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Coronaconspiracy: Conspiracy Theories on Twitter and Youtube in the Age of Coronavirus Author: Sam Dodd // Institution: City, U

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Coronaconspiracy: Conspiracy Theories on Twitter and Youtube in the Age of Coronavirus Author: Sam Dodd // Institution: City, U #Coronaconspiracy: Conspiracy Theories on Twitter and YouTube in the Age of Coronavirus Author: Sam Dodd // Institution: City, University of London // Academic Year: 2019-2020 “When you have a situation where something defies explanation, people want better explanations than they’re getting, and that’s where conspiracy theories come from, that’s where they’ve always come from. People need to bring order to chaos” (VICE, 2020, 4:35). This essay will examine the most popular conspiracy theories circulated on Twitter and YouTube about the 2019-20 global pandemic COVID-19 (coronavirus), in the English language, for the one-week time frame 5th May 2020 – 11th May 2020, then examine news coverage originating from UK-based outlets related to those conspiracy theories for the two month period preceding this time frame, for background and context. It will ask what the roles of the law and regulators, the platforms themselves, and the information professional could be in this context. ~ Terminology The way that ‘most popular’ is measured is explained in ‘Twitter and YouTube Data Analysis: Research Parameters’ further on. The term ‘conspiracy theory’ is defined as: “the theory that an event or phenomenon occurs as a result of a conspiracy between interested parties; a belief that some covert but influential agency (typically political in motivation and oppressive in intent) is responsible for an unexplained event” (Oxford English Dictionary, 2020). This essay will explore what interested parties or influential agencies conspiracy theorists claim exist; and the motivation or intent that these agencies allegedly have. Background ‘COVID-19’, known also as ‘SARS-CoV-2’ and ‘Coronavirus Disease’, is a respiratory tract virus first identified in December 2019 in Hubei, a province of China. Since then, it grew into a pandemic, with a global death toll 1 of 283,153 as at 11:45 BST on 12th May 2020 (World Health Organisation, 2020), with 32,692 of those being in the UK as at 16:00 BST on 12th May 2020 (Department of Health & Social Care, 2020b). All three terms will be used in this essay, as they are all used interchangeably on the two online platforms this piece analyses. At the time of writing, the risk level of COVID-19 was assessed as ‘high’ by the United Kingdom government (Department of Health & Social Care 2020a). Twitter and YouTube Data Analysis: Research Parameters ‘Most popular’ was measured on Twitter and YouTube by carrying out advanced searches on both platforms, conducted on Tuesday 12th May 2020, with the following parameters: - YouTube: conducting five keyword searches, one for each of these search terms: coronaconspiracy, coronahoax, coronavirusconspiracy, plandemic, covidconspiracy. In each search: filtering by ‘This Week’; sorting by ‘View Count’; analysing the five highest viewed videos in the English language that appear at the top of the search results. Comment sections on each video were also analysed. Some videos appeared in more than one keyword search, thus the overall total of videos analysed reduced from the expected 25 to a total of 18. An index of the videos analysed is attached as Appendix A. - Twitter: conducting five keyword searches, one for each of these hashtags: #coronaconspiracy, #coronahoax, #coronavirusconspiracy, #plandemic, #covidconspiracy; filtering by: language – English; date range – 5th May 2020 to 11th May 2020; minimum number of likes – 1,000. This brought up 22 original tweets in the ‘Top’ results. The reach (number of retweets and likes) of each post was also analysed. One of these tweets was a further comment on another tweet already in the list, which added nothing research-worthy as it merely repeated the statement in the original; a second tweet was eliminated as it was satire. Therefore, the overall total of tweets analysed reduced from the expected 22 to a total of 20. An index of the posts analysed is attached as Appendix B. It is acknowledged that there is a disparity between the number of posts analysed on both platforms, with two more on Twitter. However, this was the closest possible number, with the above search parameters in place that it was possible to reach. 