Dr. Judy Mikovits and the 'Plandemic'

out of the discredited scientist Dr Judy mcovits. Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, joins us for what to know about the plandemic. Thanks for joining us, Casey, thanks for having me. Whenever something like the coronavirus pandemic happens, whenever there's a big world event or something huge happening, there always tends to be some type of hoax or conspiracy theory attached to it. And these times, especially when we're all stuck at home and on the internet so much,

these things generally tend to pop up. If you'll remember, back in February, there was this whole thing spreading on YouTube and Facebook that was alleging that five g cellular networks were playing a role in spreading the virus. But right now, this is past week, this other kind of

conspiracy theory slash hoax thing popped up. It was a video called the Plandemic and it featured a woman named Dr Judy Muscovitz, and she was alleging things about Dr Anthony Fauci, who was on the Coronavirus Task Force team. There's all sorts of craziness in this video. Casey tell us about the video and then we'll get into how it went viral. So the video is conspiracy theory, as you note, and the basic idea seems to be that some shadowy elites are conspiring to use the pandemic to

sees power maybe make money by creating vaccines. And the star of this twenty six minute clip that went viral is this woman named Judy Mikovitz, who has become a

kind of hero to the Tie vaccine crowd. She's a discredited scientist who published a book in April called Plague of Corruption that sort of depicts her as a truth teller fighting scientists who aren't willing to accept inconvenient facts, and so far right publications began to promote her book, and this documentary that is forthcoming will apparently be taking an even closer look at these sort of baseless conspiracies.

This video has since since it kind of blew up, has been taken down, but tell us about some of the crazy accusations in it. I mean, one of the things that keeps popping up, and I think it was the main thing that really got it pulled down was they were saying that wearing a mask will literally activate your own virus. That's right, and that is the thing

that got it taken down. Platforms like YouTube and Facebook generally do not want to remove content from the network, and they try to enable a maximum of free speech, but they do make an exception for or stuff that is actively harmful. And while a lot of this video plandemic is just kind of conspiracy, is saying, don't forget a lot of people are making money and other people are going to become more powerful, that's not why it

got taken down. It got taken down because, as you say, it warned people against wearing masks, you know, saying that it would reinfect them, which of course there's no basis for that whatsoever. But you can imagine if a lot of people watch that and believe that it could have a really negative effect on public health. So initially Facebook didn't want to remove it, but when it sort of stumbled across that particular claim, it said, Okay, we've actually

got to take this thing down. And Dr Judy mikovits for herself. She does have a degree in biology from the University of Virginia, a PhD in molecular biology. She worked on the National Cancer Institute. She has a lot of things under her belt. But then she started getting into work about chronic fatigue syndrome and vaccines, and this is kind of where she was derailed a little bit.

A lot of people disc credited a lot of the later things that she was researching, so like, in two thousand nine, she had published research saying that a mouse retrovirus caused chronic fatigue syndrome, which got a lot of attention, but it was discredited a couple years later and the journal ultimately retracted it. And then in this sort of like weird side story, she was actually put in jail

on charges of theft, which apparently involved computers disappearing. Those charges were dropped, but the whole thing was a scandal and she was kind of sideline and lost her scientific career. But after that she sort of drifted into this anti vax crowd, and because of the credentials that you mentioned, the anti vaxers have sort of lifted her up as this brave truth teller, even though what she's saying is largely nonsense. So let's talk about how something like this

goes viral. The usual players come up. Obviously, Facebook and YouTube have a huge part in this, just because of how big the platforms are, But there was a lot of Facebook groups that were sharing this, and then beyond that, even as you mentioned, there's a lot of mistruths in these video but it also takes time for their fact checkers to go through this, so, as you've mentioned, they didn't take it down right away. It kind of was circulating around for a while while they were trying to

do some of that fact checking. It's a really interesting story. The way that things go viral on Facebook and YouTube is always changing based on things that the platforms do to try to stop bad stuff from happening, and sort of like as soon as they fixed one problem, another emerges. So over the past year, Facebook has put a lot more attention on groups, getting people to join groups, kind

of moving you away from that news feed. And there are a lot of conspiracy groups, anti vax groups where this video clip was very popular, and what happened is people were sharing it in the group and what they were sharing was actually a link to YouTube. And so from those Facebook groups, they were able to send seven point one million views to one video within a period

of between thirty six and forty eight hours. So just within that short period of time, Facebook drove all of that traffic to YouTube, and so it was kind of an unwitting tag team between the two platforms that sent this thing viral. As you noted, it did take a while for the platforms to fully understand what was in the video. The video is twenty six minutes long, it contains a lot of claims, and they had to go through it sort of point by point and ultimately make

the determination that it had to come down. But it sort of speaks to this cliche, this quote that is attributed to Mark Twain that the lie gets halfway around the world before the truth can put its shoes on, and that was definitely the case here, and it was also this whole thing with obviously all the algorithms and

this big cycle. She had just published a book not too long ago, and it became this thing where searches for her name brought up searches for the video, and vice versa, searches for the video would bring up searches for her name. So it's kind of this big cycle where just feeding off of itself for a while until

Facebook and YouTube took these things down. And you know, I think it's important to remember that Judy mckovitz has something to sell, right She has a book to sell, and this whole viral event on Facebook and YouTube has been very good for her. She had a number one best seller on Amazon over the weekend. Yesterday it was still at number six. So all of this has been of a huge benefit to somebody who is selling this very delicious idea that just doesn't have any basis in reality.

Casey Newton, Silicon Valley editor at The Verge, thank you very much for joining us. It's my pleasure. I'm Oscar Ameres and this has been your daily coronavirus update. You don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast. Every Monday through Friday, so follow us And I heard radio or wherever you get your podcast