WIRED

The world is in the grip of two major outbreaks. The first is Covid-19, the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and has so far infected more than 93,000 people. The second is the wave of misinformation that has followed in its wake.

This second outbreak – which includes rumours about bat soup, bioweapons and 5G masts; mindfulness, garlic cloves and Vitamin C injections – has led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to create a new term to refer to the phenomenon: an “infodemic”.


This fake news has spread through “cure” books on Amazon, WhatsApp viral texts, and even the mainstream media. Now, according to data taken from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks the diffusion of viral stories, a small army of Facebook fringe groups are following suit and pivoting to a new hot topic: coronavirus misinformation.

The posts, which are filling innocuous Facebook groups normally dedicated to political discussions and flight deals, are a strange evolution of conspiracy theories that have been knocking around the internet for years. One much-mooted theory, for example, is that the coronavirus has been caused by radiation from 5G masts. One of these posts, on Smart Meter Health problems UK, garnered 191 reactions, 188 comments and 86 shares – eleven times the normal amount for the group.

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The group Stop 5G U.K, created to air concerns about 5G, is responsible for many of these rumours. CrowdTangle shows it is the fourth ranking group in coronavirus posts over the last week – with 89 posts and 4,695 reactions. Claims coming out of this group vary from China trialling vitamin c therapy as a Covid-19 cure and that the whole outbreak is a cover story and the deaths are really caused by 5G.

Other Facebook groups keen on coronavirus conspiracies include “We Support Jeremy Corbyn”, “I’M A BREXITEER” and the “Jacob Rees-Mogg Appreciation Group”, with hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of reactions. These posts incorporate political conspiracies – for instance, one post on the “We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook” group, states that “people have bugs like this all the time, the media are basically covering up the economic global crash which is coming and also the Brexit shit show.” This post received 50 reactions and 126 comments, four times more than an average post on the group.


This overlap between conspiracy theories is to be expected, says Joseph Uscinski, author of Conspiracy Theories: A Primer. “The best predictor that I’ve found of people believing in conspiracy theories is that they have a worldview in which events and circumstances are caused by shadowy groups acting in secret for their own benefit and against the common good,” he says. “So every new event or circumstance that they see, they're likely to go to that same explanation – it must be caused by a conspiracy.”

Some posts are less extreme but potentially more dangerous – spreading medical misinformation about the virus. One, on the Stanley Durham Facebook group makes numerous false claims about protection from the virus, like that “You should also gargle as a prevention. A simple solution of salt in warm water will suffice.” This post, which is the most popular coronavirus post of the last week among open Facebook groups, has seen more than two thousand shares, along with 217 reactions and 24 comments, close to 60 times a usual post on the group.

Spurious sources are another favourite tactic. One post, appearing on multiple groups and garnering thousands of shares, makes numerous false claims about the nature of the virus, claiming that they obtained the information from an “uncle who graduated with a master's degree and who worked in Shenzhen Hospital”.

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Another, on the “Fuerte flights expert” Facebook Group, dedicated to finding the best flight and hotel deals in Fuerteventura, makes similarly erroneous claims, including that “the sun or any other form of heat superior at 24 degrees Celsius so getting in the sun will actually protect you from the virus itself as it cannot survive the temperatures here in the Canaries.” This post netted 147 reactions and 50 shares, eight times more than on the group.


But this medical misinformation could be seriously dangerous.“The danger of conspiracy theories is that they undermine mainstream messages, and they confuse people,” explains Julii Brainard, from the University of East Anglia’s Norwich Medical School. “One the cases we come back to is the Measles Mumps Rubella vaccine and the controversies that were kicked off with research that was published, but then retracted, and is now just heavily discredited.”

People then ignore – and even resent – professional medical advice, leading to behaviour that spreads the infection – not getting tested and not to self-isolating, for instance. A recent study found that people who believe conspiracy theories – around forty per cent of the UK – are more likely to ignore health advice.

“There’s also a kind of cognitive overload,” says Brainard. “If you really think that drinking bleach is going to help you, and you’re busy doing that, are you also going to be thinking, well, ‘did I just touch my face? Have I used hand sanitisers?’”

Social media companies, facing the first world health crisis of their era, have tried to combat this misinformation, often by collaborating with the WHO. Google has released an SOS alert, for instance, pushing WHO information to the top of search results, while Tiktok has hosted a new WHO account. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, wrote a Facebook post underlining his firm’s dedication to “stopping hoaxes and harmful misinformation” about coronavirus.

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But perhaps the problem with conspiracy theories isn’t platforms – it’s us. “We have a tendency to always want to blame new communication technologies for old human problems,” Uscinski says. “But in many ways what the internet does allow is allow people to have easy direct access to authoritative information – it allows authoritative information to combat the fakes and the phoneys. One argument to consider is that the internet may not be as hospitable to conspiracy theories as many people claim.”

Will Bedingfield is a staff writer for WIRED. He tweets from @WillBedingfield

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