Misinformation spikes as Trump confirms COVID-19 diagnosis

News Friday that President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19 sparked an explosion of rumors, misinformation and conspiracy theories that in just a matter of hours littered the social media feeds of several Americans.

Tweets shared a large number of times claimed Democrats might have somehow intentionally infected the president with the coronavirus during the debates. Others speculated in Facebook posts that maybe the president was faking his illness. And the news headlines also ignited constant conjecture among QAnon followers, who peddle a baseless belief that Trump is a warrior against a secret network of government officials and celebrities that they falsely claim is running a child trafficking ring.

In the ultimate weeks of the presidential campaign, Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis was swept into an online vortex of coronavirus misinformation and the falsehoods swirling around this polarizing election. Trump himself has driven a lot of that confusion and distrust on the campaign trail, from his presidential podium and his Twitter account, where he's made wrong claims about widespread voter fraud or hawked unproven cures for the coronavirus, such as for example hydroxychloroquine.

“That is both a political crisis weeks before the election and also a health crisis; it's an ideal storm,” said Alexandra Cirone, an assistant professor at Cornell University who studies the result of misinformation on government. “This is merely one more little bit of fake news in an election that’s already seen a high level of fake news.”

Facebook said Friday that it immediately commenced monitoring misinformation around the president’s diagnosis and had started applying fact checks for some false posts.

Twitter, meanwhile, was monitoring an uptick in “copypasta” campaigns about Trump's illness. “Copypasta” campaigns are attempts by numerous Twitter accounts to parrot the same phrase again and again to inundate users with messaging, plus they are sometimes signals of coordinated activity. The social media company said it had been working to limit views on those tweets.

But practically 30,000 Twitter users had retweeted a range of conspiracy theories about the news headlines by Friday morning, according to an analysis by VineSight, a tech company that tracks online misinformation.

Roughly 10,000 of these retweets touted the drug hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for COVID-19, as cure for the president. Another 13,000 retweets were related to a QAnon conspiracy theory that the president is going into quarantine while mass arrests of high-profile politicians like Trump’s former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton are completed, based on the company’s analysis.

Most of the conversation was via unverified accounts on Twitter, said Gideon Blocq, the CEO of VineSight.

“A lot of them seem happy about what’s likely to happen because they think Hillary Clinton is going to be arrested," Blocq said of the QAnon accounts.

Misinformation had not been only promoted in the fringe spheres of the web but by everyday social media users aswell, said Shane Creevy, head of editorial at Kinzen, an Ireland-based company that works to monitor misinformation online.

“The conspiracy area of the internet is like beyond your mainstream, but even among regular users we are seeing a great deal of crazy thinking pushed out there from people who ought to know better,” Creevy said.

Other social media users were suggesting that Trump’s diagnosis is a hoax targeted at making sympathy among voters and even getting out of another presidential debate against Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

That speculation shows up in Facebook comments on news stories about Trump.

“It is a lie,” one Facebook user wrote on a TV news network’s post about Trump, calling it a “Technique to not debate Biden anymore.”

Similar posts making the groundless claim were shared hundreds or thousands of times online.

“Is Trump faking COVID to avoid narcissistic injury of losing the election?” one Twitter user asked in a post retweeted a lot more than 4,000 times Friday morning.

Clint Watts, a disinformation expert with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, published a written report in July describing one or both of the prospects contracting COVID-19 as a scenario for prompting an onslaught of disinformation in the campaign.

“The biggest reason why this is a tragedy is basically because there are no trusted information sources remaining which have not been undermined by the president,” he said.

The news is also ripe for foreign and domestic internet instigators to exploit in a disinformation campaign, and opens the entranceway for individuals to unwittingly spread misinformation, said Cirone, the Cornell professor.

She predicted that internet surfers will share videos of politicians coughing or appearing ill to prematurely claim that they have tested positive for the virus.

Actually, social media users have previously employed a similar strategy if they shared video clips of Biden coughing during a meeting in Pennsylvania on Wednesday to suggest he was sick. The video resurfaced again - getting ultimately more than 160,000 views on Twitter by Friday morning - with social media users suggesting that Biden either infected Trump or had caught the virus from Trump through the debate. Biden and his wife tested negative Friday for the virus.

“Individual citizens shouldn’t amplify any speculation,” Cirone said. “Nefarious actors are banking on the (likelihood) that citizens will be very worried about this and accidentally spread fake news.”

In perhaps an indicator of what's to come, state-backed Russian television set channel RT tweeted a tale suggesting that Biden’s prolonged coughing from the debate raised concerns for the former vice president after Trump’s test. Within the last presidential election, Russia launched an online misinformation campaign with bogus social media accounts that aimed to sway U.S. voters' opinions in the race, and there are signs that the Kremlin is at it again.

Watts said Russian-backed accounts are mostly only trolling the president and the White House up to now, but they are just starting out - especially given that the president has only begun his quarantine.