The Role of Disinformation Research in the Disinformation Industry

This spring in light of the new reporting and a renewed bipartisan political effort to investigate the origins of COVID-19 Facebook announced that it would no longer remove posts that claim that the coronavirus was man-made or manufactured. Many disinformation workers who spent months calling for social media companies to ban such claims on the grounds that they were conspiracy theories have been awkwardly silent. Scientists had begun to admit that an accidental leak from a Wuhan lab isn't an unlikely but possible possibility.