Plandemic Revisited: A Planned Disinformation Campaign

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.649930/full

by mcguire • 5 years ago

45 77 5 years ago

hartator• 5 years ago

Weren't the main grip about that movie was about the lab leak theory that’s now mainstream? It seems a little harsh to call this misinformation as a negative light.

the-dude• 5 years ago

What means being right about the lab leak theory?

NoPie2• 5 years ago

Currently it means that we don't have enough information to say one way or another.

Being wrong means being convinced that it happened or not. It is wrong position because we don't have enough information and no reasonable position should jump to either conclusion.

jpxw• 5 years ago

- That was hardly a theory limited to them. Many people were saying that that was a possibility right from the start, including me, and I’m not a conspiracy theorist.

- There still isn’t conclusive evidence on that question, unless I’m missing something

- A broken clock is right twice a day

iratic03• 5 years ago

Except those supposed broken clocks have been right more than that

aerosmile2• 5 years ago

That's unfair. Imagine that we suddenly find out that Kennedy was not assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, but that one of the alternative explanations was accurate - you could still write down those same three bullet points, and by doing so, you would unjustly deflect from the outrage of getting it wrong the first time around. Sometimes you just have to take things on the chin, hold people accountable, and learn from it.

raphlinus3• 5 years ago

No. The movie claims that the virus was manipulated in a lab, specifically evolved from SARS-CoV-1 (which has only 79% genetic similarity). While this belief is very common in some circles, no reliable sources support it even as a serious possibility. What is now accepted as plausible is that the virus was brought to the lab, either as a live bat (or other intermediate animal), or as a sample, then was inadvertently leaked. It is also nearly universally acknowledged that the Chinese government is not being transparent and is indeed pushing bogus theories of their own (the frozen food theory in particular). That is not the same as the movie being "right," not even in the stopped clock sense.

eplanit• 5 years ago

"It is well-established that a complex set of conditions and factors enable people to adopt beliefs in conspiracy theories, including personality types, heuristics, and cognitive biases to sociological factors such as level of education and political orientation"

It's true. Some fools will believe that Covid was a grand plan by the elites to control society, while other fools will believe that the 2016 election was stolen by the Rooskies -- both for the reasons cited above, right? Or, I wonder if the author meant only "those people" (i.e. conservatives). I'm betting on the latter.

newsclues2• 5 years ago

There are four Americas.

Left fools, right fools, the people in charge and the people who aren’t in charge and are not fools.

The final group seems to be growing, as the lunacy of the others increases.

jacob019• 5 years ago

Does it? I suppose you're an optimist, I like that.

birdyrooster2• 5 years ago

It’s clear russiagate was a disinformation campaign which was also a convenient cope for all those people that were losing their minds that America could elect Trump.

Applejinx2• 5 years ago

No, there's historical precedent, plenty of motive, and it's in line with the specific political tactics that have governed Russia for quite a while now. Adam Curtis's 'Hypernormalization' touched on this.

It's also been very clear to anyone who's watched it happen on places like Reddit that 'russiagate' itself is a meme driven by powerful media management, brigading, and trolling. Anytime you're in a community and have the ability to examine heavily downvoted content and analyze it for the likely reasons it got hammered with six times the downvotes any other post in the community got, you don't soon forget what you observed.

salimmadjd• 5 years ago

Many Americans still do not realize Trump won riding on $5 billions in free media advertising[1]

Hillary also edged Bernie in the primaries receiving over $740m over sanders $320m [2]

We also know free media is becoming more effective than political advertising [3]

Which all means if you want to blame anyone in stealing the election it’s the corporate media. Also brings up the point that we really need to reinstitute some kind of equal coverage time, otherwise all these election donation limits are meaningless when media bosses can give billions to their favorite candidates.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/15/media/trump-free-media-cove...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-election-confirmed-free...

Schiendelman2• 5 years ago

I’m concerned about your characterization of 2016 election interference. I haven’t seen anyone claim the election was stolen. I do see that our intelligence apparatus in the United States believes the election was interfered with, through Russian amplification of misinformation in support of the Trump campaign, and through direct hacking. This is well documented: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...

ReptileMan• 5 years ago

And there was election fraud in 2020 (there is always) ... The question is whether any of those things are of scale enough to actually change results.

Russia has always interfered with US elections and the US has always waged propaganda war in the Russia and former USSR.

There is always bought votes or people voting when they are not allowed and so on.

Russian impact on election was way smaller than the media time and mind share of democrats and vice versa for Republicans.

jancsika• 5 years ago

I feel like Americans are constantly concern trolling about left/right political conflict to divert from ever talking about Canadians.

You do admit that Canadians have their fair share of fools, right?

I just wonder if by "some fools" you betray a bias toward thinking the U.S. is the only country in the entire world.

uses• 5 years ago

Well that's a bit of a strawman. I don't think anyone would claim the "rooskies" stole the 2016 election as you put it. On the other hand we know for a fact that Putin and his military were dead set on interfering, and were successful in several operations. We also have mountains of real actual evidence, which people went to jail or were indicted over, that Donald and his associates sought and gained help to interfere with the election.

Putting blatant covid misinformation and facts about the 2016 election in the same category is complete bullshit.

mbesto• 5 years ago

Covid was a grand plan by the elites to control society, while other fools will believe that the 2016 election was stolen by the Rooskies

These are really bad examples to try to equate. There was intervention by Russia into the US election ("stolen" is a harsh word that is up for debate), while the idea that a government entity unleashed a virus on the worldwide population is a much more serious acquisition and far less evidence to support.

spdl• 5 years ago

Except the latter "conspiracy theory" is true, pretty definitively too. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-201...

marcinzm2• 5 years ago

Not everything which is not perfectly proven is a conspiracy theory. Or at least there's levels of implausibility. The US has messed with elections and governments in many countries including through direct military intervention so belief that another country would likewise do to some extent isn't that unimaginable. On the other hand so far there's no evidence of some group of elites previously causing massive global events with hard to predict consequences and plenty of evidence of prior disease spreading (SARs, etc.). Claiming that certain subsets of elites secretly work together to benefit themselves is, for example, a more plausible scenario in that same vein and there's plenty of historical precedent for these sorts of collusions.

stuaxo2• 5 years ago

Any clue as to why the film was made and distributed in the first place and who funded it?

arthurcolle• 5 years ago

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/movies/story/2020...

sschueller2• 5 years ago

What I find very disappointing is that instead of addressing this misinformation and actively informing the people as well explaining to them (without being condescending, a huge issue IMO) why what is being reported is untrue we decided to just ban these people from discourse fueling the conspiracies.

Things are not always black and white and we as a nation need to understand that. Nothing is 100% but that is ok. No one is 100% good or evil, we all have our flaws and we need to deal with that.

Only because someone believes something "stupid" doesn't make them unable to change their mind.

I have talked to many who did not want to get vaccinated. I never told them they should, I respect their choice. I did inform them and answer uncertainties that they heard about and had. I also listened and acknowledged the concerns they had, even ones that are completely baseless but I was diplomatic about it. You can tell someone they are wrong without throwing it in their face or making them feel like an idiot. To my surprise a lot of these people ended up getting vaccinated which was never really a goal of mine.

EDIT: if you are down voting me please explain why.

nabla9• 5 years ago

When people argue in bad faith, there is no reason to engage with them. Just shun them and shut them off.

sschueller2• 5 years ago

Isn't that in the end going to result in civil war if that shunted out crowed gets too large?

I have to disagree, sure some are arguing just for the sake of it but the majority are not. They get bits and pieces of the discord and don't really know what is going on. No bad faith there.

kitsunesoba• 5 years ago

Anecdotes and all, but in my experience anti-vaxxers and the like often have a nearly religious zeal about their beliefs that makes them extremely difficult to have a productive conversation with. I’ve tried the sort of level headed, patient approach you mention and it practically never works — they don’t want to be convinced, or even hear anything that opposes what they think.

And oddly, it’s not just the ones who are arguing in bad faith who are like this. It seems to affect anybody who’s went to do “research” and stumbled upon the mountains of disinformation. The handful of people who are uncertain and haven’t been taken in by disinformation are somewhat reasonable to talk with, but they’re a vanishingly small group. The mind closing aspect of the conspiracy stuff is wildly infectious.

User23• 5 years ago

Given that most people are idiots, you can expect to find plenty of idiot anti-vaxxers. I've met quite a few who are far from being idiots though.

For example the infamous Marin county anti-vaxxers were defecting in a prisoner's dilemma type game. They got all the benefits of vaccination since herd immunity existed in the school system and none of the risks that pharmaceutical intervention carries. So as a selfish risk minimization and benefit maximization strategy that anti-vaxxing behavior was entirely rational and indeed locally optimal.

Other anti-vaxxers are capable of distinguishing between a therapy that's been used widely in the general public for decades, and thus has decades of data supporting that the intervention carries less risk than the disease, and a therapy for a disease that was rushed out in under a year and still hasn't been approved by the FDA for a disease that's known to carry minimal risk to those under the age of 40 without comorbidities. Now you can smugly say well I know the risks better and these people are religious fanatics, but really, you don't. Nobody knows the long term risks and benefits of the mRNA interventions because they have never been used in the long term. Vaccine development has historically taken about 10-15 years, so it's far from irrational to have doubts when it was done in under a year.

Edit: If any of the above is logically fallacious or based on misinformation please reply. I am willing to have my mind changed by dialectic.

mrfusion5• 5 years ago

I’d be more inclined to think this article is part of a disinformation campaign.

iratic03• 5 years ago

"Hmm this information goes against my world view, and might threaten this ego I've built up over time based on finding a way of thinking I'm right about everything. Must be disinformation."

mrfusion5• 5 years ago

Couldn’t I say the same thing about you?

One thing I can say in my defense is that I’d absolutely love to be wrong. I’d love to believe this will all be over soon with (0 covid?) and then they give us back everything they’ve taken and we’re back to normal.

Is that what most people believe?

hodgesrm2• 5 years ago

Your comment would be more interesting if you shared the reasoning why you think the article is disinformation.

mrfusion5• 5 years ago

Sorry, I wanted to but I don’t know where to start.

If anyone is genuinely interested this might be a good place to start?

https://old.reddit.com/r/LockdownCriticalLeft/

They’re usually open to good faith questions too.

Orou• 5 years ago

Mikovits' claims are bold-faced lies regardless of your opinions on the pandemic.

Probably the most hilarious claim from that video was the line: "The controversial article sent shockwaves through the scientific community, as it revealed that the common use of animal and human fetal tissue were unleashing devastating plagues of chronic diseases".

None of that is true, her [research](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073172/) had nothing to do with autism or vaccines. Many people tried to replicate her research, which contradicts her claim that she was being shut down by the government/big pharma/the boogeyman.

The fact that people don't care to distinguish between Mikovits and someone like Tyrone Hayes just shows how easy it is for grifters to take advantage of people's strongly-held opinions about the health system. Sorry to say, but if you buy into Plandemic just because you're critical of vaccines/shutdowns/whatever then you fall into that group, and you hurt your position rather than reinforce it by buying into such garbage.

beauHD2• 5 years ago

I was wondering the other day: Without the Internet and round-the-clock updates via Twitter, Facebook, etc - Would the pandemic be as pertinent in people's minds?

Social media is still relatively new, and the pandemic was amplified way more than it should have been IMHO. Nothing to tweet about? Tweet about COVID. No dramatic headlines to conjure up if you're a news outlet? COVID it is.

The pandemic didn't need 'campaigns', for it is its own campaign. With little effort it has graced news outlets' headlines for nearly 2 years now.

aerosmile2• 5 years ago

That's good and bad. On the one hand, it riles people up, on the other hand, it helped elevate the importance of developing and approving vaccines faster than ever before. I do share your sentiment though that it's troubling that the media's business plan is only partially aligned with what's good for the society.

