enablers of the infodemic
a case study
In the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Dianna Ploss was reasonable.
“At this point most of us don’t know what to believe,” wrote the ardent Trump supporter in her newsletter on March 6. Sure, the local conservative talk radio host and Massachusetts political activist already believed the “relentless twenty four hour coverage by a leftist mainstream media intent not on your safety but on creating panic” was deliberately drumming up a ruckus to tank the economy and tank President Trump’s chances at re-election, but she also shared facts about the virus’s spread in that first, early March email. “The virus is believed to have probably emerged from an animal source,” she wrote. Like many Americans at the time, she doubted its seriousness when compared with the flu. She also wondered whether COVID-19 is a bioweapon.
The next week she doubled down. “We can’t let this create irrational panic. What’s next? No elections in November? Martial law? Tanks in the streets? Forced vaccinations? Public executions? Get a hold of yourselves.”
By April, Ploss was suggesting that local officials who in February encouraged their constituents to eschew racist narratives about the virus and continue shopping in Chinatown districts were “Agents of the Chinese Communist Government,” and was invested in the narrative that the Chinese government — aided by an Obama-era grant and cooperative relationship with Dr. Anthony Fauci — had developed the virus at the Wuhan Virology Lab. Today, she is violating Massachusetts’ stay-at-home order and protesting at the Governor’s private residence to re-open the state economy.
Ploss does not create disinformation, but she traffics in it. A look at her online activism over the past month shows that like more sophisticated purveyors of disinformation, she is after confusion and chaos, all in service of a single goal: propping up the Trump administration at any cost, even human lives.
In the information ecosystem, Ploss is an enabler. She turns a blind eye and willfully covers up for the factory upstream that’s pumping muck directly into the water.
Dianna Ploss first appeared in my inbox October 2018, after I had written a story about another Massachusetts political activist, Shiva Ayyadurai. I discovered that Ayyadurai’s campaign to unseat Senator Elizabeth Warren was associated with an astroturfing operation; Ploss wrote to me to thank me for the story; in a coherent and polite note, she said Ayyadurai and his team had been spreading lies about and harassing her, and she had been suspicious of his online behavior. Not long after she reached out, I found myself on the distribution list for her “MA4Trump” weekly newsletter, a two-column, Times New Roman, HTML-induced headache emblazoned with red, white, and blue titles and pixelated memes.
Out of curiosity, I’ve never unsubscribed. Dianna’s missives mostly sit unopened in my inbox, but every few months I feel my blood pressure reaching a healthy level and decide to give it a jolt. During the impeachment proceedings, the newsletter claimed Ukraine was “Ground Zero for the CIA’s Coup upon America. What is happening in Ukraine,” Ploss wrote, beneath a meme of a worried-looking Husky dog imploring readers to do their homework, “has happened to other countries across the Globe courtesy of the Deep State, our CIA and other Corrupt American Leaders and American Politicians.”
After rallies to “reopen the economy” shut down capitals across the country, I wondered what Dianna was thinking about the pandemic. Her April 18 newsletter showed that she had fully submerged herself into the polluted river of disinformation, rumor, and conspiracy theory, claiming that Bill Gates was a pedophile that engineered the outbreak. How did she get there? With the help of Alexa Pavliuc, a social network analyst, I waded into her information flow.
Ploss, whose “DiannaPlossShow” Twitter account had over 34,000 followers as of this writing, tweeted 177 times about the pandemic between early February and mid-April. Though engagement on her tweets is quite low — her most-retweeted original COVID tweet was only retweeted ten times — the tweets show how the narratives she found most important shifted over the course of the crisis so far. Alexa and I categorized each tweet based on its substance or the substance of the linked sources. Twenty-one percent of Ploss’s tweets about the pandemic were anti-China, using hashtags like #ChinaLiedPeopleDied. Another 20% were anti-Democrat, blaming the left for inspiring panic and manufacturing crisis.
The remaining 59% of tweets were spread over a dizzying variety of categories: Ploss alternatively argued that the virus was not dangerous (10% of tweets) or that it was manmade (4%). She fretted about the economy 6% of the time, usually claiming that the pandemic was engineered to purposefully tank the economy and ruin President Trump’s chances of reelection. In 12% of tweets she shared articles from both credible sources (including The Washington Post, if they happened to fit her narrative) and misleading “news” sites (such as ZeroHedge and the Epoch Times). She supported the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat the virus, but also peddled unproven homeopathic cures, including stabilized oxygen drops.
Aside from a steady drumbeat of blame directed at anyone other than Trump, Ploss’s tweets had no unifying narrative. The posts on her Facebook page, which has over 29,000 followers and much higher user engagement, were similar (an in-depth analysis of the posts was beyond the scope of this newsletter due to Facebook’s underlying structure). In live videos of her radio show, I was surprised to learn that Ploss’s former animosity towards Shiva Ayyadurai, the astroturf-employing politican that brought Ploss to my attention, had dissipated. When an interviewee mentioned one of Ayyadurai’s misleading videos (there have been many; he claimed you can cure coronavirus by blowing a hot hairdryer down your throat and recently started spreading anti-Fauci conspiracies) had been removed by YouTube, she sympathized, glowingly discussing “Dr. Shiva” without mentioning their previous rancor. She was in a similar situation; Facebook had recently limited her ability to share links. While I put this newsletter together, her “MA4Trump” Twitter account was also temporarily suspended.
I emerged from my Dianna bubble confused and anxious, but what must it feel like in her head? I tried to reach Ploss for comment; an email I sent asking, in particular, why her feelings had changed about Ayyadurai, her once-nemesis, went unanswered, perhaps because she was busy preparing for her “Liberate Massachusetts” protest today.
Only 35 people RSVPd to the event on Facebook, and the majority of comments reacting to her announcement of the protest are negative. One of the least offensive reads: “Stay out of our neighborhood! Leave the PROTECTIVE MEASURES ALONE SET IN PLACE TO PROTECT LIVES!” Like a majority of Americans, Massachusetts residents do not feel they need to be “liberated.”
I’ve highlighted Ploss here not because of any special personal animosity towards her, or because her behavior is outrageous. On the contrary, what makes her online behavior worth analyzing is how mundane it has become. Ploss’s social media presence, newsletter, and radio show are endemic of right-wing punditry and activism in the Trump era: question everything, believe only Trump, and muddy the waters to deflect blame wherever possible. It led her to harass a counter-protester during the first thirty minutes of her event today. (Naturally, it was livestreamed.) In addition to the tens of people assembled, a few hundred others watched online as she pursued him, maskless, shouting “aren’t you supposed to be six feet away from me? Aren’t you?”
Ironically, the tagline of Ploss’s radio show is “where the truth hurts.” But it's her commitment to amplifying the President’s narratives — shared by many thousands of other Americans — that threatened people today. Amid all the worry about how foreign actors can and will utilize this crisis, we need to be clear about the threat President Trump’s domestic disinformation poses. It drives his supporters to endanger themselves and others, and it inspires them to enable his campaign to pollute our information environment. While the pandemic has led our natural environment towards recovery, our informational environment is becoming more polluted every day.
Through the haze, it can be hard to see the truth.
Thanks again to Alexa Pavliuc for her help with this newsletter! Check out her work and follow her on Twitter.
Extra credit reading:
More on the origin of the anti-quarantine protests from NBCNews
Send this article to your friends and relatives who might need help detecting COVID misinfo
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