The coronavirus pandemic has turned dangerous conspiracy theories into mainstream beliefs, one Facebook group at a time
It started with a whimper. At 16:42 Eastern Daylight Time on May 4, Kari shared a YouTube video to the Facebook page of the Upstate NY Ministry Network, a religious community “Connecting the Body of Christ” in Albany, New York State. The post received four comments and three shares. This was the first time the Plandemic conspiracy theory video was posted on Facebook. It would not be the last. This was a conspiracy theory that tore through the Facebook groups of America, powered not by anti-vaxxers or QAnon believers, but by members of Woodland Washington Community Chat, Concerned Residents Of Lawrence County Ohio, Nosey Asses of Branch County, What’s Up Oglethorpe County and You know You’re From Rancho Cucamonga if.
In little over a week the Plandemic video, a slick 26-minute production that makes wildly inaccurate claims about the coronavirus pandemic, received 2.5 million likes, comments and shares on Facebook. In that same time period, the video was viewed more than eight million times across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. This was – and still is – a viral hit unlike any other: one that has escaped the conspiracy theory echo chamber and exposed scores of people to dangerous, scientifically-baseless views. These views have been presented to them not by conspiracy theorist outliers, but by their neighbours and their friends. Now, such views being shared widely across social media risk undermining the response to the greatest health crisis in a generation – with potentially deadly consequences.
To track the spread of the Plandemic conspiracy theory, we used the CrowdTangle analytics tool to filter Facebook data based on a number of key terms, stripping out the conspiracy theorists to focus on how the video went viral in local community groups. We focussed on data from May 4 – the date the video was first uploaded, to May 7, covering the period in which the conspiracy theory went viral, but before Facebook and YouTube took concerted action to shut it down – and also before it was widely debunked. During this period, the video not only spread widely through conspiracy theory groups, but also through local communities that make up both the backbone of America and the backbone of American Facebook.
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