Related thought: we are super mad at Facebook for isolating us into similar belief bubbles. Where's the outrage at CNN and Foxnews? Yes, you hardly ever hear anything positive about them, but there's no threat of regulation, their CEOs didn't have congress hearings, etc.

beauHD2• 5 years ago

Where's the outrage at CNN and Foxnews?

And they have their social media channels where they parrot everything that's on TV, adding to the hype

stuaxo2• 5 years ago

Similar to how users distribute this themselves, near me are stickers by "the white rose"* with Covid disinformation and goading people not to wear masks.

I believe they are self printed as they are often printed on labels and don't come off in one piece.

I assume their funding probably goes back to some dark money org.

* Their chosen name is distasteful: the original white rose were anti nazi activists who were executed, this is clearly not the same.

herodotus• 5 years ago

I would like to see someone who has been directly harmed by bad Covid advice take civil legal action agains one or more of the perpetrators of their nonsense.

titzer• 5 years ago

This is the most brazen evil of our time.

rob_c9• 5 years ago

Here's an idea.

If the authorities combated things like this with openness and actually answered the difficult questions maybe people wouldn't be pushed towards dis-information through distrust.

Nobody has or should have all of the answers. I'm not expecting a public official to stand up and be a global expert on all things.

But there have been so many lies on both sides now and so much political goal scoring by sport term politicians on both sides I'm not surprised that people turned to social media.

Were all dancing around the elephant in the room that clearly everyone panicked due to china's lies at the start of 2020 and its created a culture of fear and distrust.

The only way of combating bad speech is with more speech. This means actual openness and transparency and talking about how you made decisions. This unfortunately does show how ill prepared governments all were for an actual pandemic which is a bit disappointing but it's good to know that some things are being learned from this. Even if it is that this isn't smallpocks++...

kubb4• 5 years ago

The governments would actually need to fund multi billion PR campaigns to combat the disinformation.

Apart from the political feasibility there's also the question of return on the investment. If this caused a 5% increase in the number of vaccinations, would it be worthwhile?

Even then there'd be people who think these are just two sides, and both of them make good and equally valid points.

rob_c9• 5 years ago

I'm sorry you can't make an argument on return for investment when the military is being organised to roll out the needed vaccinations and the economy is being shutdown due to the outbreak in my mind. Unless the politicians just don't give a dam about educating the population they're trying to save.

In not suggesting we can ever change 100% of opinions 100% of the time, but open clear communication is the only proper tool for contering misinformation. Alas we seem to be restoring to the old teachers approach of sit down and shut up or you get the cane for speaking out. Which is damaging for public trust in the long run.

phreeza3• 5 years ago

I agree with most of your points, but "both sides lie" really creates a false equivalence. Conspiracy peddlers are radically further removed from reality than the government/science communicators. Of course they are not perfect, but putting them on the same level as covid deniers is absurd.

rob_c9• 5 years ago

It is a logical fallacy to ignore an argument because of one small distruth or lie.

Now that's out the way...

Unfortunately I'm talking about people's emotions and their decision to trust a source of information. This is clearly NOT a purely logical situation.

There is a false expectation that govt groups are always correct and don't admit mistakes,even if they were correct as they could be at the time. Failure to own these mistakes publically and discuss the shortcomings and failings puts you into the same level of distrust as a scientist view's a snake oil salesman.

I take part on science outreach and one of the most damming things is having to explain when some media celebrity scientist said something utterly stupid and not correct. You then get the envetable "who can i trust" argument and the best way to resolve that is to share more information in a respectable slow and distant way...

Aka actually educating people.

tomp2• 5 years ago

Government/science communicators spent the first month of the pandemic denying it ("Taiwan doesn't exist", "border closures are racist"), the next month lying ("masks don't work"), and the next year politically bickering ("Trump's vaccine shouldn't be trusted" before election, "Trump's fault that people don't trust the vaccine" now) and downplaying the "lab leak" scenario that is only now acceptable in mainstream media ("acceptable" as in "not cause of banning").

