Far-right using Covid-19 theories to grow reach, according to study
PARIS (AP) — The mugshotstyle photos are posted on online message boards in black and white and look a little like old-fashioned "wanted" posters.
"The Jews own Covid just like all of Hollywood," the accompanying text says. "Wake up people."
The post is one of many that white supremacists and farright extremists are using to expand their reach and recruit followers on the social media platform Telegram, according to the findings of researchers who sifted through nearly half a million comments on pages — called channels on Telegram — that they categorized as farright from January 2020 to June 2021.
The tactic has been successful: Nine of the 10 most viewed posts in the sample examined by the researchers contained misleading claims about the safety of vaccines or the pharmaceutical companies manufacturing them. One Telegram channel saw its total subscribers jump tenfold after it leaned into Covid-19 conspiracy theories.
"Covid-19 has served as a catalyst for radicalization," said the study's author, Ciaran O'Connor, an analyst at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue. "It allows conspiracy theorists or extremists to create simple narratives, framing it as us versus them, good versus evil."
Other posts downplayed the severity of the coronavirus or pushed conspiracy theories about its origins. Many of the posts contain hate speech directed at Jews, Asians, women or other groups or violent rhetoric that would be automatically removed from
Facebook or Twitter for violating the standards of those sites.
Telegram, based in the United Arab Emirates, has many different kinds of users around the world, but it has become a favorite tool of some on the farright in part because the platform lacks the content moderation of Facebook, Twitter and other platforms.
In a statement to The Associated Press, Telegram said it welcomed "the peaceful expression of ideas, including those we do not agree with." The statement said moderators monitor activity and user reports "in order to remove public calls for violence."