Scams target your bank account, Disinformation targets your culture. So over the past year, I have been hearing a lot of people talking about COVID-19 Vaccines. They often say “Do your research”. but what they really mean is to watch this Youtube video. They are often armed with catchy memes that claim this is a big conspiracy. Something smelled fishy to me. See I study con artists, online scams and the psychology of their victims.
Is Disinformation a Scam?
The techniques are the same the goal is somewhat different or is it? That is what real research is about. I have my theory but before I start shouting that it is all a lie I need proof and on a large scale. Good thing I can program web spiders!
What is a web spider?
A web spider is a program that crawls the web looking for information. Google uses web spiders all the time. My spiders are a little different they hunt disinformation. When my spider finds a website it finds all the links on a website and reports them back to me. From there it analyzes the data and gives me a report.
Unlike a lot of people who post links online about Covid-19 Vaccines, I actually look at the whole website. The spider allows me to get all the information about a website in seconds.
I now have a database of 350+ Websites related to covid-19 disinformation. And I’m finding all kinds of interesting information (By the way I’m vaccinated)
But how is Anti-Vaccine information disinformation?
When we look at the disinformation like we would a con artist a lot of interesting things come to light.
- High emotion (Fear, anger and hate)
- Catch phrases(“They don’t want you to know”, “Mainstream media” etc)
- No links to Science to back up theories.
- More links to payment methods than to science.
- Links to known Conspiracy theory websites.
In the next few weeks, I will be posting about the techniques that relate to con artists and Disinformation.
If you have been scammed by Covid disinformation I want to talk to you.
Contact me at info@macmason.tech I would love to hear what you have to say.