was about 30 percent more conservative than the online news they usually read.  In contrast, during months when a typical conservative used Reddit more than usual, they read news that was far less conservative — about 50 percent more moderate than what they typically read.”