Short film, long reach
And
Kennedy School, March 17-19) revealed that one-third believe the virus was manmade and spread on purpose. The internet has blurred the lines between ‘‘the truth’’ and what is factually, tangibly, measurably real.
After the Christchurch mosque attacks, New Zealand’s Government swiftly and appropriately legislated against certain types of firearms. Canada has followed suit in the aftermath of the Nova Scotia shootings. But trawl through the online forums and it is ablaze with chatter that the massacres were government-sanctioned ‘‘false flag’’ operations, a decoy to disarm the public, and pave a path of least resistance for a tyrant government.
Not only is this disregarding the victims of these tragedies, but if left unchecked, followers of these theories will continue to dig in their heels. It is one of the many reasons that commonsense gun laws in the US never pass.
It is easy in New Zealand for the scale and style of such misinformation to feel far away and not that relevant, so why should we care? One important idea is that policies adopted today in the US could become New Zealand’s foreign policy challenges tomorrow. We are already seeing the Trump administration pressure countries to lay blame on China.
Butmost importantly, it is the principle that the truth is maintained without the shadow of a doubt. In order to beat the pandemic, it is important that appropriatemedical guidelines are communicated and followed.
We are already seeing a major increase in the anti-vaccine community. What if a vaccine becomes available, but amajor portion of the population decides not to vaccinate, because of the theories they have been exposed to online? This will blunt the effectiveness of a vaccine rollout and mean that people remain vulnerable.
We have to fight misinformation, no matter how slick the packaging. It may mean having that awkward conversation with your friend about 5G.
Abbas Nazari studied at the University of Canterbury, and is undertaking a masters in security studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
When 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 4million 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 onwillis’ 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 amask could increase one’s chances of ‘‘getting sick from your own reactivated coronavirus expression’’.
Plandemic quickly racked up more than 8m views. Onmay 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 somany 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, hemay 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.’’ –