COVID-19 and 5G conspiracy theories: long term observation of a digital wildfire

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely affected the lives of people worldwide, and consequently, it has dominated world news since March 2020. Thus, it is no surprise that it has also been the topic of a massive amount of misinformation, which was most likely amplified by the fact that many details about the virus were not known at the start of the pandemic. While a large amount of this misinformation was harmless, some narratives spread quickly and had a dramatic real-world effect. Such events are called digital wildfires. In this paper we study a specific digital wildfire: the idea that the COVID-19 outbreak is somehow connected to the introduction of 5G wireless technology, which caused real-world harm in April 2020 and beyond. By analyzing early social media contents we investigate the origin of this digital wildfire and the developments that lead to its wide spread. We show how the initial idea was derived from existing opposition to wireless networks, how videos rather than tweets played a crucial role in its propagation, and how commercial interests can partially explain the wide distribution of this particular piece of misinformation. We then illustrate how the initial events in the UK were echoed several months later in different countries around the world.

COCO: an annotated Twitter dataset of COVID-19 conspiracy theories

“…As shown in previous work, existing misinformation was sometimes reinterpreted and connected to COVID-19 [ 12 ]. Therefore, we expected to find similar phenomena in this data as well.…”

“…Location can be highly useful, especially since many tweets refer to the politics of the country of the author. We make use of a system to resolve locations from previous work [ 12 ]. The system is described in the Appendix.…”

“…This was done by claiming for example that 5 G is deadly and that COVID-19 is a coverup, or that 5 G allows mind control via microchips injected in the bloodstream. As 5 G misinformation has already been studied separately [ 12 , 23 , 24 ], it was not the focus of this dataset but it is included nonetheless since it is related to other conspiracy theories. Depopulation Conspiracy theories on population reduction or population growth control suggest that either COVID-19 or the vaccines are being used to reduce population size, either by killing people or by rendering them infertile.…”

“…In the context of the pandemic, this usually means that COVID-19 is being used to bring about this world government through fear of the virus or by taking away civil liberties, or some other, implausible ideas such as mind control. Esoteric misinformation Previous work on 5 G-related COVID-19 misinformation [ 12 , 23 , 24 ] showed that truly esoteric ideas concerning spiritual planes played a significant role in the initial weeks of the pandemic. The category was included to determine whether such connections also exist for other conspiracy narratives.…”

“…The technique is based on querying the Google geocoding API. It was used and explained in previous work [ 12 ]. The left side of Fig.…”