Early on the question was more like, this is a zenotic disease. What animal did it leap from? There were couple f articles about that,. debating whether it was a pengalon or a bat. Then gradually now it's did the us? Bring it here? And so there's this complete shift in tone. Now it is, did it come to wuhan from outside? That's a different thing in terms of certainty. It does tend to kind of bump up enforcement loopholes. i think that's been a real interesting challenge for the platforms.
How does disinformation spread in the age of COVID-19? It takes an expert like Renée DiResta to trace conspiracy theories back to their source. She’s already exposed how Russian state actors manipulated the 2016 election, but that was just a prelude to what she’s seeing online today: a convergence of state actors and lone individuals, anti-vaxxers and NRA supporters, scam artists and preachers and the occasional fan of cuddly pandas. What ties all of these disparate actors together is an information ecosystem that’s breaking down before our eyes. We explore what’s going wrong and what we must do to fix it in this interview with Renée DiResta, Research Manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory.