Note: This is a freely accessible serialized version of Lab Leak Fever. Audio voiceover was AI generated for accessibility. Find an overview of all chapters here or consult the book website for further information.
I got interested in the lab origin controversy at an odd time in my life. After having spent a decade in biological labs for my research, I gradually developed an interest in systemic approaches to understanding biology. There are just too many moving pieces in a biological system to capture all, or even just the most relevant, causative molecular mechanisms of complex phenomena like cancer resistance. I always found analyzing genes one by one dissatisfying. I felt it would be more useful to find the right framework to explain what the larger rules, regularities, and limitations of their interactions might be. Towards the end of my PhD studies, I had done proteomics, metabolomics, and transcriptomics—the trifecta of despair when a project is not going well, some might joke—trying to understand my organoid model system. Imagine long, dry Excel lists with thousands of gene names, with some value and some statistical power behind them. But systems biology is about creating big data sets and analyzing them to discover informative, larger patterns. As biology transforms into information science, large quantitative methods have become more prominent. Data became destiny.
Accordingly, for my postdoc, I switched fields towards bioinformatics, learned how to code, and had the lucky opportunity to spend a few years in a machine learning lab to satisfy my curiosity. It was a personally enriching, albeit academically only semi-successful, period of my career. My experience, however, became handy later. When I decided to leave academia during the pandemic with vague ideas of writing about science for a living instead of, say, coding or pipetting, my dissatisfaction with not understanding the larger forces shaping the complex systems we are part of never really left me. Looking back, I must have sent over half a million of my words out on Twitter alone, the majority of them after being sucked into the man-made controversy. Originally in favor of lab leak speculations, I was getting all too familiar with the various contrarian scientists, conspiratorial actors, and conniving opportunists that thrived on this topic. Who had a point and who was making things up? Yet again, it seemed like there were just too many moving pieces to understand what was going on. Once more, I found myself curious about the larger forces—in this case, the complex dynamics within social media—that seemed to produce certain collective confusions in our public discourse. A different, more systemic approach was needed to bring them into the right frame. What caught my curiosity was the rise of the influencer economy.
“When I had the first thousand followers, I thought it was crazy that so many people wanted to hear from me,” Professor Angela Rasmussen (she prefers Angie) recalled the early days of her rise on Twitter. Today, the outspoken and sharp-tongued virologist is known for not taking bullshit from anyone. Whether it is incompetent politicians, abusive contrarians, self-serving pundits, or out-of-touch institutions, if they make public declarations that go against what she knows the evidence to be, she is unwilling to let it slide. “The public deserves good information.” She is as sure of this today as she was in the early days of the pandemic. This simple conviction would lead her to become one of the most popular—and most harassed—virologists on Twitter, as well as a prominent figure in interviews, news reports, and articles. She admits she hasn’t always been confrontational, but it was a necessary skill she had to unfortunately learn to be listened to and to move up the ranks in a male-dominated academic environment.
Scientifically, the professor was occupying herself not so much with viruses per se as with their host's response to them. This dates back to her PhD, when she attempted to change a rhinovirus to infect mice with a mild flu. Researchers lacked any model systems to study these viruses plaguing the human upper respiratory tract. The project was mostly a struggle; it turned out that her rhinovirus was just not well suited for its new host and had a really hard time surmounting the animals’ basic immune responses to make them sick. After her seemingly endless uphill battle—speaking from experience, that is almost any PhD project—her curiosity about how much the host plays a role in infection and disease progression was ignited. Over the subsequent years, she has studied the host's varied responses to more and more dangerous viruses. Why do some patients with hepatitis C virus infection develop carcinomas rapidly, while for most others it is a slow process? Why was MERS, another zoonotic coronavirus, self-limiting and transient in Rhesus macaques but somehow causing deadly disease in humans? Why are some mice susceptible to a mouse-adapted Ebola virus, whereas others are resistant? What genetic factors decide which host gets to live or die?
While considered niche questions at the time, when the Ebola outbreak hit western Africa in 2013–2014, scientific interest in this topic suddenly spiked. Editors at the prestigious journal Science—who had first rejected her work identifying genetic factors responsible for Ebola susceptibility—came back and begged her to send them the manuscript again. An outbreak had suddenly made her findings highly relevant, putting Angie’s work on the map. “I still tell my students that getting published in the big journals is often luck; my Ebola paper would not have been any worse if published in PLOS Pathogens instead of Science magazine,” she explained. Unfortunately, these lucky events have become almost necessary to make it in the competitive world of science. It’s publish or perish. For Angie, the visibility of her Ebola work in a prestigious journal gave her enough wind in her sails to study a whole range of other virus-host interactions, from Lujo to Lassa to ultimately SARS-CoV-2. But with the latter, a whole different kind of exposure was soon to befall her.
In January 2020, she had less than a hundred followers on Twitter. She only started tweeting more frequently about the new virus (still called nCoV2019 at the time) when sensationalist headlines tended to run with a story before the evidence was in because it annoyed her. “I have been critical of journalists & armchair scientists who have been stoking #nCoV2019 panic,” she wrote at the end of January 2020 before highlighting some bad scientific takes that upset her. She bumped heads publicly with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett and especially the mono-dramatic Harvard epidemiologist Dr. Eric-Feigl Ding, who painted a very stark picture of how bad this pandemic would turn out. Both cared more about getting the message out and jolting people into action than getting all the details straight. In contrast, Angie tended to be on the cautious side, not willing to step beyond the evidence—maybe even be too conservative about it. Science is a slow process, and even dramatic results usually require replication, contextualization, and further follow-ups. Angie was a cooler head, if you will, but one that had very little patience for dramatic announcements about inaccurate R0 numbers or freakouts about asymptomatic cases. Her smackdowns (strong-worded rebuttals) of Dr. Feigl-Ding’s sensationalist tweets, coupled with her “matter-of-fact” expert explainers, quickly found a receptive and thankful audience. She would gain over 1,000 followers in the second week of February 2020.