2 For both advanced searches, the content that was retained (18 YouTube videos and 20 Twitter posts) either analysed conspiracy theories without explicitly taking a position by either supporting or debunking them, originated, upheld or supported the theories, or explicitly debunked the theories. However, satire posts were eliminated (by ascertaining from the tone of the content and/or background of the poster that it was satirising the theory) – these posts were irrelevant for the research. Types of COVID-19 Conspiracy Theories – The Trends Theories circulating on Twitter and YouTube that were unsupported by official scientific and medical sources (World Health Organisation, Public Health England, and the National Health Service), or had no evidence otherwise, and thus could be classified as conspiracy theories, fell into five main broad categories after the search parameters specified in the section above were applied. In no particular order, these were: Vaccine / Bill Gates Conspiracies: these used existing and long-running anti-vaccine conspiracy theories as a springboard, ones that existed prior to the arrival of COVID-19, that claim vaccinations are dangerous, Big Pharma make billions in revenue from them, high ranking government officials are “in on it”, “whistleblowers” are thrown in prison for telling the “truth”, and only anti-vaccination proponents can discover and share this truth with the otherwise unaware public. The coronavirus version of the vaccination conspiracy theories circulating was that Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, released the virus in order to control the population medically with the vaccine he would develop to counter it. According to this conspiracy theory, the vaccine would be mandatory – a theory disproven by the largest barrister chambers in London, UK, using the wording of the Control of Disease Act 1984 and the Coronavirus Act 2020 Schedule 21 (Hooper, 2020). This theory sprang from a) the statement Gates made in relation to the funding and research his foundation was carrying out to build factories for the development of the seven most promising potential vaccines for coronavirus (Business Insider, 2020), and b) a coronavirus-related patent granted to a British company by Gates’ foundation for research into a different coronavirus, one related to poultry (New York Times, 2020). Several of the posts analysed claimed that COVID-19 is an abbreviation for Certification of Vaccination ID-start date 2019 – a mandatory ID chip injected into every citizen inside the vaccine that would 3 enable Microsoft, and all world governments he was in collusion with, to track an individuals every move, and make them sick remotely so that new drugs can then be tested on them. 5G Conspiracies: these fell into two main theories, which we will categorise as A and B. Theory A was that 5G causes coronavirus by making people fall unwell from the radio waves emitted from 5G towers, and that (in the UK, at least) the NHS Nightingale Hospitals that were built as a response to the expected numbers of coronavirus victims were, in fact, built for people falling sick by 5G radio waves (The Guardian, 2020a). It could be asked why, if the government was wishing to kill citizens with these waves (the same waves that the 2G, 3G and 4G generations used (Full Fact, 2020a)), it would then try and heal these individuals – for free, in the nationalised health system that the UK has. Theory B riffs from Theory A, with a slight variation: that the virus had been fabricated as a cover for deaths already caused by 5G rollout, and in fact does not exist at all. In March 2020, the International Commission on Non-Ionising Radiation Protection confirmed that 5G is officially safe (5GUK, 2020), however, this did not stop media outlets from airing related misinformation, resulting in the communications regulator Ofcom threatening British broadcasters with sanctions if they continued to do so (The Guardian, 2020b). This variant of the theory hinged on the original claim that Wuhan was where 5G was first rolled out, which was used as an explanation for why Wuhan citizens fell sick first. This claim has been debunked (Full Fact, 2020b), but still it ravages the dark corners of Twitter and YouTube, as found with the posts this essay analyses. Curtailment of Personal Freedom Conspiracies: these center around two main arguments: a) that the virus does not exist, world governments having entirely invented it because they want their citizens to be frightened enough to stay home, not exercise their freedoms, not connect to each other, and thus be easier to control on a mass scale, and b) linked to the vaccine theories, that every citizen will be tracked digitally through the chip that will allegedly be in the vaccines when they are administered. ‘The Government is Trying to Kill Us’ Conspiracies: these theories are centered around governments attempting to reduce unsustainably growing population numbers by killing off the elderly and disabled in order to make room for more work-capable people (thus more economic gains via more taxes and less 4 sickness benefits or pensions), more housing freed up, and less pressure on health services. Many posts making these claims stated that there was a mistaken assumption on the part of authorities that the virus would only kill those groups – a claim unfortunately fanned by the fact that, for a short while in March and early April, this was indeed the information given by the majority of global health authorities. ‘China Manufactured/Released It’ Conspiracies: these centred around theories that the Wuhan Institute of Virology either a) caused COVID-19 through sloppy biosecurity causing the virus to be released accidentally, with the Chinese government now conducting a cover-up to avoid taking responsibility, or b) manufactured then released the virus intentionally as a bioweapon in order to control population numbers (spinning off from the last category, ‘The Government is Trying to Kill Us’).
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