I remember the video being shared on Twitter and Facebook – I’m not the TikTok or Snapchat generation, but the video also went viral there. Fear is contagious and social media offers the perfect conditions for it to spread. Viruses travel fast by air, but fear travels faster – share, share, share!
One description of the video read ‘a particularly dramatic piece of CCTV shows a person wearing a face mask standing on the street, before collapsing to the floor as others rush to help.’ Watch the video and decide for yourself whether that is a generous, gullible or collusive review. It’s striking how ‘set up’ and fake the scene is. There’s even a visible split second when the falling woman falters. Falling flat on your face takes guts and she does a pretty good job, but it still looks like amateur dramatics. Readers’ comments ranged from the credulous ‘truly frightening’ to the sceptical ‘complete set up’.
Maybe the journalists also suspected the video was set up, but the lure of clickbait was too great. Journalists should verify their sources: was this video verified? I contacted the journalists who wrote the articles about the video for the Mail Online, The Sun and The Metro to ask about its provenance, and what they had done to check its authenticity. None of them replied.
Another disturbing video showed people in China being dragged from their homes by officials in hazmat suits. Had they refused to quarantine? Were they knowingly infecting people? The video tells us that the Chinese government had started doing door-to-door temperature checks. Were these people being taken because they had a high temperature? Is the whole thing real or fake? We have no idea, yet the video will have played its part in stimulating fear.
Headlines referred to ‘zombies’, ‘killer bug’ and ‘apocalypse’. Over and over, these Chinese Covid videos were described as ‘disturbing’ by newspapers and commentators. Horror film and End of Days references seeped through. A Sun headline ‘Zombieland’ travelled with the speed of a virulent sneeze through the copycat global media.
In 2020 we learnt that fear sells better than sex. If it scares, it airs. If it bleeds, it leads. Finally, the obsession with women’s physical charms took a backseat, but maybe because it was carjacked by fear porn. I could almost reminisce about the days of quaint media sexism and objectification – oh, if all we had to worry about was a celebrity up-skirt shot, or bare boobs in The Sun, rather than daily death tolls!
Some news outlets and commentators wondered if these videos were proof that China was hiding how bad the situation was, rather than exaggerating it. But how plausible were they? The epidemic never transpired to look like this. People haven’t suddenly fallen flat on their faces, to be immediately surrounded by hazmat-suited medics anywhere except these videos. They depicted a totally overblown horror-story vision of Covid-19. If the rest of the world had Covid, China appears to have had ‘Stunt Covid’.
The videos were shared many millions of times, but it’s impossible to quantify now, as in some cases they have been removed, including the probable first sources on Chinese social media sites such as Weibo and TikTok. The videos originated in China: were they a prank or were they a psyop (a covert psychological operation)? The fact-checking website Snopes investigated the source of the videos and couldn’t find them before the event they supposedly showed, so they might be from January 2020 and that’s all we know.
Whether they were plausible, prank or psyop, the videos planted the seed of an idea that the virus had terrifying consequences. They also – at least inadvertently – ‘seeded’ the idea of a very strong medical and authoritarian response. There will be more on the importance of ‘seeding’ in Chapter 7, ‘The tools of the trade’. If you don’t remember the videos, or didn’t watch them, I do urge you to view them to compare this early glimpse of ‘Stunt Covid’ with what actually transpired.
This book focuses on the UK state, Covid and fear, and this chapter is about the UK’s media and social media, but it’s relevant to mention another Chinese influence before continuing. While I don’t wish to plunge you into the murky waters of anything that could be labelled ‘conspiracy theory’ so early in our journey into fear, the fact is the Covid stunt videos might suggest an attempt to create fear, and there is yet another reason to suspect deliberate spreading of misinformation.
It is difficult to ascertain the extent of undercover social media propaganda, but a 2017 study How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument2 estimated that from 250,000 to two million Chinese people are hired by their government to post approximately 448 million ‘fake’ social media posts per year. These undercover pro-government commentators set out to be ordinary citizens as they steer conversations in the ‘correct direction’ for the Chinese Communist Party. They are referred to as the ‘50c army’ as they are reportedly paid 50c per post.
Propublica3 analysed fake and hijacked Twitter accounts and found more than 10,000 suspected fake Twitter accounts pushing propaganda about Hong Kong. Accounts then switched their focus from Hong Kong to Covid-19. These tweets were not aimed at the Chinese living in China, as Twitter is blocked by the Great Firewall. Some were in Chinese and aimed at ethnic Chinese living overseas, but many of the tweets were in English. They were aimed at us. And they waged an unofficial PR campaign in support of the Chinese government’s handling of Covid.
Fake Twitter accounts, including bots, unleashed pro-China propaganda when Italy locked down. Italy was the first European country to sign up
