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What’s the Deal With the ‘Plandemic’ Conspiracy Video?
Understanding the viral video and its dangerous and false claims
This week, you might have seen the “Plandemic” conspiracy video pop up on your social media feeds. Posted Monday, the slickly produced 25-minute video had 1.8 million views, 17,000 comments, and nearly 150,000 shares on Facebook before it was taken down on Thursday for violating Covid-19 misinformation guidelines, reported Digital Trends. YouTube and Vimeo did the same, but on Thursday #PlandemicDocumentary trended on Twitter as supporters clamored about censorship, suggesting that the ideas it promoted had already taken root.
It’s hard to summarize all the conspiracies “Plandemic” puts forward because it incorporates so many. Primarily, the video (which was meant to be a trailer for a longer documentary) banks on common anti-vaccination ideology to make the false claims that the ongoing pandemic was caused by a previous flu vaccine and that wealthy people deliberately spread the virus to increase vaccination rates. You can read an exhaustive, scientifically backed list of the video’s false claims written by emergency management expert Jim Chaffee here, but ultimately, what got it banned from Facebook was its dangerous and false assertion that wearing a face mask “activates” the virus.