They dug their own hole (and they keep digging).

grkvlt• 5 years ago

also, lying requires intent - saying somthing you know to be false, and is not the same as making mistakes, errors, etc.

kettleballroll• 5 years ago

Were all dancing around the elephant in the room that clearly everyone panicked due to china's lies at the start of 2020

Given what I've witnessed since the start of the pandemic in my own country, it seems more plausible to me that china's actions are a product of people and states not knowing how to deal with an unknown situation and changing it's course as situations unfold. What are the lies China has told that I'm not aware of?

rob_c9• 5 years ago

Providing the evidence of no human to human transmission in February springs to mind as well as cases increasing perfectly exponentially in the real world for a real viral outbreak for several weeks.

Failure to share correct information or worse inventing false data is tantamount to lying unfortunately.

SamoyedFurFluff• 5 years ago

My understanding is that the original pushback against the lab leak wasn’t that it had no chance but that it was being used as a distraction for weak leadership initiatives. It was a whataboutism at the time where leadership was on record letting the pandemic get worse because blue states were being hit the hardest.

meowface• 5 years ago

Is it disinformation, or misinformation?

raphlinus3• 5 years ago

The pro-disinformation comments here on Hacker News are entirely predictable, yet make me despair for humanity. I'd love a site where bad faith arguments are unwelcome, but heterodox opinions are encouraged, especially when supported with evidence and reasoning.

To stir things up, I'll give an example of such an opinion right now. Health organizations around the world are systematically lying to us about the basic reproduction number (R0) of the delta variant being astronomical (the figure of 8 is now commonly cited). Serious virologists[1] remind us that the evidence for such high estimates is thin and not based on biology; changes in human behavior, combined with antigenic drift (as observed regularly in influenza without the inference of constantly climbing R0 values) can explain what we're seeing.

It is likely that the R0 value is somewhat higher than the ancestral strain, but a value of 8 is an extraordinary claim which requires extraordinary evidence. And that we do not have, in spite of preprints that show higher viral load[2].

I use the word "lying" but it's most likely this is as much self-delusion than a conscious choice to mislead. But the motivation is very strong: the "delta variant is scary" narrative is much more compelling than "Covid is still dangerous," and indeed is likely contributing to increased vaccination rates.

I'll also note that what I just said would likely trip the "misinformation" filters at the big Internet providers, as it contradicts "medically reliable sources" [WP:MEDRS]; these high estimates are being published by major medical and scientific organizations. It is interesting to note, though, that the official info from the CDC[3] is less out there than the astronomical estimates being breathlessly published by the press. The CDC page says "50% increased transmission" for delta, based on a paper from the UK[4]. That might well be true, though it's an observational study. So even on that basis, mainstream public science communication is way ahead of (in the sense of pushing higher R0 values) what would count as MEDRS.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/opinion/covid-vaccine-var...

[2] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.07.21260122v...

[3] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/variants/variant-i...

[4] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.24.20248822v...

[WP:MEDRS]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable...

pama• 5 years ago

I believe you understand that R0 is not only a function of biology but of human behavior, density, and ventilation. If biology becomes twice as effective and all else stays the same, R0 doubles. The paper you cite [4] is about the British variant, alpha; it was estimated in that paper that alpha was 43 to 90% more contagious than the original strain. Delta is way stronger than alpha, which is why it is now the dominant strain in the UK. I don’t care much about R0 as a global or country average, but delta being 2 to 3 times worse than the original is no surprise, but rather common sense based on the rate it outpaces other weaker variants.

raphlinus3• 5 years ago

You're correct that paper is about alpha, not delta. Apparently the CDC official pages haven't been updated with delta, but when they are (based on leaked internal presentations) it's likely it will have the much higher R0 estimate as you say.

I personally remain skeptical that an R0 of 8 will hold up once biological evidence is taken into account. Reasonable people can disagree.

NoPie2• 5 years ago

But then it doesn't make sense to talk about R0 of a specific delta variant at all because that R0 for delta will be different for different seasons, different countries, even different cities etc.

Instead you could say current R0 in London is 8 (or whatever) and it is mostly delta variant.

Plandemic Revisited: A Planned Disinformation Campaign

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