Her public spats soon increased as interest in the ins and outs of virology spiked, and the politicization of the pandemic gained momentum. The following week, she gained over 1,500 followers, mostly because of her response to US Senator Tom Cotton’s bioweapon fearmongering, which she followed up with a long bioweapon debunk. The next week, things escalated further. There was the CDC coronavirus test disaster under Robert Redfield. The coronavirus task force from the White House supposedly led Vice President Mike Pence got constantly bombarded by Trump himself. Then Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, being put in charge of a second controversial coronavirus task force, caused unnecessary public confusion about the information coming from the Trump administration. Angie was on a roll, a voice of seeming sanity, and people noticed. She gained over 6,200 followers that week alone, and at least five thousand more every week after. She was present and constantly available for expert commentary, and soon, mainstream journalists would start asking her for perspectives, too. By the end of March, hundreds of thousands had read her take on a viral mask figure that had made the rounds online, gaining her 8,500 followers that week.
Then April came, and with it, the Trump administration’s dire need to deflect from their failures by blaming China. Washington Post writer Josh Rogin claimed to have uncovered an old diplomatic cable that warned about biosafety issues in Wuhan, trying to breathe life into Trump’s allegations. Angie answered with a popular “distraction” meme; the caption ridiculed how political journalists would rather go for some vague diplomatic cable to drum up bioweapon fears instead of considering published scientific work from virologists that this was not an engineered virus. She was not a fan of the bioweapon conspiracy myth or the Trump administration’s malicious blame games. Certainly not while citizens were dying and leadership, not distraction, was needed. She also vocally supported Anthony Fauci against the politicization of the pandemic response by GOP operatives. The US was failing in its response to the pandemic because of political incompetence, much to the frustration of many scientists at the time. When White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett and his team predicted with a “cubic model” that all COVID-19 deaths would stop by May 15, 2020—flying in the face of the CDC’s prediction of over 200,000 deaths by June 1st—Angie found again the right words:
I am a virologist, not an epidemiologist, but even so, I know that severely ill #COVID19 patients are not going to miraculously stop dying on May 15th. Economic advisors should not presume to forecast deaths. That's magical thinking, not epidemiology, and it will cost lives.
She was right, of course. Around 1,500 Americans died on May 15th, similar to the day before and the day after. Her tweet went viral again, being shared over 1,100 times and likely seen by a million people. She gained over 11,000 followers that week. Angie had a knack for science communication and Twitter sass, reducing complexity and packaging ideas into tweets that resonated with many people. And yet, she never wanted to be so popular. “To be honest, I miss the times when I just had a hundred followers and could have normal conversations.” She had to become very careful in choosing her words, often deciding not to comment anymore because the “shitstorm” that would follow was not worth her time, mental health, or personal safety. With more than 400,000 followers on Twitter today, her voice not only carried weight during the pandemic; it seems to have filled a popular audience demand. She was at the right place at the right time, armed with the right ingredients to stand out. In a neat parallel to her scientific curiosity about host-virus interactions, it appeared that some understudied host factors—in this case, audience demand—played a decisive role in making her go viral. Citizens trusted her because she was a virologist who just told it like it was. She was authentic, relatable, and accessible. Her remarkable success and trajectory are, however, not unique in the information age. It is a sign of our changing times.
“We trust influencers because they arise from the crowd,” Renée DiResta from the Stanford Internet Observatory stated one late October night. Our writing and research have increasingly started to overlap in the last few years. We finally connected in 2023, when disinformation researchers, just like virologists, were targeted by the same anti-science actors I had been monitoring for years. The warm internet researcher and prolific writer has studied how various covert actors, such as the Russian Internet Research Agency—part of the military intelligence—influence public discourse on social media. Increasingly, her focus has fallen on the role of influencers and how they shape community consensus. “Influencers speak authentically to their communities, or at least appear so, because they use the same vocabulary, have the same biases or worldview, and we can relate to them,” Renée offered as an explanation for why we seemed to crave them.
But what made some of them successful? In theory, anybody can become an influencer. However, the attention economy is a cutthroat market; one’s competition is often millions of other compelling voices, depending on niche and platform. Whenever there is such extreme competition between people, being authentic, talented, or knowledgeable alone does not get you far. You need that little bit extra, be it luck, resources, favorable circumstances, the right contacts, a special identity, or a wealthy benefactor. Most of all, you need a unique and timely message that people want to buy into.
In marketing, this would be called the USP—the unique selling proposition that lets your product stand out from the crowd of other products. The USP imbues your informational product—your voice or opinion—with market value in the attention economy. When the pandemic started, many credentialed or seemingly credentialed experts on social media suddenly found themselves in a position where audiences were eager for their voices. If they could communicate well, entertain us, or tell us what we wanted to hear, odds were they would quickly rise to prominence. In general, turning our attention to experts in times of crisis is not a bad thing, but who we choose to trust and amplify can have dramatic consequences. Both in science and in journalism, there are well-established—albeit imperfect—mechanisms and norms to evaluate the relevance, contextuality, truthfulness, or accuracy of information. Falsehoods are often caught before they go out, and professional judgment determines if opinions have enough value to merit attention, sometimes on a global scale. Social media is more individual, rapid, and unfiltered. Amplification appears arbitrary, seemingly free of gatekeepers. The naive assumption was that, in the free marketplace of ideas, the best information would naturally rise to the top. Evidence suggests this could not be further from the truth.
“Oh, gatekeepers still exist,” Renée argued. She and her colleagues studied the way rumors and misinformation propagated on social networks. “The influencers sit at the center of their respective networks, and they function as new gatekeepers for information that bubbles up in the periphery of their social following.” If they chose to amplify a piece of content, it also served as a signal for the network to amplify as well. Suddenly, you have a crowd of people sharing the same information, post, link, or whatever. This signals the algorithms that the content is popular and should be shown to more people on the platform. Influencers are also connected to other influencers, so if one of them decides to pick up a rumor, for example, other amplifiers are more inclined to do so, too. That is how information can quickly cascade from the periphery to the center of society and, with it, to the mainstream and extensive news coverage, sometimes within hours. Twitter was famous for that, which made it a useful tool for crisis communication, such as earthquake, flood, or live shooter warnings. “In the past, we have seen something similar with local newspapers. Sometimes a story would be picked up by a local newspaper in the morning, and in the evening, it would be on national television,” Renée offered as context. We live in fast-paced times, and the internet just accelerated that. Generally, I think we should want relevant information to move and disseminate quickly through society. But in the age of social media, we rarely ask who gets to decide what information is relevant.
Editorial choices are always a point of critique for news desks; however, traditional institutions were at least constrained by journalistic norms and professional ethics, as well as consensus-finding within the people of the institutions. Influencers, acting as gatekeepers of information, remove those constraints. They have great power to amplify with none of the societal responsibility. This distorts the quality of the information most people see. “Someone invented the phrase ‘citizen journalism’ a few years ago to describe amateurs doing the work of pros. Yes, it occasionally works, but probably no more often than ‘citizen cop,’ ‘citizen attorney,’ or ‘citizen soldier,’” as The Washington Post writer Paul Farhi would tweet. He has a point. Many influencers are amateur news amplifiers who do not have the training, professional ethics, or institutional support to share information responsibly. Today, falsehoods travel around the world five times, the saying goes, before the truth has the chance to get its boots on. But influencer incompetence is not the whole story.
I believe the impact of influencers on our discourse is even more dramatic than that. They introduce an entirely new set of biases and vulnerabilities into our societal discourse. This is because influencers depend on keeping their audiences happy, growing their income, and fending off competition to remain successful. How do these pressures shape their amplification behavior? How much of what they share only benefits themselves and their brand? What about conflicts of interest and hidden sponsorships? And how exactly does an amplifier make money in the attention economy? As I was researching this topic, I discovered that there are few comprehensive studies and even less public awareness of these new phenomena. Luckily, I had an ace up my sleeve: personal access to a professional influencer to shine a light on these murky questions.
“When the Twitch leak happened in 2021, I was already among the top 0.03% of platform income earners globally,” my brother explained. Since then, his income has multiplied. Today, the 38-year-old influencer is one of the biggest German video game streamers, with over 220,000 followers on the streaming platform Twitch and over 110,000 subscribers on YouTube. He is represented by an agency and is currently considering moving to the Portuguese island of Madeira, like many of his streaming colleagues. Madeira is a haven for EU video game influencers because of its low taxes and EU time zone, and it sits directly on top of the glass-fiber cables connecting Europe to North America in the Atlantic Ocean.
I asked him to walk me through the business model that has made him and many others successful with the rise of new information technologies, social media, and online platforms. The big tech companies are very cagey about that information because it is a bit of a scandal in itself. Thanks to my brother and a leak of payout information from the platform Twitch, we can put some hard numbers together on the real inequality that drives the influencer economy. On Twitch, a mere 10,000 of its 8 million streamers earned more than $10,000 USD per year. That is only the top ~ 0.12% of all content creators—not viewers or audience—that can be considered to have at least a side income from streaming. To reach a livable salary of about $40,000 per year, that number drops to about 2,500 (0.03%). As the Harvard Business Review noted, there is no middle class in the creator economy.
I gather its logic is well summarized by one merciless doctrine: “Winner takes all.” Once the upper echelons of attention are reached—no matter on what platform or network—serious amounts of money start flowing. The top 81 streamers earned more than $500,000 USD, and 25 streamers earned more than one million dollars per year, with the top earners coming in at close to 5 million per year. I have to emphasize that this is from Twitch alone and only a fraction of the total because influential streamers of this size have countless other avenues to make real money. “Promotions, donations, gifts, campaigns… I got 800 dollars per month just sitting on this chair. I didn't even have to advertise or say anything about it.” My brother incredulously laughed again about the varied ways money can come in when you are in demand. Direct Twitch payments via advertisements and subscribers are less than 30% of his income stream nowadays, despite being his main job. Being exceptionally popular as an influencer opens a lot of other opportunities for money, fame, and even more influence. The winner takes all.
No matter what you do, you just have to be the first search result for your niche on the top of the page on the platforms. So people will see and click on you. After that, the algorithms cross-promote you to ever-new audiences and followers. The moment I started hitting the front page on Twitch on the new Diablo 4 release, my growth and followers exploded like crazy. That is what everybody is aiming for and what got me pushed even more.
I tried to faithfully translate his points from our discussion from the original German. My brother’s niche in video games is a genre called action role-play games, or aRPGs, and Diablo 4 was a long-awaited successor to the genre-defining Diablo series. In 2023 alone, my brother's video game stream had a watch time of over 4.2 million hours, equivalent to half a millennium, while over 1.7 million messages were written in his chats. With that kind of audience engagement, advertisers, sponsors, and even journalists paid notice. For example, Der Standard, an Austrian quality newspaper, wrote: “Interestingly, on February 15 [2023], he set an all-time audience record of 71,675 people streaming the game ”Lost Ark" at the same time.”, noting that Austria’s biggest football stadium only can house 50 thousand people.
Staying in the conversation and keeping people interested also makes influencers interesting for companies that want to spread less well-intentioned products or causes.
“Sometimes I get approached with extremely lucrative or compelling offers, sometimes with absurd propositions. All you really have to do once you reach this point is to provide new content regularly.” He finished matter-of-factly: “Put in the hours and pick and choose from the offers flying your way of what you want to do and what can help you grow even more.” I asked with raised eyebrows what he meant by “absurd offers.” He explained:
Well, the companies that use casino games, Pay2Win, or other microtransactions based on “dark patterns” are the most problematic and you can't really advertise them in good conscience. They manipulate and exploit vulnerable people and drive them to bankruptcy. That's why I always scrutinize the individual offers and have also set up a blacklist of companies and subject areas at my agency that are not advertised. Although these offers would be absurdly well paid and sometimes bring 10x the price of a “normal” deal
To his credit, my brother has always been the down-to-earth type of person who values integrity over money. In response to his success and new responsibilities, he teamed up with an old study friend—University Professor for Game Design Dr. Johanna Pirker—to start a videogame and tech podcast. Instantly among the top 10 in Austria, they educate, raise public awareness, and criticize exploitative monetization schemes in games, among other zeitgeist topics. Despite being an influencer himself, he has become very critical of the profession overall:
This whole system cannot continue as is. There are no regulations, nothing. Influencers can say what they want, tell lies, be super unethical. They don’t have to declare who their sponsors are, where the money comes from. Some don’t declare what is paid native advertising [sponsored content that is made to look like authentic opinion] or whether they have any conflicts of interest. Many do. I could triple my income if I went full populist.
I was surprised he laid it out so clearly, but being an influencer is mostly uncharted territory when it comes to any regulation, oversight, or simple consumer protection. To our detriment.
While most citizens experienced the pandemic as a time of loss, grief, and restriction, online influencers and manipulators saw it as a golden opportunity for self-serving ends. “The goals of influencers can be summarized as persuasion, popularity, profit, or power,” Renée DiResta neatly argues in her book Invisible Rulers. Often, these goals go hand in hand with the political or economic interests of the currently powerful. The reason why the internet abhors a vacuum and why the information sphere seems to constantly deliver new narratives in support of powerful interests has a lot to do with influencers. Pushing hidden agendas and political messages via influencers has become a huge vulnerability for a democratic society, as well as an opportunity that vested interests can exploit to shape public discourse in our shared information ecosystems. This lucrative symbiosis between influencers and the powerful has been toxic for the public good, and this brings us back to the lab leak narrative. Even after falling victim to such exploitations, few citizens understand the true scope of the problem.
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You might recall the ambitious Hong Kong postdoc Dr. Li-Meng Yan, or Scarlett, who played an instrumental role in creating the false “bioweapon” myth together with fake-dissident billionaire Miles Guo and Trump operative Steve Bannon. Their media operation, including Gnews, the social media platform Gettr, as well as an array of paid amplifiers from the Chinese-speaking diaspora surrounding the influencer Lu De, got the ball rolling. But this was just the beginning. In April of 2020, when the Trump administration's dire need to blame the pandemic on China required new narratives to distract from the scientific evidence, Miles Guo and Steve Bannon hatched a lucrative plan involving Scarlett. She was supposed to come to America, where they would carefully craft an image of her as a dissident whistleblower “telling the truth” about the CCP’s intentional release of a bioweapon. A compelling shtick for credulous audiences and lucrative beyond measure for the manipulators behind the bioweapon influencer. To understand our current vulnerabilities, I believe we are now equipped to look a bit deeper into the mechanisms, motivations, and malice of their story.
“I think Scarlett made these decisions for her own benefit. Getting to the US. Getting money. Getting fame.” Leo Poon, the SARS-1 veteran and Scarlett’s former supervisor in Hong Kong, explained to me. He had been reluctant to talk about her motivations, worried about the influence she wields today. “I am sure she will use all my comments on her to promote herself and to discredit science,” he had said more than once, expressing his concerns. Dishonesty and discrediting former colleagues, even her own husband, were a pattern with Scarlett and her new allies. On April 28, 2020, Dr. Yan quietly left for Hong Kong airport. Miles Guo had bought her a first-class ticket to the US and arranged for her arrival. “Everything seemed normal before she disappeared,” Leo Poon recalled. “In the morning, she said she is not feeling well [and] she wanted to go home; maybe take a few days holiday.” They had all been overworked and exhausted in the lab, so he told her to rest, take a few days, and recover. But later at night, her husband called Leo, wondering if Scarlett was still working late because he could not reach her. After more unsuccessful phone calls, unease had set in with Leo. Maybe she had fallen sick or unconscious? She had told him she wasn’t feeling well. They tried calling everyone, but nobody knew what happened to her. At almost midnight, they went to the police to file a missing persons report in Hong Kong. Soon, they learned from the police that she had taken a flight to the US. They tried to make contact, but with no success. Two weeks later, they would hear from her personally on the messaging app WeChat. She informed her husband that she is relaxed and safe in New York, with bodyguards and lawyers. Then silence.
After two months of quiet scheming and preparation, during which Li Meng Yan reportedly worked to increase her English skills, studied the prepared talking points, and received training by a media coach—all paid for by Miles Guo—she was finally ready to play her role.
On July 11, 2020, out of nowhere, Fox News “journalists” would come out with an exclusive scoop about a Chinese whistleblower: Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a supposedly top CoV virologist who was ready to spill the secrets about the virus. How exactly this article came about will likely remain a mystery; the Fox writers who got the scoop on the story never responded to any of my inquiries into the matter. There is no way an unvetted stranger gets taken up by a mainstream news outlet on a whim. Given how everything else around Scarlett was crafted by Steve Bannon, my suspicion is that someone in his circle of influence arranged this initial media opportunity. In any case, just two days later, Fox News host Bill Hemmer already had her live on TV—the clip was later watched 2.8 million times on YouTube—in a sensationalist five-minute segment titled “Hong Kong scientist claiming China ‘covered up’ coronavirus data speaks out.” As a seasoned Fox News interviewer, Hemmer carefully utilized strategic disclaimers such as “if you are right,” “would you explain what you think the implications are?” “tell us what you believe,” etc., while he himself appeared totally unimpressed by even the most dramatic claims. To me, it certainly appeared as if he somehow knew not to believe anything Scarlett tried to sell him. Nevertheless, spreading intriguing and politically convenient rumors is not unusual for Fox News; it is probably routine for reporters to play along with strategic disclaimers to not have the network held liable for guests’ obvious falsehoods. A softball interview, Scarlett’s scripted replies—it all just seemed very inauthentic to me personally.
Yet for audiences who were inclined to believe the many political lies, large and small, that came with supporting President Trump, Scarlett’s appearance and story were more than welcome, and credulity was easily extended. “Overnight, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media sensation, with top advisers to President Trump and conservative pundits hailing her as a hero,” The New York Times would later write. In that summer, between June 11 and September 11, she made over 18 media appearances, from Fox News to the One America News Network to multiple episodes of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. On September 7, 2020, Dr. Yan and the influential Chinese YouTuber Lu De even met US bioweapons experts as well as Trump ally Peter Navarro in the White House. According to reports, “they spent eight hours supposedly advising senior officials and advisers to the U.S. government on the origin of COVID-19 and the CCP regime's (illegal) virus research.” Of course, the Trump White House has offered up a clown parade of fringe characters over the years, but in a time of pandemic crisis, their cultivation of these actors is still somewhat telling. This whole stunt was orchestrated by Steve Bannon and also included the former New York mayor and Trump operative Rudy Giuliani. There is even a cozy picture of all of them together in Miles Guo’s house, with Scarlett and Steve Bannon reflected in a mirror in the background. A powerful, tightly knit network. Scarlett’s star rose.
On top of media appearances, there was also substantial inauthentic activity and paid promotion of Li-Meng Yan on social media, with dedicated bot networks and hundreds of sock puppet accounts—a classic of Guo’s digital operations—of Scarlett blasting out her message. Even in 2023, when I last checked, there were several hundred sock puppets with her name, message, and profile picture still existing, and that’s just on Twitter. Facebook had dedicated groups for her. Her YouTube interviews and clips have reached millions. Scarlett was also amplified through Gnews and Himalaya Exchange—another Guo-owned outlet pushing shady investment schemes—as well as the right-wing blogosphere like Zerohedge and the conspiracy myth entertainment complex surrounding The Epoch Times. They all went in lockstep, trying to amplify “Dr. Li-Meng Yan, the Chinese whistleblower,” and her unsubstantiated, made-up bioweapon claims.
While the Democratic Party blamed the failed pandemic response on Trump—quite effectively and, in many ways, justified—Scarlett played a pivotal role in the Republican counter-narrative, blaming the pandemic on China instead. When Trump’s handling of the pandemic became a liability, the PR advice from political fixers was “Don’t defend Trump; blame China.” Shifting blame to a geopolitical enemy was not a bad political strategy, and it likely helped energize and mobilize the MAGA crowd shortly before the 2020 presidential election. While Trump ended up losing the election to the more popular Biden, it is still remarkable how he managed to garner the second-most votes of any presidential candidate ever. Trump received about 5 million more than the previous record holder, Barack Obama, despite overseeing arguably the largest pandemic failure and loss of lives the nation has ever experienced. Putting the blame for the virus on China worked for his voters; they came out enthusiastically for him. Maybe this type of voter mobilization around an outside enemy is one of the powers of shared conspiratorial myths.
All this political energy from the pre-election season benefited Scarlett. “She always wanted to have a bigger name,” Leo Poon reminded me again about Scarlett’s past. He tried to give her opportunities, introduced her to collaborators, and helped her progress. He even supported her when it came to traveling to a prestigious keystone meeting overseas in March 2020. She was free to study and talk about what she wanted. However, Scarlett seemingly always wanted more than he could give. She wanted a promotion. She wanted first-author papers even without great contribution. She wanted fame, best Leo could tell. In her media stunts over the summer, Scarlett reinvented herself and her history. She was not merely another postdoc; no, she was a top virologist who was being suppressed. She claimed that she was not allowed to talk about the origins despite being offered a seminar. She claimed that her supportive professor Leo, who was the first to be suspicious about information from China, was actually part of the cover-up for the CCP.
She was becoming increasingly radical, and her comments were filled with delusions and fabrications that were at odds with reality. After first writing to her husband that she was okay and he did not need to worry about her in May, her feelings towards him seemed to have turned sour, too. A few months later, she claimed that the Sri Lankan researcher had actually tried to kill her multiple times to prevent her from telling the truth about the virus. Leo shook his head in disappointment. Not only has he known Scarlett’s husband for years, but why would a gentle Sri Lankan researcher with no ties to mainland China suddenly become a CCP assassin? “It makes no sense, but some people still believe it,” he groaned. With the US election looming, Scarlett’s attention-grabbing fabrications were not done.
On September 15th, she reached peak attention at an interview with Tucker Carlson, who I personally consider to be a chief Trump propagandist. Then still at Fox News, Scarlett was interviewed by him about a core piece of the bioweapon propaganda, her preprint article that suggested “sophisticated laboratory modification” of the coronavirus. The “study” was uploaded on September 14 to a website called Zenodo, an open-source repository of research—not a peer-reviewed journal. It’s unclear whether the preprint was ever sent for any peer review. Nobody knew who the supposed coauthors on it were (all pseudonyms except Scarlett), let alone whether they even existed. The supposed “research” was financed by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, both sponsored by Miles Guo and connected to Steve Bannon as well. “Neither organization has published scientific literature before, according to a Google Scholar search,” as a fact check from Politico journalists dryly noted. Nevertheless, her preprint, just like the earlier claims about HIV-insertion from Indian researchers, exploded into the information ecosystem and was downloaded millions of times. It looked like science. Spurred on by that success, Scarlett quickly released another preprint just a month later, with an even more explicit title: “SARS-CoV-2 Is an Unrestricted Bioweapon.” To most scientists, these preprints were obvious bunk. Soon after that, two more such – what I would characterize today as fanfiction – “Yan Reports” followed. Having the shape and style of scientific publications—while not adhering to any norms such as evidence-based reasoning, data, or analysis—her “Yan Reports” were a way to package targeted propaganda into a previously trustworthy format, to give it a veneer of scientific authority. Deceptions and manipulation often work by taking something familiar and trustworthy, like a messenger, format, or news outlet, and subverting it to political ends.
Of course, I was not the first to investigate Scarlett’s background story. Already in November 2020, The New York Times documented most parts of how Miles Guo and Steve Bannon had carefully crafted her persona, trajectory, and media appearances. “How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation,” their investigative article was titled. Despite the illuminating reporting from NYT early on, nobody could yet grasp the full picture of the entire operation, why it worked as well as it did, and ultimately, what the manipulators in the shadow truly gained from it. It was not just a partisan media stunt but symptomatic of much larger vulnerabilities in our information ecosystems.
Intentionally or not, publishing Miles Guo`s and Bannon`s bioweapon propaganda in preprint form—via the cultivated Chinese influencer Scarlett—had been a brilliant move. It allowed the manipulators to create dramatic amplification based on an elaborate social hack. Usually, preprints are something boring that nobody will ever read or pay attention to except for a few domain experts. Even touring Fox News, right-wing podcasts, and having Tucker Carlson feature a conspiratorial fake whistleblower was just more preaching to the choir, unlikely to reach new audiences. But on Twitter, a platform known to stoke cross-partisan conflict, Scarlett’s preprint and media appearances managed to engage a very specific audience: the chattering classes, politicians, media makers, and lastly, virologists who recently found new influence because of the pandemic.
Angie Rasmussen was just one of the many scientists who felt compelled to criticize the preprint. By September 2020, a plethora of journalists and politicians now followed virologists worldwide, relying on them for pre-digested pandemic-related information. Following virologists on Twitter often provided a quick scoop on new pandemic developments for health reporters. When outrage erupted in the scientific community over Scarlett’s pseudoscientific bioweapon preprints, many of their criticisms, debunkings, and assessments were considered newsworthy and made it into mainstream media. Scarlett did her best to stoke the flames of conflict, verbally attacking, insulting, and smearing her scientific critics, sometimes goading them into reacting. Furthermore, many political journalists who were in the business of monitoring right-wing political operatives such as Steve Bannon or Tucker Carlson would turn to virologists to reach out for comments. “It looks legitimate because they use a lot of technical jargon. But in reality, a lot of what they're saying doesn't really make any sense,” Angie was quoted by Scientific American. For some, those expert assessments were a good way to score political and social points. Expert quotes from virologists would become silver bullets for political journalists to shoot down political adversaries with the authority of science.
