Short film, long reach
Perman
WStacy
hen film-maker Mikki Willis uploaded a 26-minute video called Plandemic on May 4, he knew it was likely to cause a stir.
But he didn’t bank on becoming the poster boy for coronavirus disinformation. In his mind, he was just a dad making low-budget movies at home.
The closest he’d come to viral fame was when he posted a video in 2015 to his YouTube channel about how he’d bought his young son a Little Mermaid doll – a moment of open-minded, non-gender-conforming parenting that earned him more than 4 million views and a laudatory spot on the local news.
If you haven’t seen Plandemic, picture the sort of ominous conspiracy theory video that would pop up on your paranoid uncle’s Facebook feed or in the darkest recesses of Reddit, then stir in a global health crisis.
Plandemic centres on Willis’ interview with a former molecular biologist named Judy Mikovits, who alleges that a shadowy cabal of scientists and business interests, including the likes of Bill Gates and Dr Anthony Fauci, is leveraging the coronavirus crisis to boost their own power and profits.
Presented uncritically as a courageous whistleblower, Mikovits lobs a string of unsubstantiated claims, including that the virus was developed in laboratories in China and the US, that health officials are deliberately inflating Covid-19 statistics and, most dangerously, that wearing a mask could increase one’s chances of ‘‘getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expression’’.
Plandemic quickly racked up more than 8m views. On May 6, in an effort to tamp down the spread of misinformation, YouTube and Facebook pulled it down.
Plandemic was lambasted as the latest manifestation of a toxic internet fever swamp that breeds irrational fantasies and rampant pseudoscience. But community spread had already set in.
The video has continued to circulate among a receptive group of vaccine sceptics, Rightwing media and conspiracy theorists of every stripe, signalboosting nefarious narratives about the pandemic among proTrump lockdown opponents and anti-Chinese-government outlets such as the Epoch Times.
Willis says he met Mikovits a year ago through mutual friends and was impressed by her. When news surrounding the pandemic began to grow increasingly alarming, he felt ‘‘there were just so many things that didn’t add up’’, so he contacted her.
He says he ran some of her views past other medical experts. ‘‘I did do my best to reach out to people to say, ‘She’s making some claims here, and can you validate this?’ And the ones that they couldn’t validate, or at least were left with ‘that could be true, but science hasn’t proven it yet’, I left it in. Because I figured, perhaps this starts the conversation that does actually get to the bottom of this point.’’
To some, Willis is the internet’s latest villain; to others, he may come across as a fearless truthteller. But as he sees it, he is simply offering an alternative to what he calls ‘‘the mainstream narrative’’. ‘‘Even though people are making up crazy things about me online, thankfully I have a lot of people who’ve known me for years who are doing their best to defend those claims.’’ – Los Angeles Times