118 Three Kid Rock pages on Gettr, Gab, and Truth Social had nearly identical bios and were likely from the same user. Graphika and the Stanford Internet Observatory, “Suspected Russian Actors Leverage Alternative Tech Platforms in Continued Effort to Covertly Influence Right-Wing U.S. Audiences,” Graphika, December 13, 2022; Donald J. Trump (@donaldjtrumpjr), “Yup,” Instagram, June 15, 2022, https://www.instagram.com/p/Ce1j3F2u5nY.

119 Trump, “Yup.”

120 Vittoria Elliott, “Telegram’s Bans on Extremist Channels Aren’t Really Bans,” Wired, November 28, 2023, https://www.wired.com/story/telegram-hamas-channels-deplatform.

121 Marianna Spring, “Marianna Vyshemirsky: ‘My Picture Was Used to Spread Lies About the War,’” BBC, May 17, 2022, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61412773.

122 Maayan Lubell, “Exclusive: Facebook Removes More Russia Posts Claiming Children’s Hospital Bombing a Hoax,” Reuters, March 16, 2022, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/exclusive-facebook-removes-more-russia-posts-claiming-childrens-hospital-bombing-2022-03-16.

123 See, for example, this collaboration between CNN and Clemson University investigating a Russian troll factory in Ghana: Clarissa Ward, “Inside a Russian Troll Factory in Ghana,” CNN, March 12, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/03/12/russian-trolls-ghana-ward-pkg-vpx.cnn.

124 Miles Klee, “Twitter Fires Election Integrity Team Ahead of 2024 Elections,” Rolling Stone, September 27, 2023, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/twitter-elon-musk-fires-safety-team-2024-elections-1234832199.

125 Kate Starbird, Ahmer Arif, and Tom Wilson, “Disinformation as Collaborative Work,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 3, no. CSCW (November 7, 2019): 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229.

126 Samantha Bradshaw, Renée DiResta, and Carly Miller, “Playing Both Sides: Russian State-Backed Media Coverage of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” International Journal of Press/Politics, February 28, 2022, https://doi.org/10.1177/19401612221082052.

127 Stanford Internet Observatory Team, “Digital Street Conflict,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 3, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/digital-street-conflict.

128 Amanda Seitz, Eric Tucker, and Mike Catalini, “How China’s TikTok, Facebook Influencers Push Propaganda,” AP News, March 30, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/china-tiktok-facebook-influencers-propaganda-81388bca676c560e02a1b493ea9d6760.

129 Vincent Ni, “China Hires Western TikTokers to Polish Its Image During 2022 Winter Olympics,” The Guardian, January 22, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/22/china-hires-western-tiktokers-to-polish-its-image-during-2022-winter-olympics.

130 David Gilbert, “Russian TikTok Influencers Are Being Paid to Spread Kremlin Propaganda,” Vice, March 11, 2022, https://www.vice.com/en/article/epxken/russian-tiktok-influencers-paid-propaganda.

131 See, for example, Henry John Farrell and Bruce Schneier, “Common-Knowledge Attacks on Democracy,” SSRN Electronic Journal, November 17, 2018, https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3273111: “Election security does not simply involve physical infrastructure, such as ballots and polling booths. It also involves roughly consensual expectations about how the system works, who won and who lost, and so on. If an attacker does not penetrate the physical election infrastructure, but does successfully subvert the shared expectations around the election, she can nevertheless succeed.”

132 See Yochai Benkler, “The Danger of Overstating the Impact of Information Operations,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/danger-overstating-impact-information-operations: “If the objective of the campaign is to sow doubt and confusion, to make Americans believe that we have been infiltrated and that Russia is an all-powerful actor messing with our democracy, then overstating the importance of the campaign simply reinforces and executes the Russian plan.”

133 Josh A. Goldstein and Renée DiResta, “Foreign Influence Operations and the 2020 Election: Framing the Debate,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020, https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/foreign-influence-operations-and-2020-election-framing-debate.

134 The US District Court for the District of Columbia, “Indictment Criminal No. (18 U.S.C. §§ 2,371, 1349, 1028A),” US Department of Justice, February 16, 2018, https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1035562/download.

135 Gregory Eady et al., “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research Agency Foreign Influence Campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US Election and Its Relationship to Attitudes and Voting Behavior,” Nature Communications 14, no. 62 (2023): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-35576-9.

136 Marshall Cohen, “Access Hollywood, Russian Hacking and the Podesta Emails: One Year Later,” CNN, October 7, 2017, https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/07/politics/one-year-access-hollywood-russia-podesta-email/index.html.

137 “Launching the SIO Virality Project,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, May 21, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/launching-sio-virality-project.

138 “Iran Leader Refuses US Help; Cites Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory,” Al Jazeera, March 23, 2020, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/3/23/iran-leader-refuses-us-help-cites-coronavirus-conspiracy-theory.

