Elon Musk and Twitter Blue subscribers are boosting RFK Jr. anti-vax conspiracies to millions

• Prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for president as a Democrat.  
• Kennedy has been repeatedly suspended from Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube for spreading misinformation.
• But on Elon Musk’s Twitter, Kennedy’s conspiracy theories are boosted by paid subscribers.

Before he announced his candidacy for president in April, it seemed that anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his slew of conspiracy theories would remain consigned to the fringes of political debate.

He told attendees of a “health policy roundtable” his campaign hosted last month with a variety of anti-vaccine personalities that the mainstream media had ostracized him.

“I’m somebody who could not get on the press for 18 years,” said Kennedy, who has compared pandemic-era public-health measures to Nazism, claimed chemical exposure is causing people to identify as transgender, and said at a campaign event last week that COVID-19 is proof that governments are building bioweapons to target racial groups.

Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have repeatedly suspended RFK Jr. and the accounts he’s associated with for spreading misinformation about vaccines and the COVID-19 pandemic. (For his part, Kennedy has said he is not an anti-vaxxer, but he has sown doubt about the safety of vaccines by calling for more studies on links between vaccines and conditions, including autism.)

But on Twitter, where he has more followers than on all other platforms combined, RFK Jr.’s misinformation has thrived, amplified by a host of Twitter Blue subscribers whose tweets are algorithmically boosted into other users’ feeds.

Twitter Blue subscribers pay $8 a month for a suite of features, including an edit function and the ability to write lengthier tweets. But most significantly, their tweets are prioritized by Twitter’s ranking algorithm, meaning they appear higher in users’ feeds.

Twitter Blue subscribers also receive a blue checkmark next to their name. Before CEO Elon Musk rolled out Twitter Blue last year, only users manually verified by Twitter staff received a blue check, usually because they were political figures, celebrities, or news media.

A blue check “used to signal actor authenticity,” four researchers from NewsGuard, an app that assesses the reliability of media sources, concluded in an April study showing that Twitter Blue subscribers were spreading conspiracy theories. “Now, it’s a way for peddlers of misinformation to appear trustworthy.”

An Insider examination found more than 20 Twitter Blue subscribers with follower counts ranging from 180,000 to 1 million users who have spread RFK Jr.’s conspiracy theories to tens of millions of people in the past two months, according to Twitter’s metrics.

A Twitter spokesperson, when asked to comment, auto-replied with a poop emoji. Kennedy’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

The tweets come from right-wing and anti-vaccine activists whose accounts have been penalized by other social media platforms. They include the anti-vaccine activist Del Bigtree, who previously sued YouTube and Facebook for suspending his accounts from their platforms; Dr. Robert Malone, who rose to prominence discrediting the COVID vaccine; and Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, who was suspended by a Houston hospital for spreading vaccine misinformation to her patients and online, including tweets promoting the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19.

Bigtree and Malone did not respond to requests for comment. In a text message after the publication of this article, Bowden wrote that her tweets “are all based on first-hand knowledge from seeing thousands of patients with COVID, long-haul COVID and vaccine injuries. I have been defamed, censored and retaliated against for speaking out about what I’m seeing.”

They also include anonymous accounts like The Vigilant Fox, Chief Nerd, and KanekoaTheGreat, all previously suspended from Twitter for spreading misinformation. In the past week, tweets from those three accounts alone showing support for RFK Jr., including repeating the bunk theory that COVID-19 targets certain ethnicities and repeating calls for Kennedy to debate a prominent vaccine scientist, have received more than 15 million views, according to Twitter’s metrics.

Kennedy, who has 1.9 million Twitter followers, is also a Twitter Blue subscriber.

Musk, who unveiled Twitter Blue last year after purchasing the company for $44 billion, has emerged as an RFK Jr. booster, along with other Silicon Valley elites. Musk hosted a bizarre two-hour-long Twitter Spaces last month in which RFK Jr. pronounced that the rise in mass shootings is linked to antidepressant use, implied that pharmaceutical companies are to blame for COVID deaths, and thanked Musk for “reclaiming democracy.”

Twitter in the Musk era has become an incubation tank for misinformation, propelled in part by Twitter Blue subscribers, according to researchers at the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate.

The center found more than one-quarter of the tweets with the most engagement from Twitter Blue subscribers contain misinformation. On Twitter, anti-vaccination and conspiracy theorists have celebrated the reinstatement of accounts previously banned for spreading misinformation.

“The Twitter blue tick used to be a sign of authority and authenticity, but it is now inextricably linked to the promotion of hate and conspiracism,” Center for Countering Digital Hate president Imran Ahmed said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Twitter does not act on complaints about Twitter Blue subscribers’ tweets in 99% of cases, the nonprofit found.

Insider identified blue-check Twitter accounts amplifying Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s conspiracy theories by examining Twitter’s database of tweets flagged for review as possibly containing misinformation.

However, none of the tweets spreading misinformation that the Insider reporters reviewed ended up with a community note or warning label attached.

July 19, 2023 This story has been updated to include comment from Dr. Mary Talley Bowden.