Zombie Misinformation and the Failure of X
In January of 2023, ICU physician Natalia Solenkova, discovered that right wing blogger Ramsey Paul had reposted a Tweet from her that vilified anti-vaxxers and it was going viral on Twitter. There was one problem. She had never written the Tweet. Ultimately, she would learn that a Tweet of hers had been photoshopped and posted anonymously on 4chan.org where Paul found it and posted it to Twitter, making no effort to check its authenticity.
The Birth of Disinformation
The doctored tweet, which suggested anti-vaxxers were motivated by hate, was red meat for the “medical freedom” crowd. Not only did it blow up on Twitter, it prompted an 11 minute rant from Joe Rogan to his 14 million Spotify listeners.
Solenkova, an ICU doctor who spent the pandemic caring for desperately ill COVID patients was now receiving death threats. Within a week Rogan had apologized. But the fake Tweet was just getting started.
The Misinformation Zombie
The Tweet appeared continuously, sometimes from trolls, but often from influencers like Simon Goddek or Gad Saad, each with a million followers. Or, like this week, from discredited Canadian doctor, William Makis, who unearthed the two year old fake Tweet reposted it.
Once again, the post went viral with thousands of reposts. Within hours, right wing mega-influencer, Dinesh D’Souza had shared it with a note comparing vaccine advocates to the followers of Jim Jones and it soon attracted death threats. Ultimately, it got over a million views.
“It’s devastating to realize that no amount of debunking can stop this disinformation from being weaponized against me,” says Solenkova when asked about the experience, “This fake tweet, thoroughly refuted about two years ago, continues to recirculate, with people failing to fact-check or acknowledge its debunking. Every few months, accounts with large followings use it as a dog whistle to spark another wave of attacks. Each time, it’s the same: death threats, images of gallows, and threats of Nuremberg trials. This ongoing cycle of emotional and psychological assault feels impossible to escape.”
So, a post that never should have seen the light of day is amplified by X and generates death threats for a dedicated physician before being revealed as misinformation. Despite being revealed as misinformation on national media, it continues to appear, most recently from, a physician, who almost certainly knows this is misinformation, dredges up the misinformation and spreads it, making it disinformation. Again, X dramatically amplifies the disinformation and generates death threats. Like a zombie, misinformation and disinformation can have eternal life on X, rising again and again to terrorize their victims.
One of the first things Elon Musk did after taking over Twitter was to kill content moderation. He pretended it was about free speech. Like everything in Musk’s life, it was really about money. Moderation is expensive and difficult, so he decided to crowd source the truth. Community Notes seems like a perfect, democratic solution to misinformation but it’s the opposite. It creates the illusion of moderation, while being incredibly ineffective at preventing the spread of misinformation.
Zombie Misinformation is a Feature, Not a Bug
It took four days for a community note to appear on the post from Makis. By that time, it had been viewed over a million times. That CN is still not visible to the general public.
Community Notes are, at best, too little too late. And, there is no guarantee they are ever correct. The whole notion that this sort of polling defines the truth is at the heart of what’s wrong with X specifically and social media in general. There is no process for determining if these are not bots, much less any explicit validation of the expertise or correctness of those respondents. As the increasingly right wing, anti-science climate on X drives away moderate voices, Community Notes will increasingly become a biased tool for promoting those viewpoints.
On social media there are no journalistic standards, there is no consistent accountability, and there is no clear path to retraction. Community Notes are worse than useless. Free speech absolutism has become an excuse for laziness. In its current form, social media threatens the truth itself and a society untethered from the truth can’t function.
The inaccuracy of the post made national news. But the reality is that X has no interest in shutting down this misinformation. Scanning new Tweets for forbidden images would be simple. But, in the absence of any consequences, why would X want to ban content that can generate a million views two years after its first appearance. When Solenkova and others sought to have the Tweet removed, they were told it did not violate Twitter’s standards. Controversial misinformation is social media gold.
We must demand accountability in all of our media. Social media must not get a free pass. We must create systems that lead us relentlessly towards the truth. In the end, there are no alternative facts. There is one truth. And it matters.
