Although social media giants such as Facebook and YouTube have largely removed a debunked documentary about the COVID-19 pandemic from their platforms, copies and variations of the video are still up on alternative social media sites where hundreds of thousands of people are watching them.
Although social media giants such as Facebook and YouTube have largely removed a debunked documentary about the COVID-19 pandemic from their platforms, copies and variations of the video are still up on alternative social media sites where hundreds of thousands of people are watching them.
And links to that content keep popping up on the mainstream platforms.
Plandemic is a 26-minute video, originally touted as a vignette meant to be part of a longer documentary, full of false and misleading claims about the coronavirus, including about how people can protect themselves.
The video flooded social media platforms in the first week of May. According to the New York Times, it was viewed more than eight million times across major platforms
The original version has been removed from Facebook, YouTube and Vimeo in their push to crack down on false or misleading information relating to the COVID-19 pandemic. Facebook said some of the documentary’s claims could cause “imminent harm,” and YouTube cited “medically unsubstantiated diagnostic advice.”
Nonetheless, clips and modified versions of the documentary have resurfaced on the sites. Facebook has labelled them false and linked to fact checks by news organizations detailing a range of problems with the content, including its promotion of conspiracy theories and incorrect medical information.
Complicating this effort is the fact that Plandemic is easy to find on websites known as alt-tech platforms, many of which position themselves as alternatives to the popular mainstream social media platforms and as proponents of uncensored free speech.
These social media platforms often act as a reservoir for content that’s been flagged and removed from major sites such as Facebook and YouTube, as was the case with Pandemic, and links to the content on alt-tech platforms often make their way back onto mainstream social media platforms.
So, despite the efforts of the mainstream sites to crack down on what they’ve deemed potentially harmful content, alt-tech platforms help keep it circulating.
One such alt-tech site is BitChute, a video-sharing platform registered in the U.K. that is similar to YouTube, allowing people to comment and vote on posted videos. It shows more than 1,770 search results for the term “Plandemic.” The top result appears to be a re-post of the original Plandemic video, and it had more than 1.6 million views as of Wednesday.
There are about a dozen alt-tech platforms in operation, some based on blockchain technology that allows them to tout their decentralized nature.
It’s not possible to verify how many users and visitors each has, but some claim to have sizable communities.
Twitter-alternative Gab, for example, which is favoured by the far right, says it had at least a million registered users last year.
BitChute recently tweeted that it had 20 million unique visitors in April.
‘A censorship backfire’
Zarine Kharazian, assistant editor at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab in Washington, D.C., which studies disinformation and how it affects democratic norms, says in the case of Plandemic, the filmmaker seemed to anticipate the v