This Week in Misinformation: COVID Lab Leak Redux, Murdoch/Fox Election Lies, Ukraine War Really Real
2 March 2023
Misinformation is at the root of so much of what ails us. Understand misinformation, and you understand much more than those around you!
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Reliability scores for media outlets cited in the summary are in parentheses for each, courtesy of the terrific folks at Ad Fontes Media.
Now, on to our top stories.
Inarguably, the biggest story in misinformation this week was that someone in the Department of Energy thinks, maybe, that COVID could have leaked from the Wuhan lab.
It began with an exclusive in The Wall Street Journal (44.36), which reported that analysts at DoE had shifted out of the “we can’t even guess” column into “lab leak is likeliest among the possible explanations we have” mode.
Believers in the lab leak theory were overjoyed that the mainstream media was reporting it and that the government had finally decided to stop burying the truth. Note: this is not at all what happened with the intelligence assessment reported by the Journal, but regardless that’s what they ran with. And, almost immediately, people who recalled being “silenced” for raising this possibility (@RepAndyBiggsAZ via Twitter)--nevermind that a lot of them did so while also invoking grand conspiracy theories--went straight to demanding apologies or even suggesting punishment for those who have spoken out against the theory. Many thought they had once-and-for-all exposed the fact-checkers as frauds and the conspiracy theorists as clairvoyant.
If anyone was censored simply for raising this, it would be hard to justify, and I wouldn’t try to defend that action. But let’s also not get carried away with this minor change in the landscape, which added no new evidence to the public domain: still most likely, by far from what is out there (@RottenInDenmark via Twitter), is zoonotic transmission in the Wuhan wet market (@PhilippMarkolin via Twitter). It’s not particularly close, though of course that’s something each person should weigh out (@DrJoeHanson via Twitter), but with the low confidence assessment and no other agencies persuaded by seeing it, I wouldn’t bet on DoE’s new secret evidence being a smoking gun. Even if true, it also wouldn’t logically follow that the numerous conspiracy theories trotted out anew this week (Associated Press, 48.40) have any merit, either.
The ongoing reckoning at Fox News saw a dramatic reveal from Murdoch himself.
Unfortunately for those at Fox who wanted to break from Donald Trump (New York Times, 42.48), we all saw instead a network that tried to earn back its audience’s “trust” by indulging his fantasies about 2020 that anchors knew were false (CBS News, 44.28).
The billionaire owner of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, admitted as much in testimony he gave in the Dominion lawsuit, and his confession that it was really all about the money earned him a good number of headlines (Forbes, 41.15).
Democrats took notice and called for Murdoch to reprimand the anchors that cynically ran with the election fraud narrative (Forbes, 41.15). Trump, on the other hand, insisted that Murdoch should fire anyone at the network that did not amplify the lies (Deadline, 41.75). So we all agree Murdoch should do… something!
Yes, this came up: the war in Ukraine is not fake, though a lot of what Russia has said about it is.
Whenever a real thing happens, you can bet its opposite, made-up thing is also asserted. In this case, huge Twitter accounts on the right tried to insinuate that a war hasn’t been happening in Ukraine because, they say, there is so little (?!) video of it coming out, and that buildings that got repaired were never damaged to begin with, and the like (BBC, 46.15).
One particularly amusing piece that was trotted out was that the Ukrainian president’s body double was caught on camera (@Shayan86 via Twitter), putting the lie to the supposed scam that President Biden’s visit to Kyiv was. TL;DR: It was the bodyguard, not a body double.
Meanwhile there are mounds of evidence for Russia pouring a lot of resources and ingenuity into the information aspect of its war against Ukraine (U.S. Department of State Global Engagement Center, -), and that even a year in it is able to do so with the assistance of Western companies (Grid News, -) and by manipulating search engines (Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, -).
Don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten your grab bag: a new study shows, unsurprisingly, that celebrities were key misinformation vectors when it comes to COVID and other health misinformation; speaking of which: Woody Harrelson jokes (?) about anti-vaccine conspiracies in his SNL monologue; misinformation “superspreader” engagement increased 44% on Uncle Elon’s Twitter; on the home front, a Russian court fines Wikipedia over military “misinformation”; Conspiracy theories about geoengineering are harming climate research; 15-minute cities have been turned into an international conspiracy theory; Fox News defends itself from broadcasting election conspiracy theories by spouting conspiracy theories in its legal filings; and now that Speaker McCarthy has given Tucker the January 6th security tapes, Trump allies like Mike Lindell are threatening to sue him.
All that, and a lot more, below. This is This Week in Misinformation.
-- Kevin