When a little-known chiropractor in Woodinville wrote a Facebook post about the coronavirus Saturday morning, it just sat there, not attracting much attention. For the first couple of minutes anyway.
But then, like the virus itself in a crowded bar, it started to multiply. It was a little tentative at first, but once accelerated by some of the superspreaders of social media, it went exponential and reached all the way to the president’s Twitter thumbs in a matter of hours.
By about 2 p.m. Saturday, just five hours later, the chiropractor’s post had been shared by tens of thousands of accounts, which means it potentially was viewed by tens of millions of people. It was then promoted by a QAnon conspiracy believer who has 65,700 Twitter followers, and from there, on Saturday evening, that tweet was shared by the King Superspreader himself, Donald Trump. His Twitter feed has an incredible 85.6 million followers.
It wasn’t until the next day that a man out on the Olympic Peninsula started chasing after it all.
“This is pretty much all I’ve done this summer,” says Dean Miller. “Debunk bad information going around about the coronavirus.”
Miller, a former reporter for The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review and editor of the Idaho Falls Post Register, now works for a fact-checking outfit called Lead Stories. The service uses software to track the virality of content on the web. Then, paid in part by social media giants such as Facebook and TikTok to “help clean up their worlds,” it deputizes journalists like Miller to be sort of like the contact tracers of the misinformation pandemic.
“We’re like an upside-down form of journalism,” says site co-founder Alan Duke. “The regular press spends its time looking for stories that are true; we’re only interested in claims that are false.”
The post of the Woodinville chiropractor, Elizabeth Hesse, definitely fit into the latter category, he said. Increasingly, the most viral false stories start exactly like this one: as musings from regular people, not necessarily professional right-wing or left-wing misinformation spreaders.
“This week the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid. That’s 9,210 deaths,” she wrote.
Major parts of that are false. There was no quiet updating or admitting of anything, as the CDC has been running COVID-19 death stats regularly for months. Beyond the implied subterfuge, it also isn’t remotely true that the CDC data shows that only 6% of the total died from COVID-19.
What it shows are what are called “co-morbidities,” or other conditions present at the time of death. Many of these are caused by COVID-19 itself. So, for example, if you catch COVID-19 and it causes respiratory failure and heart failure, the death certificate may list all of that. In other cases, the death certificates list preexisting conditions like hypertension that may or may not be related to the death. Long story short, the triggering cause of death in all the deaths is still COVID-19.
As Miller wrote in his debunking that appeared on Monday: “The CDC Did NOT Admit That Only 6% Of Deaths In COVID Toll Were From COVID-19.”
Miller interviewed a medical examiner and the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch of the CDC, who is responsible for the data cited. Twitter then took down the president’s retweet, and Facebook appended a series of warnings, including Miller’s fact check, to the chiropractor’s post and other mentions of the issue.
“Once the bug is discovered, it gets labeled and blocked all across the web, that’s the goal,” Miller said.
But like any virus, this story just mutated into a slightly new version of conspiracy. Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show featured it Monday night, only not the part about it being false. His angle was: “Why is it forbidden now to tweet CDC data? What are they hiding?”
By press time, I wasn’t able to reach Hesse. The chiropractor did sum up her experiences in a post, in which she seemed proud of her 15 minutes of viral misinformation fame.
“Data juking is real and is unacceptable when countless deaths NOT COVID related ARE classified as COVID, and there is an agenda at hand to strip us of our liberty and sovereignty,” she wrote. Her story going viral “symbolizes those people, those Patriots that know freedom and our Constitution is truly our birthright, and this even has served a greater purpose in waking people up in empowerment.”
It ought not symbolize anything, because it was WRONG. Increasingly it feels like that’s not even relevant anymore. (...)
But then, like the virus itself in a crowded bar, it started to multiply. It was a little tentative at first, but once accelerated by some of the superspreaders of social media, it went exponential and reached all the way to the president’s Twitter thumbs in a matter of hours.
By about 2 p.m. Saturday, just five hours later, the chiropractor’s post had been shared by tens of thousands of accounts, which means it potentially was viewed by tens of millions of people. It was then promoted by a QAnon conspiracy believer who has 65,700 Twitter followers, and from there, on Saturday evening, that tweet was shared by the King Superspreader himself, Donald Trump. His Twitter feed has an incredible 85.6 million followers.
It wasn’t until the next day that a man out on the Olympic Peninsula started chasing after it all.
“This is pretty much all I’ve done this summer,” says Dean Miller. “Debunk bad information going around about the coronavirus.”Miller, a former reporter for The (Spokane) Spokesman-Review and editor of the Idaho Falls Post Register, now works for a fact-checking outfit called Lead Stories. The service uses software to track the virality of content on the web. Then, paid in part by social media giants such as Facebook and TikTok to “help clean up their worlds,” it deputizes journalists like Miller to be sort of like the contact tracers of the misinformation pandemic.
“We’re like an upside-down form of journalism,” says site co-founder Alan Duke. “The regular press spends its time looking for stories that are true; we’re only interested in claims that are false.”
The post of the Woodinville chiropractor, Elizabeth Hesse, definitely fit into the latter category, he said. Increasingly, the most viral false stories start exactly like this one: as musings from regular people, not necessarily professional right-wing or left-wing misinformation spreaders.
“This week the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) quietly updated the Covid number to admit that only 6% of all the 153,504 deaths recorded actually died from Covid. That’s 9,210 deaths,” she wrote.
Major parts of that are false. There was no quiet updating or admitting of anything, as the CDC has been running COVID-19 death stats regularly for months. Beyond the implied subterfuge, it also isn’t remotely true that the CDC data shows that only 6% of the total died from COVID-19.
What it shows are what are called “co-morbidities,” or other conditions present at the time of death. Many of these are caused by COVID-19 itself. So, for example, if you catch COVID-19 and it causes respiratory failure and heart failure, the death certificate may list all of that. In other cases, the death certificates list preexisting conditions like hypertension that may or may not be related to the death. Long story short, the triggering cause of death in all the deaths is still COVID-19.
As Miller wrote in his debunking that appeared on Monday: “The CDC Did NOT Admit That Only 6% Of Deaths In COVID Toll Were From COVID-19.”
Miller interviewed a medical examiner and the chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch of the CDC, who is responsible for the data cited. Twitter then took down the president’s retweet, and Facebook appended a series of warnings, including Miller’s fact check, to the chiropractor’s post and other mentions of the issue.
“Once the bug is discovered, it gets labeled and blocked all across the web, that’s the goal,” Miller said.
But like any virus, this story just mutated into a slightly new version of conspiracy. Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show featured it Monday night, only not the part about it being false. His angle was: “Why is it forbidden now to tweet CDC data? What are they hiding?”
By press time, I wasn’t able to reach Hesse. The chiropractor did sum up her experiences in a post, in which she seemed proud of her 15 minutes of viral misinformation fame.
“Data juking is real and is unacceptable when countless deaths NOT COVID related ARE classified as COVID, and there is an agenda at hand to strip us of our liberty and sovereignty,” she wrote. Her story going viral “symbolizes those people, those Patriots that know freedom and our Constitution is truly our birthright, and this even has served a greater purpose in waking people up in empowerment.”
It ought not symbolize anything, because it was WRONG. Increasingly it feels like that’s not even relevant anymore. (...)
by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Lead Stories
