Investigation by BBC and ISD think tank into the COVID-19 “infodemic” on Facebook finds right-wing misinformation had far more interactions than the WHO and CDC
“What if [they] are trying to kill off as many people as possible” reads one Facebook post. Tweets: @carljackmiller , @bbcclick , @carljackmiller , @carljackmiller , @carljackmiller , @carljackmiller , @carljackmiller , @carljackmiller , and @amaramarasingam See also Mediagazer Tweets: Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : I've written a piece today about the ‘infodemic’. To me, it's not about information but organisation. There is a parallel world out there that sees the lockdown as a tool of social control, complete with activism, gift shops and meaning for its members. https://www.bbc.co.uk/... @bbcclick : Extremist political and fringe medical communities have tried to exploit the pandemic online. We worked with the UK counter-extremism think-tank the @ISDglobal to study how and why. https://www.bbc.co.uk/... Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 2/ Now, The Epoch Times has had advertising banned by Facebook and has been alleged of running ‘inauthentic networks’ by both Twitter and FB. Newsguard has claimed it has shared information about corona virus that is ‘materially false’. Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 4/ Even quite niche sites like http://humansarefree.com/ which claims the ‘plandemic’ was prepared years in advance got 149K interactions. Now interactions don't imply agreement of course. But they do imply a more substantial intervention in peoples' lives than just seeing smt. Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 3/ Epoch Times was one of 34 sites that Newsguard said had shared corona health misinformation. We looked at all of them. At 8.4M and 7.6M, http://themindunleashed.com/ and http://redstatewatcher.com/ both got more interactions than CDC/WHO Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 6/ Fringe medical/political sites have built huge empires on social media that can harvest enormous numbers of eyeballs. Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 5/ I don't suggest that any of these sites are more visible that information from the CDC/WHO. They have a zillion other ways of getting their content out. BUT interactions means discussion, argument, sharing it on and of course likely challenging it. In other words, culture. Carl Miller / @carljackmiller : 1/A thread sharing more numbers from our investigation into the scale and size of online social organisation underneath the #COVIDー19 infodemic. To benchmark everything, since Jan, posts to the WHO website got 6.2M interactions on FB. CDC got 6.4M EpochTimes got 48M... Amarnath Amarasingam / @amaramarasingam : A co-investigation by @BBCClick and @ISDglobal on how both extremist and fringe medical communities have tried to exploit the pandemic online. https://www.bbc.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
The BBC–ISD investigation lands a month after Facebook's own [[a:951885|internal report claimed US users were reading more COVID-19 content from higher-quality publishers]], making the finding that fringe sites like The Epoch Times and RedStateWatcher out-interacted the CDC and WHO a direct rebuttal of the company's ranking narrative. Carl Miller's framing pushes past content moderation entirely: the infodemic is an organised parallel community around lockdown-as-control, complete with activism and merchandising, not just loose falsehoods.
First-order effects
- Facebook's 'higher-quality' publisher ranking is publicly contradicted by interaction data showing fringe right-wing pages beating WHO and CDC posts by millions of interactions, handing critics concrete evidence that its feed mechanics reward organisation over authority.
Second-order effects
- The measurement problem compounds: a later [[a:958958|global survey of journalists names Facebook the single greater source of COVID-19 disinformation]], and the [[a:960361|Avaaz study finds the same small-cluster, mostly right-wing account pattern behind viral voter-fraud posts]] — converging independent evidence that keeps enforcement pressure on Facebook's thresholds rather than individual takedowns.
Third-order effects
- If engagement-ranked feeds structurally favour coordinated niche communities over institutional publishers during crises, the durable fix shifts from per-post moderation to how distribution itself is governed — the terrain later debates over Facebook's 'imminent harm' ban threshold occupy.
The trend: Crisis-era misinformation is increasingly an organisational phenomenon that engagement-optimised platforms amplify faster than institutional health authorities can compete with.