After President Trump promoted a video of the news conference on social media and Donald Trump Jr. declared it a “must watch,” views of the video went through the roof. Social media platforms finally removed the video for promoting false and misleading claims about COVID-19 but, as usual, the damage was done. By that time, versions of the video had been seen millions of times across social media platforms. One version was viewed on Facebook over 16 million times alone.but, as usual, the damage was done. By that time, versions of the video had been seen millions of times across social media platforms. One version was viewed on Facebook over 16 million times alone.

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President Trump was perplexed by the removal of the video. “For some reason the Internet wanted to take them down and took them off.  I think they are very respected doctors. There was a woman who was spectacular in her statements about it, that she’s had tremendous success with it and they took her voice off. I don’t know why they took her off.  Maybe they had a good reason, maybe they didn’t.”

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It is unclear which woman Donald thought was “spectacular in her statements,” so let’s take a closer look at two of the possibilities. The first, Ms. Gold, was arrested for her participation in the January 6th insurrection and eventually pleaded guilty, receiving a 60-day prison sentence and a $9,500 fine. She was subsequently fired from the hospitals she worked for. Three years later, she received a public reprimand from the Medical Board of California, along with a fine of $26,739.25. The Board also required she take educational courses in professionalism and ethics.

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Stella Immanuel is a registered physician in Texas who has the distinction of writing 69,000 prescriptions for hydroxychloroquine in 2021 alone (the national average was 43). < Note: One of the theories America’s Frontline Doctors pushed during the pandemic was that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine was effective in treating hospitalized COVID-19 patients – even though randomized controlled trials (the “gold standard” in determining whether treatments are effective) found that was not the case. To this day, the only FDA-approved treatments for COVID-19 are Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir tablets and ritonavir tablets); Veklury (remdesivir); and, for certain hospitalized adults, Olumiant (baricitinib) and Actemra (tocilizumab). >

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This Stella is a piece of work. The Daily Beast reported that “she has often claimed that gynecological problems like cysts and endometriosis are in fact caused by people having sex in their dreams with demons and witches… she alleges alien DNA is currently used in medical treatments, and that scientists are cooking up a vaccine to prevent people from being religious. And, she has said that the government is run in part not by humans but by ‘reptilians’ and other aliens.”  Well, that part may actually be true.  : )

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But wait! Thank God, there’s more! “In sermons posted on YouTube and articles on her website, Immanuel claims that medical issues like endometriosis, cysts, infertility, and impotence are caused by sex with ‘spirit husbands’ and ‘spirit wives’ – a phenomenon Immanuel describes essentially as witches and demons having sex with people in a dreamworld.” Evidently, “they are responsible for serious gynecological problems. We call them all kinds of names… endometriosis, we call them molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts, but most of them are evil deposits from the spirit husband. They are responsible for miscarriages, impotence – men that can’t get it up.”  We gotta tell ya, that’s some church.

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Spreading misinformation wasn’t the only thing America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD) were up to. A TIME magazine investigation found that “hundreds of AFLD customers and donors accused the group of touting a service promising prescriptions for ivermectin, which medical authorities say should not be taken to treat or prevent COVID-19, and failing to deliver after a fee had been paid. Some customers described being charged for consultations that did not happen. Others said they were connected to digital pharmacies that quoted excessive prices of up to $700 for the cheap medication. In more than 3,000 messages reviewed by TIME, dozens of people described their or their family members’ COVID-19 symptoms worsening while they waited for an unproven ‘wonder drug’ that didn’t arrive.” Dr. Irwin Redlener, the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, put it this way, “They’re the 21st century, digital version of snake-oil salesmen.”

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Clearly, President Trump wasn’t helping matters during this time. In fact, he was the conductor of the COVID misinformation train. A study by Cornell University found “that media mentions of Donald Trump within the context of COVID-19 misinformation made up by far the largest share of the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation. Trump mentions comprised 37.9 percent of the overall misinformation conversation, well ahead of any other topics.” The researchers concluded that President Trump “was likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation infodemic. Only 16.4 percent of the misinformation conversation was ‘fact checking’ in nature, suggesting that the majority of COVID misinformation was conveyed by the media without question or correction.”

