Western media is not immune. Even just a regular media where you see the headline framed is gic question. And so it's a sort of one two punch of curiosity gaps as the pressure against platforms goes up, because there's so much costly misinformation. The conspiracy theorys that chronovirus was linked to five g actually caused real people to blow up cell towers in in the u k. Once physical violence is actually triggered the real world as a result of it, you have this dynamic where tech platforms are actually forced to respond. So they actually have to start taking down things like five g conspiracy theories in cell towers which is what youtube did. We're now the conspiracy theorists say, see
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.