“That’s better performance than most mainstream media news stories,” says Joan Donovan, a sociologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.ĭonovan charts the path of this piece of disinformation like an epidemiologist tracking the transmission of a new virus. Then that article was liked, shared or commented on by nearly one million people on Facebook. The interview was covered by the newspaper the New York Post, which didn’t debunk the notion. The idea reached Roger Stone - a former adviser to US President Donald Trump - who in April discussed the theory on a radio show, adding that he’d never trust a coronavirus vaccine that Gates had funded. It’s been viewed nearly two million times. Two days later, traffic started flowing to a YouTube video on the idea.

On 19 March, the website falsely claimed that Gates planned to use a coronavirus vaccine as a ploy to monitor people through an injected microchip or quantum-dot spy software. The false claims quietly proliferated among groups predisposed to spread the message - people opposed to vaccines, globalization or the privacy infringements enabled by technology. He’d use vaccines to control people, declared a third. Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist who has funded efforts to control the virus with treatments, vaccines and technology, had himself created the virus, argued one theory.

In the first few months of 2020, wild conspiracy theories about Bill Gates and the new coronavirus began sprouting online.

Conspire conference 2018