Donald Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis sparks explosion of conspiracy theories

Facebook said on Friday, local time, that it immediately began monitoring misinformation around the President’s diagnosis and had started applying fact checks to some false posts.

Twitter, meanwhile, was monitoring an uptick in “copypasta” campaigns about Trump’s illness. “Copypasta” campaigns are attempts by numerous Twitter accounts to parrot the same phrase over and over to inundate users with messaging, and they are sometimes signals of co-ordinated activity. The social media company said it was working to limit views on those tweets.

But nearly 30,000 Twitter users had retweeted a variety of conspiracy theories about the news by Friday morning, according to an analysis by VineSight, a tech company that tracks online misinformation.

Roughly 10,000 of those retweets touted the drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID-19, as a treatment for the President. Another 13,000 retweets were related to a QAnon conspiracy theory that the President is going into quarantine while mass arrests of high-profile politicians like Trump’s former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are carried out, according to the company’s analysis.

Most of the conversation was coming from unverified accounts on Twitter, said Gideon Blocq, the CEO of VineSight.

“A lot of them seem very happy about what’s going to happen because they think Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested,” Blocq said of the QAnon accounts.

Misinformation was not only promoted in the fringe spheres of the internet but by everyday social media users as well, said Shane Creevy, head of editorial at Kinzen, an Ireland-based company that works to monitor misinformation online.

“The conspiracy part of the internet is like outside the mainstream, but even among regular users we are seeing quite a lot of crazy thinking pushed out there from people who should know better,” Creevy said.

Other social media users were suggesting that Trump’s diagnosis is a hoax aimed at generating sympathy among voters or even getting out of the next presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

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That speculation shows up in Facebook comments on news stories about Trump.

“It is a lie,” one Facebook user wrote on a TV news network’s post about Trump, calling it a “Strategy to not debate Biden anymore.”

Similar posts making the groundless claim were shared hundreds or thousands of times online.

“Is Trump faking COVID to avoid narcissistic injury of losing the election?” one Twitter user asked in a post retweeted more than 4000 times on Friday morning.

Clint Watts, a disinformation expert with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, published a report in July describing one or both of the candidates contracting COVID-19 as a scenario for prompting an onslaught of disinformation in the campaign.

“The biggest reason why this is a disaster is because there are no trusted information sources remaining that have not been undermined by the President,” he said.

The news is also ripe for foreign and domestic internet instigators to exploit in a disinformation campaign, and opens the door for people to unwittingly spread misinformation, said Cirone, the Cornell professor.

She predicted that internet users will share video clips of politicians coughing or appearing ill to prematurely claim that they have tested positive for the virus.

In fact, social media users have already employed a similar strategy when they shared video clips of Biden coughing during an event in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to suggest he was sick. The video resurfaced again – getting more than 160,000 views on Twitter by Friday morning – with social media users suggesting that Biden either infected Trump or had caught the virus from Trump during the debate. Biden and his wife tested negative on Friday for the virus.

“Individual citizens shouldn’t amplify any speculation,” Cirone said. “Nefarious actors are banking on the (likelihood) that citizens will be very concerned about this and accidentally spread fake news.”

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In perhaps a sign of what’s to come, state-backed Russian television channel RT tweeted a story suggesting that Biden’s prolonged coughing from the debate raised concerns for the former vice-president after Trump’s test. In the last presidential election, Russia launched an online misinformation campaign with bogus social media accounts that aimed to sway US voters’ opinions in the race, and there are signs that the Kremlin is at it again.

Watts said Russian-backed accounts are mostly only trolling the president and the White House so far, but they are just getting started – especially given that the President has only begun his quarantine.

“They are going to position all sorts of conspiracies or amplify American conspiracies,” Watts said.

AP