For two decades, as our politics fractured and misinformation flourished, multiple social media networks emerged to provide a light fast pathway for even the most asinine propaganda to spread. This super-spreader superhighway changed everything.

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As we saw with the false Antifa narratives that shot through social media during the protests and on January 6th – which proved that social media is unrelenting even on our darkest days – social media has enabled widespread deceit to infect the bloodstream of American society, poisoning our politics and enabling pathological collective delusions that are shared by millions of people on obscure conspiracy theory platforms as well as mainstream networks like TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and all the rest. Instead of bringing the country together amid chaos and grief, social media firms enabled what is the equivalent of bomb-throwing. Instead of promoting productive public discourse, they allowed hundreds of false, inflammatory posts to metastasize.

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During the protests, for example, some posts said George Floyd wasn’t even dead. Others claimed that Derek Chauvin, the Minnesota police officer charged in Mr. Floyd’s death, was an actor paid by the “Deep State” and that George Soros, the billionaire investor and Democratic donor, was funding the protests around the country. 

 

This poor guy. We don’t know where the conspiracy crazies got hold of his name, but for years George Soros has been one of their favorite villains. Sid Miller, the agriculture commissioner of the great state of Texas, seemed to speak for all of them when he said – with zero proof – “I have no doubt in my mind that George Soros is funding these so-called ‘spontaneous’ protests. Soros is pure evil and is hell-bent on destroying our country!” The week after Mr. Floyd’s death, George Soros was mentioned in 34,000 tweets. On YouTube, over 90 videos in five languages were posted detailing various Soros conspiracy theories. He was mentioned in 72,000 posts on Facebook. Together, the ten most active Facebook posts about George Soros were shared over 110,000 times.

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We’ve already seen example after example of how – and how fast – this poopoo spreads, but let’s look at a couple more just for fun! After all, we couldn’t possibly end this discussion without bringing up Plandemic, a trilogy of films that promoted misinformation about COVID-19 during the pandemic.

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As we were all locked down, living the real-life consequences of COVID-19, Plandemic peddled baseless allegations and dangerous advice in the name of “experts,” and falsely blamed a shady ring of scientific and political elites for manufacturing the virus to increase their power and bank accounts. The goal of the film, in the filmmaker’s own words, was to “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system” (think big pharma, Bill Gates, the World Health Organization – and, naturally, poor George Soros).

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In the first film, released on May 4, 2020, the Plandemic narrator says (in a very grave and dramatic tone): “Now, as the fate of nations hang in the balance, Dr. Mikovits is naming names of those behind the plague of corruption that places all human life in danger.”  Dr. Mikovits is Judy Mikovits, who the filmmaker called “one of the most accomplished scientists of her generation.” In truth, Judy Mikovits was a long-discredited virologist who insisted the shadowy elite cabal was trying to bury her obviously brilliant scientific theories.

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Among many fictitious assertions, Mikovits claimed that, although she was instrumental in discovering HIV, she was put in jail for her scientific research by…wait for it…the before mentioned shadowy cabal of elites. However, she was actually put in jail for stealing proprietary information from Whittemore Peterson Institute, who had since fired her < Mikovits maintained she was dragged out of her house without a warrant; held in jail without charges; and that the lab notebooks and other material she was accused of stealing was “planted” in her house >.

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Brian Vastag, a former reporter for The Washington Post who had reported on Mikovits in the past, said his “stomach sank” when he heard about her involvement in Plandemic. Vastag had covered a 2009 paper – co-authored by Mikovits and published in Science magazine – that studied myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). The paper, which maintained ME/CFS may be caused by a mouse retrovirus, was retracted by the authors two years later. In a statement, Science wrote that “’multiple laboratories, including those of the original authors, have failed to reliably detect’ the mouse retrovirus in chronic fatigue syndrome patients. ‘In addition, there is evidence of poor quality control in a number of specific experiments in the report.’” Among others, Science also fact-checked Plandemic and found that “none of these claims are true.” The article then walks through every discredited claim – exhaustively, point by point – to prove it.

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When Plandemic was first posted on May 4, 2020, it stayed on the fringes of the Internet for a few hours, circulating through conspiracy theory and anti-vaccine forums. However, it quickly crossed over into the mainstream. New York Times investigative reporters analyzed exactly how Plandemic blasted its way across the Internet and here’s what they found: In less than a day after the video’s creator Mikki Willis uploaded the video, a QAnon Facebook group posted the video for its almost 25,000 members. From there, 1,660 people shared the video to their own pages.

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At around the same time, Dr. Christiane Northup jumped into the fray. Northup is an OB/GYN physician who was once a “medical expert” on Oprah. During the pandemic, she encouraged her followers to look into QAnon and continued to insist that COVID-19 was nothing more than a plot by the “Deep State” to depopulate America. She said vaccines were “crimes against humanity” and called Centers for Disease Control a “death cult.” In one of her podcasts, she told her audience that “we are, indeed, at war. It is good versus evil. Dark versus light.”

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After watching Northup’s nightly ten-minute videos at the height of the pandemic, Jonathan Jarry – a biological scientist at McGill University, a research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada – said, “In this parallel universe, there are Indigo children, time travelers from the future, and geomancers performing acupuncture on Mother Earth by moving rocks around. Rarely have I witnessed such a smorgasbord of gobbledygook from someone who once had an active medical license.”

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Northup shared the Plandemic video with her nearly 500,000 followers. From there, over 1,000 people shared the video. By the evening of May 4th, Plandemic hit the Reopen Alabama Facebook page. Reopen Alabama was a group advocating for shelter-in-place orders to be lifted and, at the time, had 36,000 members… and was linked with other Reopen America groups around the country. From there it spread like wildfire.

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Soon after, the video hit the Facebook page of Nick Catone, a professional mixed martial arts fighter and vocal anti-vaccine activist.  Over 2,000 of his almost 70,000 followers “liked” the video. The following day, Melissa Ackison, a candidate who ran in the Republican primary for Ohio’s 26th District Senate seat (she lost), posted the video on her Facebook page for her 20,000 followers. Now the video was in the political mainstream, rapidly making its way to Republican groups around the World Wide Web.

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By May 7th, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook had removed Plandemic for violating their misinformation policies but, as usual, the damage was already done. In a little more than a week after Mikki Willis posted the video, it had been viewed over 8 million times across social media networks.

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We wish we could say this was the only time during the pandemic that batshit crazy physicians gave bad advice and spread misinformation regarding COVID-19 but, alas, there were plenty of others. For example, a group of physicians who call themselves “America’s Frontline Doctors” spewed falsehoods about COVID vaccines and treatments at a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court in July 2020. The event, referred to as the “White Coat Summit,” was organized by Simone Gold, the founder of America’s Frontline Doctors, in coordination with the conservative Tea Party Patriots – and was broadcast on Breitbart News.