The main figures behind the early spread of the #FilmYourHospital misinformation were right-wing politicians and prominent individuals on social media who had a large following.

Figures Behind the Early Spread of #FilmYourHospital 

#FilmYourHospital was a conspiracy theory which argued that the COVID-19 pandemic was fake. People essentially took photographs of hospitals' parking lots to "prove" that COVID-19 was a (politically-motivated) hoax.

Davidson College

Research has investigated how misinformation can spread on social media and can have a cascading effect in the creation of conspiracy theories.

Internet and the Spread of Misinformation

Gruzd, A., & Mai, P. (2020). Going viral: How a single tweet spawned a COVID-19 conspiracy theory on Twitter. Big Data & Society, 7(2), 1-9.

Going viral: How a single tweet spawned a COVID-19 conspiracy theory on Twitter

Internet and the Spread of Misinformation: #FilmYourHospital

Willingness to share a message one has just read. Experimentally measured using the following items: “I am willing to share this information with my friends or family” and “I think this information is worth sharing with my friends or family.”

Sharing Intention

Research on tweets from the first half of 2020 found that the words ‘Us’, ‘India,’ ‘Wuhan,’ ‘Coronavirus,’ ‘China,’ and ‘Might’ are commonly used words when it is the case of misinforming tweets. Most tweets were sent in March, around the beginning of the pandemic. Misinforming tweets gained a large amount of spreading, regardless of factuality or popularity.

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