Others were less confrontational. They simply felt that when someone like Tucker Carlson spreads pretty blatant disinformation to millions, it is newsworthy by itself and in need of correction. “On the one hand, we don’t want to give credence to just so much garbage,” added Gigi Kwik Gronvall—an immunologist and biosafety expert—in an interview with CNN. “On the other hand, because it’s getting taken seriously, it’s important to point out that this is not science.” But no matter what motivations or news outlets one turned to—CNN, NYT, Snopes—everybody had a story running about how outrageous and false Scarlett`s preprints were. In marketing, it is often said that there is no such thing as bad PR. I’d wager a bet that the attention economy is pretty much the same. There is no such thing as “bad attention” because no matter how much pushback Scarlett`s bioweapon propaganda received, it just tended to increase attention to it and made Scarlett more famous.
My brother would probably conclude that Scarlett, as an influencer, seemed to have found a way to catapult herself to the “top spot in the bioweapon niche.” Her outrage-baiting preprints became the top search result. She was the number one content creator when people googled the word “bioweapon.” From there, the algorithms and other dynamics would take over-amplification. Media makers would probably think of her as shaping the news cycle for a couple of days. No matter what frame is used, amplification beyond traditional niche boundaries is what brings new audiences. Journalists whose topics make it into the news cycle shape the public discourse of millions, while video-game influencers like my brother suddenly become visible to people who have never seen an aRPG game, maybe even entice them to try it out. That is the whole point of going viral—to expose communities outside the usual target groups. Today, outrage-based viral marketing is often just a business strategy.
This is the dirty little secret and ultimate goal of companies, states, or manipulators who sponsor influencers: to make their product or message go viral and persuade unsuspecting people to buy into something they traditionally would never consider because they would never encounter it. Scarlett’s rise might have caused dramatic pushback by scientists and some media, but she also reached countless susceptible citizens who were not following the bioweapon discussion at all. The mere exposure forced people to consider the possibility and proved enticing to those who weren’t sold on the “official narrative” about the virus in the first place. It did not matter how many of the new people she reached were shaking their heads or making fun of her work. There is simply no real downside to stealing people’s attention with stuff they find objectionable or irrelevant; the moment you get them to think about your product or message, you’ve already succeeded. This is a foundational vulnerability in the attention economy. All that mattered for Scarlett and her political puppet masters was that new audiences would be exposed because this would mean that previously unreachable converts could be won over for the cause.
In subsequent months, Scarlett leveraged her newfound fame into a permanent media presence, including her own podcast called “The Voice of Dr. Yan,” thousands of subscribers, patrons, donations, and, of course, the same shadow financing and patronage of Bannon and Guo for years to come before they had a fallout. She had always wanted to make a name for herself. It is pretty easy to see she reached her goal.
This new reality of how propaganda interfered with the attention economy was a bitter lesson to learn for scientists, responsible influencers, and journalists alike. “I have become very careful about what I comment on,” Angie Rasmussen explained. Ever since she became more famous, clout chasers have crafted elaborate lies about her with the sole goal of triggering her into responding. It was a conundrum. If she responded, it just boosted their profile and message; if she did not respond, the falsehoods about her were left standing unopposed. While personal defamations are somewhat easier to ignore, what are scientists who are targeted with lies about their work or profession to do? What about lies that misrepresent their research or what we know reality to be? Or even worse, what about lies that actively harm citizens in the short or long run?
It is hard to put concrete numbers on the harm from online disinformation. However, for the thousands who got sucked into Guo’s and Bannon’s larger media operations, the prize his most hardcore followers collectively paid comes to a very concrete number: one billion dollars. This sum was calculated by the US District Court, Southern District of New York. But even so, they have not found all the victims yet. Guo reportedly made his career through a mix of shady business dealings, investment frauds, and corruption in the booming Chinese real estate market, a sector already saturated with shady figures. When his co-conspirators—high-level officials in the Chinese Communist Party, including the former vice president of the Ministry of State Security, Ma Jian—were exposed and given life-long prison sentences, he ran. Worth almost two billion at the time, most of his wealth was tied up in real estate projects he could not take out of China. Truth be told, it seems to me that even in China, his astronomic wealth was most likely a mirage, as it was entangled in debt disputes totaling around 17 billion yuan, as the Chinese newspaper Caixin would report later. I will refrain from pointing out similarities to another shady real estate mogul, but why Guo found a second home in the MAGA movement does not seem like a big mystery to me. In any case, he seemingly needed a new income stream to continue his lifestyle in the US, and one thing he excelled at was manipulating people into giving him money for supposedly lucrative investments. That is why he started his media operation with Bannon in 2018.
Five years down the road, in March 2023, Miles Guo was indicted by the Southern District of New York and arrested on 12 counts, including conspiracy to defraud, deception, wire and securities fraud, concealment, illegal money transactions, and so on. The many victims of his media operation and investment empire were either tricked into sending Guo their money voluntarily, as gifts or donations, or manipulated in some of the many fraudulent investment schemes and ventures Guo Media offered to them. “[Miles Guo and his co-conspirators] operated through a series of complex fraudulent and fictitious businesses and investment opportunities that connected dozens of interrelated entities, which allowed the defendants and their co-conspirators to solicit, launder, and misappropriate victim funds,” the indictment summary would read. All that money went into Guo’s pockets, and he seemingly loved to live and spend it lavishly, including a 50,000-square-foot mansion, a $3.5 million Ferrari, and a $37 million luxury yacht, as the indictment states. As of this writing, Guo is still in jail; a judge has denied his $25 million bail offer. It will be a long and complicated ordeal to bring him to justice because he can afford the best lawyers money can buy and has political connections to the highest offices. When his unindicted co-conspirator Steve Bannon was arrested—coincidentally on Guo’s yacht—after he stole money MAGA acolytes donated to his fraudulent “We Build the Wall” fundraiser, President Trump simply pardoned him. Justice tends to work quite differently in the US when one has money and connections, but that is a different story.
What type of figures Guo or Bannon were was never a mystery to me. In my opinion, they were shameless and self-important grifters fleecing their marks. What baffled me was the question of why some people would pay so much money to them in the first place and how Scarlett and the bioweapon myth fit into that picture.
