Vaccine Disinformation. A case study.
Friends know that I’ve long subscribed to “bottom of the barrel” conservative email-lists. GOP PATRIOT NEWS and other fly-by-night popup “news services” litter the conservative landscape, firehosing ad-encrusted email blasts on the hour.
The reason they exist is well-documented: the conservative base responds to fearmongering and lib-mocking. And when they respond, their clicks and shares can be monetized. The system doesn’t require diabolical propagandists, just profit-seekers leeching off the echo chamber.
Take this morning’s email from “TPN News” — aka “Three Percent Nation,” a reference to a far-right group that advocates active resistance to the corrupt, liberal federal government. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Percenters). Mind you, TPN News
Like most of these sites, it has no fixed identity. The domain (threepercentnation dot com) was registered in 2014, and despite an “archive” of news stories going back to 2014, seems to have spent most of its life as a GoDaddy parking page.
At some point it was a half-hearted online store with one product: 3%er sticker packs (again, thanks http://archive.org), but now it’s an ad-encrusted wordpress site.
To the uninformed or confused observer it looks like an ugly but nondescript news site; but it’s absolutely typical of the ocean of bottom-feeder sites in the conservative rage-to-clicks ecosystem.
So, I promised Vaccine Disinformation.
This morning’s email had an alarming headline: “WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN TO THE VAXXED IN THE NEXT THREE MONTHS IS HORRIFYING!” Again, it’s typical of the genre: vague but terrifying, or vague but infuriating, or vague but schadenfreudey.
The email itself is a firehose of ads and clickbait stories, but the headline re-appears, with no additional information but situated comfortably amongst other appeals to conservative hot-buttons of the moment. A few years ago, it was wall-to-wall Benghazi. Now it’s vaccines.
Clicking through to the site itself is an adventure in “how many ad delivery systems can be backed into a single HTML payload” — I count four separate ad networks and a request to send web push notifications before the site’s logo even loads.
The “news story,” once it loads, reads like a bad rehash of a Facebook post: Vague comments about “the rush to vaccinate” and “no one knows what’s in it” that are familiar to anyone who watched the pre-COVID antivax movement.
Also… ads. Lots of ads. Roughly every 2-3 sentences.
It announces, without proof, that one in three vaccinated people only receive a saline placebo. “Maybe you got the PLACEBO? How do you know??!?!” it asks the reader.
Also? Horny Girls Are Looking For Men Over 21. CLICK HERE.
It repeats an easily-debunked claim about blood banks refusing the vaccinated (see https://www.redcrossblood.org/local-homepage/news/article/covid-19-vaccination-guide-blood-donation.html). “If you think that isn’t true, GIVE IT A TRY!” the TPN post shouts.
The “article” wraps up with some half-hearted appeals to ignorance and fear: “If doctors don’t know how to cure COVID how can they make a vaccine?”
Then, an unsourced claim that “top doctors claim YOUR vaccinated family members will drop like flies this fall.”
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The final payload — sandwiched between vague but dire warnings and another wall of ads — is a warning to “prepare yourself!” and an embedded video ranting about Agenda 21, one of the far right’s “The UN will kill us all” conspiracy theories. (see https://www.splcenter.org/20140331/agenda-21-un-sustainability-and-right-wing-conspiracy-theory)
I’m beating this particular dead horse because I want to make a point. It’s easy to look at the site and say, “Wow, this is nothing but a pile of red flags with a warning on top, how could anyone fall for this?”
I mean… the “contact us” page is a broken takedown request form
What’s important to remember is that I get dozens of emails like this every single day, from an ever-changing, ever-rotating mix of popup conservative “news” sites that take the conservative anger-du-jour, amp it up and reflect it back, then use it to season a page full of ads.
These sites are innumerable and built on the grimy, clicks-to-cash SEO/Spam techniques that have been evolving in the Internet’s sewers for decades. The system doesn’t require diabolical propagandists, just a copypasta churn of existing memes to fill the gaps between ads.
They benefit from the carefully-cultivated paranoia the conservative movement has encouraged towards “mainstream news,” and reinforce it by flooding the audience, filling their inboxes and browsers with a cacophony of rage and suspicion.
And ads. So many ads.
Sometimes it’s laughable, because the rageclick topic of the moment is something like, a celebrity saying Trump is a demagogue. And you can watch the whole aggregate grift-organism pivot in realtime to a wave of “You Won’t BELIEVE DeNiro’s HATEFUL Tirade!” headlines.
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But more often than not, the relentless buzz of headlines and breathless “do you KNOW? are you SURE? have you HEARD?” copy is echoing genuinely dangerous disinformation, because that’s what “reputable” conservative media sources are hyping in a slightly-more-respectable form.
If you’re one of the people who’s slid into that echo chamber, the issue isn’t whether you believe that Three Percent Nation is a credible news source. It’s the perception that LITERALLY EVERYONE is talking about this SHOCKING STORY. Your’e surrounded by it.
Your friend on facebook trying to explain to you how MRNA vaccines work and how clinical trials are structured and what the ingredients of a vaccine are? They’re trying to shout over a storm, while the storm is shouting, “THEY’RE A DUPE!”