Is This a Bya Weapon?

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There are conspiracy theorists in china as well. And there are these message boards in, you know, various online communities where people share theories. Any time there is any emergent diseas anywhere, the bya weapon conspiracy comes out. This is not new. It happened with zeka bola. I mean, you name it, sars, there has been a bya weapon story about it. Most people don't, think know that the origin story of aids has a us. O weapon came from which country? That was russia.

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.