There’s a kind of public and collective schadenfreude taking shape on black Twitter.
It began after Diamond and Silk, among the best known and most outspoken black supporters of President Donald Trump, were reported to have parted ways with Fox News after they promulgated unproven and dangerous medical advice, false claims, conspiracy theories and misinformation about the coronavirus outbreak.
Some of the posts on the women’s social media accounts have been removed, and at least one account was briefly suspended. The women, who describe themselves as “opinionators,” falsely told their online and television fans that the coronavirus was a ruse to fell Trump in the November election, as well as a fantastic plot crafted and controlled by the “globalist elitists” to manipulate Americans and “wreak havoc on our lives.” They recommended that more Americans should not practice social distancing based on the as-yet medically unproven idea that it would confer lasting immunity against the coronavirus to more of the population.
Fox News, as well as Diamond and Silk, did not respond to requests for comment. But black Twitter, and indeed much of Twitter in general, has had no shortage of responses.
The irony is that the misinformation amplified by Diamond and Silk and others has gained traction in conservative, mostly white social media spaces and black, mostly left-leaning online spaces, too. Concepts similar enough to pass as first cousins on the misinformation family tree have proliferated in social media spaces that do not usually cross or blend.
One example: false conspiracy theories related to the tech billionaire Bill Gates’ health care philanthropy. In conservative white spaces, there are unsubstantiated claims that the coronavirus is Gates’ route to disease profit, a crafty government surveillance system or a man-made population-control mechanism with unfair economic consequences. When those fictional claims moved to conservative black Twitter, misinformation cast the virus as a black population reduction device, a useful if unplanned excuse for aggressive and unfair government monitoring or a poverty boosting tool. Once the misinformation circulated among left-leaning black social media, it often described the coronavirus and the resulting disproportionate death toll as racial population shaping. In those circles, social distancing measures were also sometimes described as a green light for abusive policing.
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“What you have are the same, often very dangerous, ideas repackaged in a way that makes sense to very different groups of people,” said Shireen Mitchell, a researcher who studies online disinformation and harassment. “And it’s distrust in government, in the establishment, in institutions that are the connective tissue — they’re a prevailing theme that makes these wild ideas seem true to those who believe.”Years before the word Gamergate took on public meaning, Mitchell identified a pattern of harassment and doxing used to silence black women and girls. Then the same thing began happening to white women in gaming forums. In 2015, Mitchell and a small group of other black feminists began sounding the alarm about suspicious social media posts. They were written by people no one in the activist community had ever heard of, and they relied on sometimes laughable attempts at the black vernacular and cartoonishly offensive, extreme versions of activist ideas. It seemed to Mitchell then that someone was trying to stir up animosity and confusion.
Now, something strange is happening with coronavirus misinformation, and she is deeply concerned that it could have real consequences, such as online voter suppression, the focus of her current work. A lot of coronavirus myths are showing up in social media spaces where voting is the ostensible topic of conversation.
It was there at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic that utterly false claims of black immunity spread like weeds. That happened while COVID-19 actually proliferated in the United States in ways that would ultimately produce a disproportionate death toll among black, Latino and Native Americans.
Later, unproven stories took hold that the virus was the work product of labs in various countries, including China and the U.S., followed by false claims about vaccine-related moneymaking schemes controlled by a tech billionaire and about the virus’ being spread by cellphone technology. All three ideas jumped from mostly white, conservative circles to mostly black and politically liberal ones, where they have often been amplified by black social media influencers and celebrities.
The problem is so serious that the World Health Organization has called it an “infodemic,” and it secured unprecedented cooperation from many American social media companies to tag, remove and otherwise try to limit the spread of misinformation. But that has had only limited success.
