China is pushing a new Covid origin theory: Maine lobsters.
In mid-September, Marcel Schliebs, a disinformation researcher at the University of Oxford who had been tracking messaging that Chinese diplomats and state media spread on Twitter for 18 months, spotted the emergence of a surprising coronavirus origin theory.
Some of the accounts were “unsophisticated sock puppets” with “very few or zero followers,” Schliebs said, while others appeared to be accounts that were once authentic but had been hijacked and repurposed to spread disinformation.“Attribution is really difficult,” said Schliebs, a postdoctoral researcher of computational propaganda at Oxford’s Programme on Democracy and Technology. “But we can see there’s a coordinated effort, and that it’s a pro-Chinese narrative.
“Whether or not anyone is buying into lobster or Fort Detrick being the source of Covid, it’s at least having the effect of muddying the truth and confusing people,” he added. Twitter investigates inauthentic networks of accounts to see if it can reliably attribute them to state-linked activity, the company said, but that process can take several months. It has not yet linked this network to anyone working for the Chinese government.
Some articles pointing the finger at Maine lobsters link to a World Health Organization report published in March that said SARS-CoV-2 can survive in frozen and refrigerated products and packaging for a long time, which provides a “scientific basis for the possibility” that such imports could transmit the virus.
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