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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNYT: How the 'Plandemic' Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/technology/plandemic-movie-youtube-facebook-coronavirus.html
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic have gained more traction than mainstream online events. Heres how.
By Sheera Frenkel, Ben Decker and Davey Alba
There have been plenty of jaw-dropping digital moments during the coronavirus pandemic.
There was the time this month when Taylor Swift announced she would air her City of Lover concert on television. The time that the cast of The Office reunited for an 18-minute-long Zoom wedding. And the time last month that the Pentagon posted three videos that showed unexplained aerial phenomena.
Yet none of those went as viral as a 26-minute video called Plandemic, a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.
Plandemic went online on May 4 when its maker, Mikki Willis, a little-known film producer, posted it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and a separate website set up to share the video. For three days, it gathered steam in Facebook pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement, most of which linked to the video hosted on YouTube. Then it tipped into the mainstream and exploded.
Just over a week after Plandemic was released, it had been viewed more than eight million times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and had generated countless other posts.
The New York Times focused on the videos spread on Facebook using data from CrowdTangle, a tool to analyze interactions across the social network. (YouTube and Twitter do not make their data as readily available.) The ascent of Plandemic was largely powered by Facebook groups and pages that shared the YouTube link.
On Facebook, Plandemic was liked, commented on or shared nearly 2.5 million times, according to the CrowdTangle data. That far outdid Ms. Swifts May 8 announcement about her City of Lover concert, which plateaued at about 110,000 such interactions on Facebook. The Office casts Zoom wedding video, which was posted on May 10, reached 618,000 interactions in less than a week. And the Pentagons videos, which were posted on April 27, had one million interactions two weeks after the first post.
</snip>
Conspiracy theories about the pandemic have gained more traction than mainstream online events. Heres how.
By Sheera Frenkel, Ben Decker and Davey Alba
There have been plenty of jaw-dropping digital moments during the coronavirus pandemic.
There was the time this month when Taylor Swift announced she would air her City of Lover concert on television. The time that the cast of The Office reunited for an 18-minute-long Zoom wedding. And the time last month that the Pentagon posted three videos that showed unexplained aerial phenomena.
Yet none of those went as viral as a 26-minute video called Plandemic, a slickly produced narration that wrongly claimed a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to profit and gain power. The video featured a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who said her research about the harm from vaccines had been buried.
Plandemic went online on May 4 when its maker, Mikki Willis, a little-known film producer, posted it to Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and a separate website set up to share the video. For three days, it gathered steam in Facebook pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement, most of which linked to the video hosted on YouTube. Then it tipped into the mainstream and exploded.
Just over a week after Plandemic was released, it had been viewed more than eight million times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, and had generated countless other posts.
The New York Times focused on the videos spread on Facebook using data from CrowdTangle, a tool to analyze interactions across the social network. (YouTube and Twitter do not make their data as readily available.) The ascent of Plandemic was largely powered by Facebook groups and pages that shared the YouTube link.
On Facebook, Plandemic was liked, commented on or shared nearly 2.5 million times, according to the CrowdTangle data. That far outdid Ms. Swifts May 8 announcement about her City of Lover concert, which plateaued at about 110,000 such interactions on Facebook. The Office casts Zoom wedding video, which was posted on May 10, reached 618,000 interactions in less than a week. And the Pentagons videos, which were posted on April 27, had one million interactions two weeks after the first post.
</snip>
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NYT: How the 'Plandemic' Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online (Original Post)
Dennis Donovan
May 2020
OP
choie
(4,111 posts)1. Again with the weasel words
LIE - not falsehoods
LizBeth
(9,952 posts)2. I saw it a number of times on my FB. But, I also saw the counter show whenever anyone posted
Plandemic so there was a lot of counter to the video. In my sphere, I did not see it go well for those promoting that CT