Facebook is letting Russian and Chinese state-controlled media push the false Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory
Since the invasion, right-leaning Facebook pages have posted 336 times about the conspiracy theory and have earned almost 500,000 interactions on these posts. In fact, right-leaning pages account for nearly 60% of posts about the conspiracy theory that were posted by politics and news Facebook pages, and they have earned nearly 60% of total interactions.
Many of these posts are from right-wing media outlets and personalities, including six of the 10 posts with the most interactions. The post from right-leaning pages with the most interactions is Fox host Tucker Carlson’s post with video of him pushing the theory on his show. (Carlson has pushed the theory on his show multiple times.) His Facebook video has over 310,000 views.
Facebook boasts that it has taken action to curb Russian propaganda about its invasion of Ukraine, but the platform is still allowing the propaganda to thrive, including in ads that even earn revenue for Facebook and the other parties.
Methodology
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled a list of 1,773 Facebook pages that frequently posted about U.S. politics from January 1 to August 25, 2020.
For an explanation of how we compiled pages and identified them as right-leaning, left-leaning, or ideologically nonaligned, see the methodology here.
The resulting list consisted of 771 right-leaning pages, 497 ideologically nonaligned pages, and 505 left-leaning pages.
Every day, Media Matters also uses Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool and this methodology to identify and share the 10 posts with the most interactions from top political and news-related Facebook pages.
Using CrowdTangle, Media Matters compiled all posts for the pages on this list that were posted from February 24 through March 20, 2022 and were related to the Ukraine-US biolabs conspiracy theory. We reviewed data for these posts, including total interactions (reactions, comments, and shares). One post that was a false positive was removed from the final dataset.
We defined posts as related to the Ukraine-U.S. biolabs conspiracy theory if they had any of the following terms in the message or in the included link, article headline, or article description: “Ukraine bio-lab,” “Ukraine bio lab,” “Ukraine biolab,” “Ukrainian bio-lab,” “Ukrainian bio lab,” “Ukrainian biolab,” “bio-lab in Ukraine,” “bio lab in Ukraine,” “biolab in Ukraine,” “Central Reference Laboratory,” “level-3 bio-safety lab,” “Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program,” “Odessa-based laboratory,” “biowarfare lab,” “Victoria Nuland,” “biological research facilities,” “bio-lab,” “biolab,” “bio lab,” “biolabs,” “bio-labs,” “bio labs,” “biological lab,” “biological labs,” “biological research,” “bio-safety,” “biosafety,” “biowarfare,” “bioweapons,” “bio-warfare,” or “bio-weapons.”
