I suspect many people are looking for explanations as to how the #Plandemic video went so viral, so I made some data visualizations of 2 different datasets with CrowdTangle data to see if I could find some answers. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

This is a timeline of interactions on Facebook posts containing the keyword " #Plandemic" from April 8 to May 8. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

A timeline of interactions on Facebook posts containing the query "Judy Mikovits" from April 8 to May 8. Interactions on multiple posts on a single day are added together for a daily total of all interactions. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

A chart of reactions to Facebook posts containing keyword #Plandemic from April 8 to May 8. Links to YouTube dominated this dataset, followed by links to other websites outside of Facebook (vimeo was also common). https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

I made the same chart for reactions to 23,681 Facebook posts containing the query “Judy Mikovits” from April 8 to May 8, 2020. There are fewer links in this second dataset (and fewer posts overall) but links out to YouTube, again dominated the dataset. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

Link map of 37,275 #plandemic Facebook posts from April 8 to May 8, 2020. The larger, visible labels are highly active Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members. These Facebook groups are the central hubs in the network. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

Here's a closeup of the #plandemic network and a filtered graph. I removed nodes with less than 50 edges. So it's basically YouTube videos and all the Facebook Groups they were shared into. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

YouTube videos that I manually checked are now offline.

The link map for 23,681 Facebook posts query "Judy Mikovits" from April 8 to May 8 contains the same large Facebook groups, connected by links that were shared to those groups, majority of which were links to YouTube. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

Here's a closeup of the #plandemic graph. The network is dominated by large QAnon and conspiracy Facebook groups. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

So the #plandemic video spread from YouTube to Facebook thanks to highly active QAnon & conspiracy-related Facebook groups with tens of thousands of members which caused a massive cascade. Both platforms were instrumental in spreading viral misinformation. https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

I'm still trying to make these graphs more legible. Names of some Facebook groups & pages tend to be very long, hence the messy labels. This is my first blog published using Facebook data, I'll get better w/ practice. ;) https://medium.com/@erin_gallagher/facebook-groups-and-youtube-enabled-viral-spread-of-plandemic-disinformation-f1a279335e8c

Closeup of "Judy Mikovits" graph