[ad_1]
CHICAGO (AP) – The news Friday that President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump tested positive for COVID-19 sparked an explosion of rumors, misinformation and conspiracy theories that filled the social media of many Americans within hours. .
Tweets shared thousands of times claimed that Democrats may have intentionally infected the president with the coronavirus during the debates. Others speculated in Facebook posts that perhaps the president was faking his illness. And the news also generated constant speculation among QAnon supporters, who traffic in the unfounded belief that Trump is a warrior against a secret network of government officials and celebrities who falsely claim he runs a child trafficking ring.
In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis turned into an online vortex of misinformation about the coronavirus and the falsehoods swirling around this polarizing election. Trump himself has fueled much of that campaign confusion and mistrust, from his presidential podium and Twitter account, where he has made erroneous claims about widespread election fraud or touted unproven cures for the coronavirus, such as hydroxychloroquine. .
“This is both a political crisis weeks before the elections as well as a health crisis; it’s a perfect storm, ”said Alexandra Cirone, an assistant professor at Cornell University who studies the effect of misinformation on government.
Facebook said on Friday it immediately began monitoring misinformation surrounding the president’s diagnosis and began applying fact checks to some fake posts.
Twitter, meanwhile, was monitoring a spike in “copypasta” campaigns on Trump’s illness. “Copypasta” campaigns are attempts by numerous Twitter accounts to repeat the same phrase over and over again to flood users with messages, and are sometimes signals of coordinated activity. The social media company said it was working to limit visits to those tweets.
But nearly 30,000 Twitter users had retweeted a variety of conspiracy theories about the news Friday morning, according to an analysis by VineSight, a technology company that tracks misinformation online.
About 10,000 of those retweets touted the drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID-19, as a treatment for the president. Another 13,000 retweets were related to a QAnon conspiracy theory that the president will go into quarantine while mass arrests of high-profile politicians such as former Trump Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton are carried out, according to the company’s analysis.
Most of the conversation came from unverified accounts on Twitter, said Gideon Blocq, CEO of VineSight.
“Many of them seem very happy about what is going to happen because they believe that Hillary Clinton will be arrested,” Blocq said of the QAnon accounts.
Disinformation was promoted not only in the fringe spheres of the internet, but also by everyday users of social media, said Shane Creevy, managing editor of Kinzen, an Ireland-based company that works to monitor misinformation online.
“The Internet part of the conspiracy is outside the mainstream, but even among regular users we are seeing a lot of crazy ideas being driven by people who should know better,” Creevy said.
Other social media users were suggesting that Trump’s diagnosis is a hoax aimed at generating sympathy among voters or even getting out of the upcoming presidential debate against Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
That speculation appears in Facebook comments on news about Trump.
“It’s a lie,” wrote a Facebook user in a television news outlet about Trump, calling it a “Strategy to Stop Debating Biden Anymore.”
Similar posts making the unfounded claim were shared hundreds or thousands of times online.
“Is Trump faking COVID to avoid the narcissistic damage of losing the election?” asked a Twitter user in a post that was retweeted more than 4,000 times on Friday morning.
Clint Watts, a disinformation expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, released a report in July describing one or both candidates contracting COVID-19 as a scenario to spark a landslide of disinformation in the campaign.
“The main reason this is a disaster is because there are no reliable sources of information left that have not been undermined by the president,” he said.
The news is also ready for domestic and foreign Internet instigators to exploit in a disinformation campaign, opening the door for people to unknowingly spread misinformation, said Cirone, a Cornell professor.
She predicted that Internet users will share video clips of politicians coughing or looking sick to prematurely claim that they have tested positive for the virus.
In fact, social media users have already employed a similar strategy when they shared video clips of Biden coughing during an event in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to suggest he was ill. The video resurfaced again, garnering more than 160,000 views on Twitter on Friday morning, and social media users suggested that Biden infected Trump or that he had contracted the Trump virus during the debate. Biden and his wife tested negative for the virus on Friday.
“Individual citizens shouldn’t amplify any speculation,” Cirone said. “Nefarious actors are relying on the (probability) that citizens are very concerned about this and accidentally spread fake news.”
Perhaps in a sign of things to come, Russian state-backed television channel RT tweeted a story suggesting that Biden’s prolonged cough from the debate raised concerns for the former vice president after Trump’s test. In the last presidential election, Russia launched an online disinformation campaign using fake social media accounts that aimed to sway the views of American voters in the race, and there are signs that the Kremlin is doing it again.
Watts said the Russian-backed accounts are mostly only controlling the president and the White House so far, but they are just getting started, especially since the president has only just begun his quarantine.
“They are going to position all kinds of conspiracies or amplify American conspiracies,” Watts said.
___
Dupuy reported from New York. Associated Press technology reporter Barbara Ortutay in Oakland, California, contributed to this report.
