The Wall Street Journal's Deepa Seetharaman wants us to know that while poor billionaire Bill Gates has 'long been a target for online trolls,' that 'the social-media attacks have intensified' as the Micrrosoft co-founder and World Health Organization (WHO) benefactor has become the left's de-facto coronavirus czar.

Seetharaman suggests that the attacks have increased due to Gates's angry criticism towards President Trump, who halted funding to the WHO due to the organization's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and its allegiance to China.

In the 24 hours after Mr. Gates’s comments, his Twitter account was mentioned at least 270,000 times—more than 30 times more than average—mainly by angry supporters of President Trump, according to Clemson University researchers. Mr. Gates’s Instagram post from April 5 drew an additional 45,000 comments in that same 24-hour period. The post now has more than 225,000 comments. -WSJ

Perhaps the 'conspiracy theorists' are having a little trouble digesting the fact that Gates - whose vaccine efforts in India were blamed for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children - coincidentally hosted an October, 2019 high-level 'pandemic simulation' in New York called Event 201 which specifically focused on coronavirus and projected over 65 million deaths worldwide.

Combine that with Gates' recent comments about mass vaccination and biometric identification in order to 'open up' the country and allow people to attend mass gatherings - an idea which Dr. Anthony Fauci said "has merit," and so-called conspiracy theorists have plenty of dots to connect.

In a new interview, Bill Gates authoritatively states that mass public gatherings will not come back "at all" until we have mass vaccination. Who made him king of the world? https://t.co/siW7bZ9yGc … pic.twitter.com/ivaCI8eAEl — Alternative News (@NewsAlternative) April 4, 2020

MIT is working on a "quantum tattoo" that will mark you with an invisible identifier while also delivering a vaccine. Can you guess who is the premiere donor of the project? https://t.co/ZEWqCUVGwI pic.twitter.com/jFVip4DaqZ — Roosh (@rooshv) April 4, 2020

According to the Journal, "social-media platforms remain fertile ground for virus-related conspiracies and online harassment, despite repeated pledges by the companies to crack down on such activity."

So - Gates is being harassed and nobody is stopping these thought criminals with their menacing opinions. And of course, 'bots' are also being blameed for amplifying 'conspiracy claims' - since there can't be that many real humans with bad things to say about Mr. Gates.

"I’ve never seen a time where more mis- and disinformation has flowed than this coronavirus period," said Univsity of Texas assistant professor Sam Woolley, who has 'studied disinformation for nearly a decade.'

Some antivaccine activists and conspiracy-minded posters encouraged their followers across social media to attack Mr. Gates on Instagram, a form of harassment called “brigading” in which people coordinate attacks and hijack conversations online, according to a review of accounts. This week, one Instagram account told its 52,000 followers that “it wouldn’t be a bad thing for all of us to go visit Bill Gates Instagram and let him know what you think.” A spokeswoman for the Gates Foundation declined to comment. -WSJ

According to the report, Facebook is now "looking at this behavior carefully to determine whether it violates our policies. People on our services are allowed to speak freely, and do so in an organized way, but we remove accounts that are fake or designed to mislead," and will begin notifying users who have engaged with what they deem misinformation that they've been hoodwinked by bad actors in cyberspace.

How nice! Maybe Facebook will hire someone from the Gates foundation to do their fact checking?