The Absurd Reason ‘Covid-19 Is a Lie’ Ended Up Trending on Twitter

It wasn’t because people believed it

People gathered at Huntington Beach, CA, to protest coronavirus closures on Friday, April 17, 2020. Photo: Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register/Getty Images

On April 17, a protester in Huntington Beach, California, was photographed holding a white sign that said, in ultra-bold capital letters, “COVID-19 IS A LIE.” The protester was clad from head to toe in personal protective gear.

The absurd dissonance between the protester’s words and actions made the photograph a hit on Twitter, where critics of the Trump-backed “liberate” protests circulated it as an example of the movement’s hypocrisy. “Can’t make this stuff up,” tweeted progressive political YouTuber Bryan Tyler Cohen, drawing more than 20,000 favorites. “Okay I’m done,” another viral tweet deadpanned. “Conservatism in 2020: Whatever is smart, we’re against it,” snarked another.

People had such a field day sharing the image that the phrase “Covid-19 is a lie” began to climb the ranks of Twitter’s trending topics, cracking the top five in California. Now the phrase “Covid-19 is a lie,” sans context, was pinned to the Twitter homepage for millions of users. Naturally, many assumed that claim was trending because people were tweeting it in earnest. They added their own exasperated tweets to the pile, driving it further up the charts.

It’s the latest example of a phenomenon that threatens to undermine Twitter’s efforts to contain an outbreak of coronavirus misinformation, while making the anti-science movement seem more influential than it really is. To address it, Twitter would have to invest more in a curation team that often seems overmatched by the algorithms it’s trying to rein in.

Twitter, like Facebook and other social networks, has taken a hard line (by social media standards) against coronavirus misinformation, implementing more aggressive policies on the grounds that falsehoods about a pandemic can be matters of life and death. And yet here Twitter’s own software posted a blatant and dangerous falsehood for all to see. Anyone who clicked into the topic could glean that it was mostly making fun of that falsehood, but the popularity of tweets railing against it makes clear that many users did not.

This is not the first time Twitter’s trending topics have played this role. In the 2020 U.S. Democratic primary, divisive hashtags such as #NeverWarren trended nationally, fueled in large part by tweets expressing outrage at the hashtag. The more popular it became, the more people saw that it was trending and expressed condemnation, inadvertently stoking the trend.

The trending algorithm’s “circular logic,” as Whitson Gordon put it in OneZero last year, can have real consequences. Bernie Sanders’ campaign was dogged by criticism of his online supporters’ boorish behavior, and while some of that was real, the backlash-driven trending topics made it seem more widespread. In turn, some media outlets treated the trending topics as newsworthy in themselves, bringing the narrative to wider swaths of the public.

On April 18, the phrase “fire Fauci” trended for similar reasons, and the hashtag #FireFauci has trended separately on two other occasions. Some of the initial “fire Fauci” tweets were from right-wingers calling for the top doctor’s ouster from the Trump administration. But once that ball got rolling, it gained momentum from Fauci defenders who were furious about it. In the most recent instance, three of the top four tweets containing the phrase were criticizing it, and two of them were arguing that it was tantamount to endangering lives. The irony, of course, is that they were more responsible for its trending than most of the people who actually believed it.

“It’s like some weird autoimmune response, where the response far exceeds the need to respond.”

Some researchers have labeled this phenomenon “accidental amplification.” But that makes it sounds like a careless mistake by users, as opposed to a vicious cycle that’s essentially built into the platform. Renee DiResta, research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory and an expert on misinformation, sought a better way of describing it. “It isn’t quite rage-trending or meta-trending,” she mused. “It’s like some weird autoimmune response, where the response far exceeds the need to respond.”

When it happens, DiResta said, it opens a marketing opportunity for charlatans and opportunists who can reach a wider audience by glomming onto the trend. For instance, the anti-vaxx doctor Shiva Ayyadurai — who is also notorious for claiming to have invented email — has repeatedly used the #FireFauci hashtag to boost his own profile among the anti-science crowd. And the top tweet in the most recent “fire Fauci” trend came from Rashid Buttar, a doctor in North Carolina who pushes chelation therapy as a cure for autism and cancer. Those doctors already had their own sizable Twitter audiences, but a top tweet in a trending topic can bring a windfall of new followers. And the topics create the perfect Venn diagram for someone like Ayyadurai to loop anti-Fauci sentiment into the broader anti-vaccine movement.

Twitter says it’s aware that trending topics can be fueled inadvertently by counter-speech and is working on ways to better signal that to users when it happens. “We’re working to add more context to trends so the full story/situation is easier to see up front,” spokesperson Liz Kelley tweeted in response to a tweet from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac on Friday.

Twitter clarified to OneZero that it already adds context to some trending topics. When the trend revolves around a particular link, that link will appear directly beneath the topic’s name, inviting users to click through to the original story. Other times, Twitter will create a Moment — a curated series of tweets on a given theme — to go with a trending topic, and that Moment will appear under the topic name. A spokesperson acknowledged that didn’t happen in the case of the “Covid-19 is a lie” trend.

At root, the problem is a familiar one for Twitter and other internet platforms: The humans they employ to curate and moderate are overwhelmed by the speed and scale of their software and user base. One way to fix that is to hire more humans. Another is to constrain the software.

In 2016, Facebook faced a firestorm over charges that its human editors were applying a political slant to the stories they selected for that social network’s “trending” module. It responded by firing the journalists who had been doing that work and relying on software to surface trends without any added context. The results were glaringly bad and at times laughably inscrutable; eventually Facebook got rid of its trending section altogether.

That path may have been tenable for a company focused on connecting friends and family. Ditching trending topics seems less likely for Twitter, whose core purpose is to keep up with current events and memes. So it makes sense that Twitter would focus instead on improving it.

As is often the case with Twitter, it just doesn’t seem to be moving very fast. The company declined to say how many people are on its curation team, but it seems safe to say it isn’t nearly enough to manually contextualize every trending topic in every country, or even all the problematic ones.

A more realistic solution in the short term might be to prioritize the most sensitive types of trends, such as those pertaining to elections or public health, over those that involve sports or entertainment. And in the medium term, don’t be surprised if Twitter finds more ways to automate at least a semblance of context, such as by surfacing related topics or showing which accounts are driving the trend. There might also be hybrid solutions that allow humans to add context more quickly, such as finding and pinning one explanatory tweet to a topic rather than building a whole Moment around it.

Adding context does seem like the right approach, DiResta said. If people could see at a glance that “Covid-19 is a lie” was trending as an example of a protester’s stupidity, they’d be spared a spike in blood pressure and the compulsion to tweet their own outrage at the trend. At the same time, opportunists might be deterred from trying to capitalize on the topic by associating themselves with it. And no one would be misled into thinking that “Covid-19 is a lie” is a more popular sentiment than it really is.