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That’s impressive, but it’s nothing compared to what was discovered after President Trump and several of his closest allies were booted from Twitter after the January 6th Capitol riots. Honestly, this is hard to believe but it’s true. To refresh your memories, on January 6th Twitter and Facebook announced that Donald Trump would be suspended from their platforms until at least the following day. On the 7th, Facebook banned him through January 20th (this was later extended to two years), and on the 8th Twitter permanently banned him from its platform “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” 

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Within two days of President Trump being banned from Facebook and Twitter, Zignal Labs found that online misinformation regarding election fraud fell 73 percent. SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT!! “Election fraud” mentions plummeted from 2.5 million to 688,000 across all social media platforms. The hashtag #FightforTrump fell 95 percent, and #HoldTheLine and the phrase “March for Trump” dropped over 95 percent. Think about that for a second…that’s extraordinary!

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But it comes as less of a surprise when you discover that – during the week of November 16, 2020, two weeks after the 2020 election and less than two months before January 6th – every single one of the twenty most-engaged Facebook posts that included the word “election” came from Donald Trump. Every single one of them were also slapped with a false or misleading warning by independent fact checkers.

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The craziest thing is how one little post can move so dang fast! Over a four-week period beginning in mid-October 2020, Avaaz – a nonprofit organization that promotes global activism – analyzed 95,546 Facebook posts that included “voter fraud” in some way.  Collectively, these posts were liked, shared or commented on almost 60 million times. Avaaz’s analysis revealed that only 33 of the 95,546 posts were responsible for over 13 million of the 60 million interactions.

 

In another analysis, the Election Integrity Partnership – a collaboration between the Stanford Internet Observatory, the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, social media intelligence firm Graphika, and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab – found that “posts from just 20 users were the source for approximately 20 percent of all of the retweets in their dataset. This means that a small number of accounts was responsible for a large portion of the spread of misleading election-related information.”

 

An ironic twist to all this is that many conservatives at the time were convinced that social media networks were drowning in political bias – against them. That’s just downright false. Right-wing users drove far more engagement than left-wingers in the 2020 election, a fact that a Facebook executive acknowledged in an interview with Politico weeks before November 3, 2020.

 

The reason the political right has higher interactions rates is simple, the Facebook executive said. Their content is better at hitting visceral trigger points: “Right-wing populism is always more engaging,” the executive said, because the content triggers “an incredibly strong, primitive emotion” by engaging on such topics as “nation, protection, the other, anger, fear.” The Politico article continued, “In the final stretch of the 2020 campaign, the Facebook posts with the most engagement in the United States most days – measured by likes, comments, shares and reactions – were from conservative voices outside the mainstream media: Dan Bongino, Ben Shapiro, David Harris, Jr., Franklin Graham and ‘Blue Lives Matter,’” according to the Facebook-owned tool Crowdtangle.  “Trump’s personal page also regularly made the top of the list, in effect allowing him to become a publisher in his own right and navigate around the traditional media.”

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The level of this impact was greatly enhanced by people like Guo Wengui, the Chinese real estate developer whose yacht Steve Bannon was on when Bannon was arrested for fraud on August 20, 2020. At the time, a report from Graphika called Ants in a Web revealed that Wengui was “at the center of a vast network of interrelated media entities which had disseminated online disinformation and promoted real-world harassment campaigns. Graphika identified thousands of mostly authentic social media accounts associated with this network which are active across platforms including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Gab, Telegram, Parler, and Discord.”

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Although the network primarily focuses on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and anti-CCP dissidents, it also “acted as a prolific producer and amplifier of mis- and disinformation, including claims of voter fraud in the U.S., false information about COVID-19, and QAnon narratives.” The report revealed that “in the second half of 2020, content from the Guo media network was increasingly prevalent in the American right-wing social media environment. Activity within the Guo network spiked in the run-up to the November 2020 U.S. presidential election.”

 

The real-life consequences of the super-spreader superhighway that is the Internet are massive. Research conducted by the University of Virginia McIntire School of Commerce found that “the more time someone spends on Facebook, the more polarized their online news consumption becomes… What’s more, Facebook usage is five times more polarizing for conservatives than for liberals. This evidence suggests Facebook indeed serves as an echo chamber, especially for its conservative users. Facebook and Reddit shape the news consumption of their conservative users in dramatically different ways. In months when a typical conservative visited Facebook more than usual, they read news that was about 30 percent more conservative than the online news they usually read. In contrast, during months when a typical conservative used Reddit more than usual, they read news that was far less conservative – about 50 percent more moderate than what they typically read.”