In my last post I mentioned a consiracy theory about a widespread misinformation campaign to spread fear about COVID-19 and push the notion that everyone should get vaccinated. I mentioned that I hadn't found any obvious manipulation surrounding the hashtag #VaccineRegret or that people were pretending to be doctors and claiming that dying COVID-19 patients are regretting not getting vaccinated. Alas, it didn't take too many days until I came across tweets claiming to have proof that a misinformation campaign is underway. All you needed to do is search for "getting crushed by COVID-19" and see the lies pour in.

You can imagine my shock. How had I missed this? My original search was confined to #VaccineRegret so that would explain missing this tweet as it doesn't mention regret at all, only that the Delta variant of COVID-19 is bad and overtaxing hospitals. Below is the picture that is being shared widely on Twitter:

At first glance it looks pretty bad. That's a lot of tweets with identical wording. What's going on? Is this proof of a misinformation campaign? Let's look into it deeper.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I didn't mention this in my previous post but DON'T HARASS ANYONE. I am mentioning the Twitter handles of the accounts involved only for fact-checking purposes. It is Twitter's job, not the users, to moderate and address TOS breaches. Check that I'm not misconstruing anything and check the original accounts mentioned but DON'T HARASS USERS.

So with that out of the way (I am serious about the note above), let's look at the accounts in the picture. Although the picture has nine tweets, there are only 8 accounts involved as two of the picture are from the same account. The accounts involved are:

@EM_RESUS @realjuliasong @NJOverclocked @TheTaylorDay @pgriffie2 @GroyperAccount @AmericanREI5 @PLagoon

Let's start with @EM_RESUS. You might recognize the tweet after it made the rounds on Twitter. Looking into it, this account is the originator of the tweet and looking into his account it looks like he is an actual doctor reporting his own experience working at a hospital.

This is the search term I used to find the original tweet:

We are officially back to getting crushed by COVID-19. since_time:1626987600 until_time:1627333199

So that leaves 7 Twitter accounts to look at. Let's start with the easiest: @NJOverclocked, @TheTaylorDay and @GroyperAccount are all suspended so it's difficult to look deeper into what kinds of accounts they are. Bots? Trolls? Whos knows. I vaguely remember that the Internet Archive has some find of archiving for Twitter and that might help look into those accounts but I feel I spent enough time looking into this as is and so I'll leave that for a later date. Let's just say that they are suspicious. @GroyperAccount has a Pepe the Frog avatar so who knows what agenda that account had.

3 potential bots with unknown motives. That leaves 4 more accounts to look into. Let's look at @pgriffie2 and @AmericanREI5. These two accounts are still online and look like they are real people. (Who knows anymore what "real" even means anymore.) Looking at their accounts, they seems like people who are sharing left-wing political content. I could find the posts with identical wording and they hadn't removed them. It looks like they for whatever reason that they copy/pasted the tweet for unknown reasons. They are not trying to hide it though: they have now openly made it a part of their Twitter identities after people started coming after them. I'd chalk this up thoughtlessness on their part. Maybe they wanted to amplify the message, maybe they had some kind of desire to trick people into thinking they are medical professionals and get get people vaccinated. In any case, this doesn't seem like sophisticated PsyOP agents working to drive the people into a panic.

That leaves the last two tweets: @realjuliasong and @PLagoon. These belong to the last category: right-wing aggitators. The most obvious is @realjuliasong. This is clearly a right-wing account trying to get people angry by using right-wing propaganda. Tweeting the identical words of the "crushed by COVID-19" tweet was probably to dilute the message and make the original seem less trustworthy.

@PLagoon is not as straight-forward. This is an account that posts fairly right-wing slanted material quite a bit. There is nothing he has posted that could be considered exactly anti-vaxx, but he's reposted stuff critical of the FDA and other stuff that makes me wonder why he would want to copy/paste something like the "crushed by COVID-19" tweet. It could be to dilute the message like with the @realjuliasong account, but it seems strange and uncharacteristic of the account.

So as the final round-up we have: 1 orignal tweet, 3 banned accounts, 2 thoughtless left-wind copy/pasted tweets and 2 potentially right-wing accounts trying to agitate users. When I went and looked for more you'll find a few accounts copy/pasting the "crushed" tweet but they again get banned or private their accounts. Users like @KCVeteran4thIVY & @RedPillNihilist sound more like the right-wing agitator sort than anything else and there may be some proof that there was an effort to actually attack the original "crushed" tweet. This doesn't yet convince me that there is a left-wing conspiracy to cause people to panic about COVID-19. If anything, it looks more like there are efforts on the part of right-wing agitators to counter any narrative that expresses concern over the pandemic. It took me hours to compile this, look at every account with some level of detail and write a blog post. How many people would go through this amount of effort over a stupid picture? You'd more likely just look at it, think "that's bad" and bring it up during your next coffee break. Maybe I'm the idiot for wasting my time trying to disprove lies that takes bad actors mere minutes to spin up.

This is going to be it for this episode of INFO WARS. If you too want to be a part of INFO WARS, below are two more pictures seeming to show a left-wing influence campaign in action. One seems to be pre-COVID and about general anti-vaxx stuff but they are here if you want to play a game of "keyboard warrior".

Tweet: "this is disgusting, masks and social distancing should..."

@StateAverse @CDM0202 @AzpiCesar28 @Leedsmano04 @thfcsam_ @rowe_szn @ToWalkAbroad @dannyon_ @Jed0st

For the tweet: "Antivaccine rhetoric is dangerous. Vaccine hesitance...", there seems to be a lot more evidence of wide-spread copy-pasting. I think it may have been a Twitter share button at play, the same things happens when people share anti-vaxx stuff as well: