USA TODAY International Edition
Trump’s health stokes false theories
Lack of information boosts conspiracies
The misinformation age quickly enveloped the news that President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, had tested positive for COVID- 19, as conspiracy theories about the news flourished on social media.
Followers of the extremist conspiracy group QAnon, who have concocted a variety of falsehoods about the roots of the pandemic since it began, scrambled to explain how Trump’s announcement fits into their false premise.
Meanwhile, critics of the president circulated conspiracy theories about the announcement, questioning its legitimacy.
In some cases, Americans are simply wondering how this could happen and seeking out information to make sense of the situation.
“Conspiracy theorists – but also just Americans who are not conspiracy theorists, because there’s not a lot of information available – will let their imaginations run wild about what is happening here,” said Katy Byron, editor and program manager of journalist nonprofit The Poynter Institute’s MediaWise, a fact- checking group. Many people aren’t waiting. The flood of commentary on social media about the president’s positive test illustrates how a desire to explain the news through one’s chosen ideological framework is not exclusive to one particular side of the political aisle, Byron said. It is, in fact, a very human tendency to seek out and promote information that confirms our respective biases about the world, regardless of the facts.
In this particular case, however, the flood of conspiracy theories comes against a mountainous backdrop of misinformation built, in part, by the president himself. Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the pandemic, having consistently denied or downplayed the science regarding the spread of the coronavirus.
In doing so, he has used Twitter to amplify his message to his more than 86 million followers. He has given a platform to the followers of QAnon by retweeting and praising its adherents.
QAnon is a loosely connected community of believers in a patchwork of baseless conspiracy theories. In promoting its theories, the group has gained steam on such platforms as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
After Trump’s announcement confirming his positive test, believers in QAnon, which the FBI has deemed a domestic terror threat, sought to decode the wording of his tweet as a sign that the president was poised to arrest former Democratic presidential nominee and Trump rival Hillary Clinton, who was falsely accused of involvement in a cabal of satanic Democrats running a secret child sex trafficking ring. They suggested, without evidence, that Trump actually doesn’t have the virus at all but was sending a message that he’s about to go on a mission to root out the evil cabal.
“QAnon followers, again, unsurprisingly, don’t believe the diagnosis is real,” said Aoife Gallagher, a disinformation and extremism analyst at the London- based Institute for Strategic Dialogue, in an email interview.
But QAnon followers weren’t the only people circulating conspiracy theories about Trump’s illness. On the left, opponents of Trump suggested in various ways that the president was lying about his diagnosis for the sake of a political gain with about a month to go before Election Day.
Byron, the MediaWise program manager, said she’s particularly concerned that bad actors, such as Russia and Iran, will use the situation to promote conspiracy theories and provoke tensions for the sole purpose of sowing chaos among Americans.
“This is one of the more rare cases where there’s going to be so much misinformation on both sides of the aisle,” Byron said.
“When you’re scrolling through social media, if you see something that elicits an emotional response, take a minute and do some fact- checking before you share it.”