The answer, as best I can tell, might lie with another dirty secret for profiteering in the attention economy: targeting specific audiences to fleece. “In the video game industry, the most lucrative monetization schemes are microtransactions coupled with some psychologically rewarding in-game mechanics,” my brother elaborated. Traditionally, companies would charge for games up front, 50 to 100 dollars nowadays, and when the game did well, the profit margins increased. However, with the arrival of mobile phones, a new model has taken over the market: so-called “free to play” mobile games, which people can download and play with no upfront cost on their smartphones. Monetization then happens through the back door via microtransactions—completely voluntary small purchases of digital products—within the game itself. “However, statistics show most players give video game businesses very little for these free games through in-game transactions, maybe 1–5 dollars. That is peanuts and would not cover the development cost nor be profitable,” according to my brother. Sure, free games reach a bit more people, he admitted, but they do not reach ten or even fifty times more gamers to break even with traditional sales. So why do all those mobile companies still do it?
“They are fishing for whales,” he said, demystifying the matter. Whales are players who spend an extraordinary amount of money on video games because they get so invested in them that they become psychologically hooked on them one way or another. The term “whale” originally referred to big spenders in casinos. If the monetization is via some backhanded casino-style mechanics, addicted gamblers tend to fall prey to them, even in the safety of their own homes. Online gambling is an unregulated space in many countries today, and for mobile games, it is even more so. The unethical targeting of addicts needs no further elaboration. However, this targeting is not limited to gamblers. There are also more subtle mechanisms for fishing and hooking a whale. For example, in-game purchases are often shiny cosmetic items that make the whale’s character stand out. Or they can buy upgrades to their online avatars that allow them to be more powerful than others. Sometimes, whales also spend real money for in-game “cash” or items, which they then distribute to others for a sense of social status validation, community, or purpose. All these human desires can quickly turn whales into victims exploited by gaming companies. Many whales spend until they are bankrupt, often tens of thousands of dollars. A Forbes investigation revealed that just 0.15% of all mobile gamers were shown to account for over 50% of all mobile game revenues. For this reason, fishing for whales - i.e. manipulating people using these psychological “dark patterns”, as my brother and others call it - is an extremely unethical but highly lucrative strategy. The difficult part of this type of monetization is finding these whales in the first place, as they are extremely rare in the general population, and keeping them hooked them for as long as possible.
This is where Scarlett and the bioweapon myth come back in. Very few people are naturally so gullible as to invest their money in influencers or “get rich quick” schemes online. They must truly believe in the cause or trust that the person they give money to is benevolent and will take care of them. They might feel socially isolated and want to belong or confused and looking for guidance. Many have fallen into hardship, either financial or existential, and desperately seek a way out. All these factors make normal citizens susceptible to conspiratorial ideation and an easier mark for manipulators. But while finding those susceptible people was difficult before the information age, today, with enough attention, algorithms deliver them directly into the hands of manipulators.
The strongest predictor of believing any new conspiracy theory is already believing in others. There is a reason why the YouTube ranking algorithm funnels conspiracy theorists down the rabbit hole: It learned what it needed to show them to keep them engaged. Conspiracy myths are a neat targeting device to find people with certain unmet psychological needs. People who might be susceptible to tailored and specific messages that seem to address their grievances or give them a scapegoat for their problems. People who might find community or purpose within extremist movements and hate groups. Targeting conspiratorial-belief-prone citizens has been a political strategy Bannon deployed successfully before and during the pandemic; it made propaganda outlets a fortune. Scarlett's purpose was to serve as a gateway into a different media ecosystem, the Guo-verse. She was a funnel, if one were to use the marketing term. “More and more, especially for the right-wing populists around the world, people approach truth and reality from the demand side,” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University, described in an interview about the rise of conspiratorial media outlets.
“When there is the demand for something to be true, these media properties go out and meet it.”
For any outsider, the Guo-verse was weird to observe. Full of anti-CCP and anti-government propaganda, it created a cult around Miles Guo as this remarkable dissident supposedly fighting the CCP. They encouraged others to get ready to replace the Chinese government, together with them. The Guo-verse provided a niche community for the Chinese-speaking diaspora and, increasingly, the right-wing MAGA acolytes. Both hated communism and the same “soft on China” people—communist sympathizers, as MAGA Republicans would come to falsely label all their democratic opponents—and distrusted big government. They were driven by a desire for fame, success, and financial independence. Many were seeking a higher meaning or purpose in life, and they trusted the charismatic and insanely rich Guo with his mansion, his yacht, his luxury cars, and his cigars. Guo knew how to mobilize them; for example, he made them buy his cringe-worthy song “Taking Down the CCP” with such fervor that it would rank #1 on the Apple charts for a day. Pretty wild. Is it any surprise that followers so enthralled with Guo might have thought it would be a good idea to invest in Himalaya Coin—a quarter-billion-dollar cryptocurrency fraud from Guo—that promised them to get rich quickly? Or that they would buy into artificially inflated shares of GuoTV? Or spend lavishly on special “G|CLUBS platinum membership” programs? No matter how preposterous the schemes or grift, of the millions of people who got exposed to Guo’s disinformation, a minor fraction of a fraction of them were guaranteed to buy into it. The motivated few. The true converts and believers. Scarlett and Miles Guo were hunting precisely those whales, best I can tell. During the pandemic and visible fears in the Chinese Diaspora that a bioweapon was released to quell their pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, Scarlett was his most treasured bait, funneling in ever more susceptible citizens through a confluence of Gnews, Gettr, Fox News, social media platforms, and mainstream media. After she brought them in, Guo would offer a larger mission to defeat the CCP and an intricate set of “investment opportunities” for his whales, who would often spend tens of thousands of dollars until they went into bankruptcy. The end result? A billion-dollar fraud enabled by manipulation of the information ecosystem.
The time we are most likely to be victimized and actually manipulated by influence operations is when we are most violently agreeing with something we’ve read online.
Carl Miller, a research director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) who studies information warfare online, has explained some if its logic to me. Influencers are an important weapon in the arsenal of what he considers “information combatants”.
“Influencers can harness attention, radiate trust, evoke emotion, and direct energy—all to great effect. They capitalize on atmospheric intuitions, giving people the right evidence to substantiate what they feel intuitively,” Renée DiResta would write in her book “Invisible rulers”. Influencers are influential, often without our conscious awareness. No matter how one views that development, they are a new power center in our midst, and we certainly lack checks and balances for them.
