Great rundown of the weird world me and my team @MEActNet have been living in the last three weeks as we tried to assess what threat this disinformation campaign posed to our #MECFS community. One point of disagreement: I do not think this was at heart a marketing campaign. https://twitter.com/noUpside/status/1259256225088208896

Rather, I think this disinformation campaign is exploiting social media’s every weakness: all that it is horribly ill-equipped to handle and was not remotely designed for.

Watching it all unfold and feeling powerless to do anything about it had me truly questioning the value of our community’s openness, intimacy, distributed structure, and the good faith and presumption of trust that underlie our every interaction.

My main goal is ensuring that our #MECFS community and allied communities are prepared: that we learn how to recognize and respond (or better yet, not respond) to #COVID19 disinformation campaigns. To that end, take a look at our new disinfo handbook: https://www.meaction.net/2020/05/09/meaction-disinformation-handbook-2/

Why do we need to be prepared? There are aspects of this campaign and/or campaigns adjacent to it that have not yet been reported on. In other words, this is far from over.

The sooner we can stop playing whackamole with the conspiracy theory of the week and start learning how to see the actual game, the better. I am not convinced there will be any great solutions unless tech platforms step up or we all exit en masse. (Ha!) But awareness is a start.