139 Shelby Grossman, “Virality Project: Saudi Arabia State Media and COVID-19,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 24, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/saudi-arabia-state-media-and-covid-19.

140 Maggie Michael, “Yemen’s Rebels Crack Down as COVID-19 and Rumors Spread,” AP News, June 9, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-health-yemen-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak-677a1fc12d864cd37eea57e5f71614a2.

141 Daniel Bush, “Virality Project (Russia): Penguins and Protests,” Stanford Internet Observatory Cyber Policy Center, June 9, 2020, https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/io/news/penguins-and-protests-rt-and-coronavirus-pandemic.

142 DiResta et al., “Telling China’s Story.”

143 John Dotson, “The CCP’s New Leading Small Group for Countering the Coronavirus Epidemic—and the Mysterious Absence of Xi Jinping,” Jamestown Foundation, February 5, 2020, https://jamestown.org/program/the-ccps-new-leading-small-group-for-countering-the-coronavirus-epidemic-and-the-mysterious-absence-of-xi-jinping.

144 Vanessa Molter and Renée DiResta, “Pandemics & Propaganda: How Chinese State Media Creates and Propagates CCP Coronavirus Narratives,” Misinformation Review, June 8, 2020, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/pandemics-propaganda-how-chinese-state-media-creates-and-propagates-ccp-coronavirus-narratives.

145 Paul Mozur et al., “China Uses YouTube Influencers to Spread Propaganda,” New York Times, December 31, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/technology/china-propaganda-youtube-influencers.html.

146 Renée DiResta, “For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy,” The Atlantic, April 11, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/chinas-covid-19-conspiracy-theories/609772.

147 Lijian Zhao (@zlj517), “CDC was caught on the spot,” Twitter, March 12, 2020, 10:37 a.m., https://twitter.com/zlj517/status/1238111898828066823.

148 DiResta, “For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy.”

149 Bret Schafer and Raymond Serrato, “Reply All: Inauthenticity and Coordinated Replying in Pro-Chinese Communist Party Twitter Networks,” Institute for Strategic Dialogue, August 6, 2020, https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/reply-all-inauthenticity-and-coordinated-replying-in-pro-chinese-communist-party-twitter-networks; Brandy and Schafer, “How China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Use and Abuse Twitter.”

150 Renée DiResta et al., “Sockpuppets Spin COVID Yarns: An Analysis of PRC-Attributed June 2020 Twitter Takedown,” Stanford Internet Observatory, June 11, 2020, https://fsi.stanford.edu/publication/june-2020-prc-takedown.

151 Josh Lederman, “U.S. Insisting That the U.N. Call Out Chinese Origins of Coronavirus,” NBC News, March 25, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-insisting-u-n-call-out-chinese-origins-coronavirus-n1169111.

152 Nathaniel Gleicher, “Labeling State-Controlled Media on Facebook,” Meta, June 4, 2020, https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/labeling-state-controlled-media; “New Labels for Government and State-Affiliated Media Accounts,” Twitter, August 6, 2020, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2020/new-labels-for-government-and-state-affiliated-media-accounts.

CHAPTER 7: VIRUSES, VACCINES, AND VIRALITY

1 Jennifer Kasten, “What Judy Mikovits Gets Wrong,” Medpage Today, May 12, 2020, https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/generalinfectiousdisease/86461.

2 Sheera Frenkel, Ben Decker, and Davey Alba, “How the ‘Plandemic’ Movie and Its Falsehoods Spread Widely Online,” New York Times, May 21, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/20/technology/plandemic-movie-youtube-facebook-coronavirus.html.

3 Angelo Fichera et al., “The Falsehoods of the ‘Plandemic’ Video,” FactCheck.org, May 8, 2020, https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/the-falsehoods-of-the-plandemic-video.

4 See Jon Cohen, “Controversial CFS Researcher Arrested and Jailed,” Science, November 19, 2011, https://www.science.org/content/article/controversial-cfs-researcher-arrested-and-jailed. Charges were later dropped.

5 Jon Cohen, “In a Rare Move, Science Without Authors’ Consent Retracts Paper That Tied Mouse Virus to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome,” Science, December 22, 2011, https://www.science.org/content/article/updated-rare-move-science-without-authors-consent-retracts-paper-tied-mouse-virus.

6 Stuart J. D. Neil and Edward M Campbell, “Fake Science: XMRV, COVID-19, and the Toxic Legacy of Dr. Judy Mikovits,” AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses 36, no. 7 (July 2020): 545–549.

7 Martin Enserink and Jon Cohen, “Fact-Checking Judy Mikovits, the Controversial Virologist Attacking Anthony Fauci in a Viral Conspiracy Video,” Science, May