I’ve alluded a bit to how Mikovits was boosted for weeks as part of a book promotion effort before her breakout "success” in the Plandemic clip. The NYT's @daveyalba breaks down the amplification & PR/marketing aspects of the story clearly here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/technology/plandemic-judy-mikovitz-coronavirus-disinformation.html

Plenty of experts have been working hard to refute the specific pseudoscience in the video clips so I'm not going to discuss that. What I & some other researchers had been looking at for 3 weeks prior were efforts to turn her into a counter-Fauci 'whistleblowing' influencer.

Marketing techniques are used to spread ideas, grow influencers, etc. It's what social media was designed for. There are 3 rough components to a successful social media influence campaign: content creation, dissemination, amplification.

Content creation: Mikovits released a new book a month ago. Articles/memes for the initial launch were pushed heavily in anti-vax circles; her co-author is a vaccines-cause-autism blogger. One cover blurb is top antivax crank RFK Jr. He provided the earliest boosts.

Many av books/movies trend or hit #1 on Amazon; anti-vax groups support their leaders, esp when they're framed as brave whistleblowers risking death to speak the ‘truth’ that every ailment known to man is some kind of vaccine-related injury w/a vast govt cover-up. As Mikovits is.

RFK Jr had been gaining more reach in emerging # Reopen (MAGA-ish) & anti-Gates (Q) communities as Mikovits’ book released. Antivax memes incorporated her into wild claims ab Gates and Fauci, positioning her as the whistleblower who would reveal the evil, fight back against them

Dissemination: Mikovits’ site had a prior twitter account that amassed ~2000 followers over 3 years. On April 18 she created a new acct; her first tweet thanked a “Google whistleblower” for helping her get on Twitter. It had ~15k followers within a day, 100k+ by yesterday.

A later tweet (now deleted) thanked him for making YT videos of her & pointed people to a PayPal pool. Vorhies' own tweet was blunt: “Help me take down Fauci”, it read, w/link to a GFM for his company to accept donations to make vids of Mikovits. He laid out a plan for funds:

As plan specified, Mikovits was indeed interviewed by numerous YT creator contacts over several weeks, including the Pandemic ‘filmaker’. There were also several bluecheck accounts on FB- Rashid Buttar - and large-audience YT influencers who interviewed her.

Again: this is a marketing campaign. Plandemic didn't just come out of nowhere. It wasn't foreign amplification or anything like that. This is what social media is designed for.

Each piece of YT content, and related stills, memes, articles, were posted to FB Pages & Groups. Most were related to vaccines, Q, or Reopen protests. Gradually the focus of the sharers included bigger audiences: natural living. healthy dieting. pro-business.

Each could find what they wanted in her messages. Meanwhile, Twitter followers -some eggs, some real- kept climbing. Again, a mix of Q, Reopen, and anti-vaccine accts. Press coverage by Gateway Pundit drove some spikes & expanded interest on Twitter.

Amplification: YouTube took down several Mikovits videos before Plandemic, bc, her health claims were wrong in all of those too. Takedowns spawn secondary videos about censorship. This reinforces the mystique of the whistleblower persona that Mikovits’ team was constructing.

Ultimately shares beget more shares, b/c the content is pushed into more people’s feeds. I wrote a whole lot about platform curation, expertise, and sound info here this week; think it’s a really challenging dilemma https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/health-experts-dont-understand-how-information-moves/611218/

Mikovits never got lift during years as a pseudoscience conf regular. But when she expanded her message to include anti-Fauci, anti-mask, anti-SIP, became a COVID contrarian, worked w/skilled marketers…in 3 wks managed to break into mainstream awareness. https://twitter.com/M_B_McCool/status/1258190610076512257?s=20

So: with a compelling angle (everyone loves a whistleblower!), a networked distribution strategy, some lift from algos, the dubious credential of many twitter followers (eggs or not)...a good marketer can manufacture an influencer. Whether their claims are valid is irrelevant.

Great thread here illustrating some of the FB group/page spread. There were also interesting distributions in follower count creation dates. Lots of brand new accounts (vague Q bios) as well as clusters from 2009. https://twitter.com/3r1ng/status/1259281460516839425?s=21 https://twitter.com/3r1ng/status/1259281460516839425