Donald Trump Jr.’s comments to Fox & Friends on Friday might be the purest example of the sort of misinformation that’s spreading almost as quickly as the coronavirus. “For [Democrats] to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people, so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning, is a new level of sickness,” he said. “You know, I don’t know if this is coronavirus or Trump derangement syndrome, but these people are infected badly.” To some extent, propaganda has always cropped up alongside mass disease—the whole black-cats-and-bubonic-plague thing, for example—but as technology has evolved, and information reaches exponentially more people exponentially faster, the potential for misinformation to spread has become correspondingly voluminous. “The scariest thing about this virus is the fact that there are a lot of people out there who don’t believe this is a scary virus,” a biomedical investor told me. “This is a bad one, and you’ve got people conspiring that it’s a hoax made to get Trump thrown out of office.”
When HIV/AIDS first sprang up in the 1980s, conspiracy theories about the disease became ubiquitous. In the U.S., rumor spread that you could catch it from doorknobs or swimming pools. One largely believed rumor held that AIDS was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency to kill off African Americans and gays. It was arguably the first global pandemic in the age of 24-hour cable news, which began around the same time the disease really started to spread, and helped fill the empty hours of television, injecting fear into the arteries of America. On top of that, add smartphones, social media, fake news, Donald Trump, and the far right’s politicization of everything from sporting events to where you drink your coffee to the brand of sneakers you wear, and you have the perfect setup for a virus to go viral, and a bunch of conspiracy theories to spread around the globe before the truth has time to tie its shoelaces.
Coronavirus, or Covid-19, isn’t just a severe acute respiratory syndrome with a terrifying incubation period; it’s also the first true epidemic of a polarized, plugged-in era. Other diseases have come along since the age of the internet, but none have been politicked in an era when the president gives social-media-born conspiracy theories and the CDC equal weight. During the 2002 SARS outbreak, while we had things like Excite and GeoCities, there was no such thing as social media (Myspace arrived on the scene a year later, but it never became a hub for news distribution). When bird flu surfaced in 2013, it didn’t kill enough people to become a true global pandemic, and Trump was still just a conspiracy-toting reality-TV star, rather than the conspiracy-toting president. At the time, the White House did its best to dispel rumors around the disease, as opposed to surfacing or creating them.
This time around, the president is proclaiming at his rallies that coronavirus is a “hoax” constructed by the Democrats. Conspiracy theorists on YouTube say it’s a false flag (I’m not even going to link to the videos), and QAnon theorists on Reddit are regurgitating the insanity that it’s all part of another deep state plot to overthrow the government. Other false stories have deduced that the Defense Department created the virus to target China. Millions of tweets argue a number of conspiracy theories, including that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation cooked up the virus—for what purpose, God only knows. Rush Limbaugh is telling his millions of listeners that media emphasis on the virus is designed to destabilize the stock markets in a threat to Trump’s presidency, and that coronavirus is “the common cold, folks.” (Fact-check: It is not.)
Meanwhile, as the Washington Post reported, bots on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere are sharing stories meant to cause more confusion and chaos—pushing that this a hoax, or a bioweapon, or that it originated from “people eating bat soup.” As the Post noted, the fake stories raise “the specter that foreign governments or other malicious actors may have deliberately tried to sow fear and discord about the international health emergency—much as Russian agents had done during the 2016 presidential election in the United States.” Our own media outlets are helping spread other conspiracies. The New York Post has information that the virus possibly leaked from a bioresearch lab in China. And in recent weeks, some have floated the theory that there’s a cure for the disease (again, not true), which the anti-vaxxer world is eating it up like it’s another ploy to get them to immunize little Johnny from measles. But don’t worry—they won’t fall for it! Even Vice President Mike Pence, whom Trump appointed to help stop the spread of the virus, seems more concerned with downgrading how bad this could be. He spent the weekend going on talk shows to defend comments by his boss, and his boss’s son Donald Trump Jr., or to tell Americans it’s not necessary to buy protective gear.
On Monday, another report found that the highly popular messaging platform WhatsApp had spawned countless fabricated “cures” to help stop the spread of the virus, which, in many instances, could likely make it worse. “In recent weeks, WhatsApp users throughout Africa and Asia reported a stream of text messages and voice memos in private channels that pitch fake coronavirus cures,” the Washington Post reported. “Some of the recirculated texts wrongly list garlic, salt water, and a type of tea as natural remedies for the outbreak, even though no treatments exist.” The report found similar misinformation being shared in Nigeria, Singapore, Brazil, Pakistan, Ireland, and other countries.
There could be several devastating effects of all this false information. On the one hand, we have people potentially storming the supermarkets in mass hysteria, believing the world is about to end because of an article they read that said coronavirus could be spread via toilet seat. There’s already some precedent for this—as CNN noted last week, a recent survey found that 38% of Americans “wouldn’t buy Corona beer ‘under any circumstances’ because of the coronavirus.” On the flip side are those who refuse to believe that the disease is truly a threat, and in turn dismiss the importance of washing their hands, or going to the hospital if they’re sick, or even trusting their doctors if a vaccine becomes available. As with politics, the worst-case scenario is paralysis: People are flooded with so much competing information that they simply stop paying attention. When the disease inevitably infiltrates the United States en masse, those people might find themselves both frightened and ill-prepared. And that’s when all hell could break loose.
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