Unfortunately, weaponized conspiracy myths such as the bioweapon saga harm not only the true believers but also those they target, as well as the wider society. Mobilizing online communities with hate and scapegoats—all too common for conspiracy myth entrepreneurs—sooner or later corrodes a democratic society. “The laboratory origin stories have taken on a new life as political propaganda, with wide-ranging, deeply harmful implications,” Prof. Rasmussen would write in an op-ed for the scientific journal Nature in January 2021. “Yan Li-Meng has personally attacked scientists engaged in combating this misinformation with evidence, including me. As a result, I’ve been threatened with violence and sexual assault.” This came at a time when social media platforms have increasingly abdicated any responsibility to moderate the discourse in favor of the harassed—often minorities—or basic human rights. This is a business decision. Study after study shows that platforms preferentially amplify emotionally charged and hateful content because it keeps people engaged. Platforms also cater to their biggest influencers, worrying about losing out to competitors if the most influential take their followers somewhere else. The bigger the influencer gets, the less likely they will face any pushback or scrutiny from the platforms. As a result, as Scarlett’s online popularity grew, so did her power to wage war on science and scientists.
Believers in conspiracy myths tend to be very active online, very aggressive, and very motivated to engage. Renée describes this as “the asymmetry of passion,” where extremist groups will intentionally attempt to reinforce narratives to shape the reality of viewers. They also tend to swarm the comment sections and pile on targets of their ire. All they need is for “their team’s” influencers to highlight who the “bad guys” are, and they will make a sport out of insulting, discrediting, or harassing them. Often, their hate campaigns include attempts to get scientists fired, as well as make them toxic or damaged goods in the public’s eye. The bigger their target’s profile, the worse it gets. Academic experts who communicate on social media and find themselves on the wrong side of the conspiratorial mob face dire real-life consequences, including stalking, harassment, doxxing, character assassination, and violence. If the expert happens to be female, sexism and misogyny easily find their way into that toxic mix as well.
Today, Angie has more poignant words for it. “Look, we are all getting harassed, intimidated, and threatened for our research. The only difference is that as a female scientist, they also call you a fat, ugly bitch that should be raped while doing so.” She is still convinced that citizens deserve good information, but attacks to discredit, insult, harass, or threaten her have certainly taken a toll. She has been advising others, including myself, to first and foremost take care of our mental and physical health because speaking up online as a scientist has become a risk to livelihood and personal safety. Surveys conducted by the journal Nature supported her notion; two out of three scientists from a sample of over three hundred health scientists reported harassment after communicating online, and about ten percent received death threats. Facing these issues with conspiratorial mobs, many scientists get effectively bullied off platforms and out of public discourse. Studies show that 30% of public health workers have left the profession entirely. Some are forced to disengage because they worry about the safety of their family, while others self-censor online to avoid being targeted. For the leftover, inconvenient scientists who dare speak up against popular myths—or face the ire of a large influencer—life can indeed become very unpleasant. Lawsuits, sabotage, and credible death threats have been following certain virologists ever since Scarlett’s rise to fame. It seems to me that our desire for influencers has made it harder for scientific or institutional voices on certain controversies to reach citizens.
None of that is the platform's fault, somebody like Mark Zuckerberg would likely say. The platforms simply give people what they want, and if that turns out to be junk information and tribal infighting, well, that is just humans being humans. A convenient excuse. It’s also not the first time an industry has tried to lay responsibility on the individual for problems that are somehow strongly associated with their business model. For me, these explanations are unsatisfying and fail to grasp the larger picture. I believe our current conundrums and confusions are not inherent to us as individuals but are rather mostly rooted in a wider systemic problem.
The arrival of the “winner takes all” attention economy has inadvertently changed the way information is valued in society. Our institutions and democratic society were once built on two assumptions. First, that information should flow freely between citizens. Second, citizens deserve and value good information, meaning content that is factual, timely, relevant, contextual, and truthful. The gatekeepers and guardians of shared information spheres and public discourse—journalists, reporters, and news outlets—would serve as the fourth estate to keep democratic citizens empowered against the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. “The more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes because then citizens of countries around the world can hold their own governments accountable. They can begin to think for themselves,” former President Barack Obama said in a November 2009 town hall meeting with future Chinese leaders. It was an easy binary in a less complicated world; free information flow is always good, and censorship is always bad. Yet social media platforms and the attention economy fundamentally challenge these assumptions. Maybe they were naive in the first place. We went from information scarcity to information abundance and ubiquity. We went from being mostly information receivers to being constant broadcasters of it. We went from careful curation and gatekeeping to free-for-all cage fights for our attention. Clickbait, memes, hacktivism, virtue-signaling, community raids, micro-targeted persuasion campaigns, crypto scammers, conspiracy myth entrepreneurs, synthetic media, bot networks, astroturfing, unrepentant information warfare—these and more now happen and often define what most citizens get to see in their fragmented digital spaces. The merciless and bloody winner-take-all fight for our attention has somehow transformed the traditional role of information—its inherent beauty—within society. It was meant to inform and educate us about the world. This is what we used to value information for.
In contrast, today, most influencers, information merchants, creators, and consumers (including many of us) treat information as a new type of digital product that we exchange for a variety of reasons. Entertainment, social status, community, profit, persuasion, or power—with information warfare, a lot is at stake. The informative merits—the accuracy, relevance, or truthfulness—of those new digital products became a secondary consideration at best. Is the current commodification of information really just humans being humans, as tech CEOs want us to believe? Or could it be that the information ecosystems we participate in primarily reward exploitation—of our attention, beliefs, and agency—over the traditional role of information as a tool for education, emancipation, and equality?
Historically, technological disruption has been a motor for societal change. The systemic shift in how we treat information was not necessarily conscious but rather a byproduct of the technological disruption of information flows. We see it reflected today in our actions and choices. A viral “get rich” cat meme is more lucrative than an educational essay about poverty alleviation. A misleading video clip smearing a political opponent is more persuasive than an analysis of a policy plan. A false myth feels more emotionally satisfying than a dry scientific study. No matter where one looks, the systemic change in how society treats and values information has had a myriad of related but unforeseen consequences.
“News stories,” whose traditional purpose was to inform us, have become weapons for information warfare online, for example. “Throughout the 2010s, activists, journalists, propagandists, politicos, white nationalists, and conspiracy theorists converged in these spaces, and the platforms curdled into battlegrounds where news stories were the primary ammunition.” The Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel would chronicle our descent into confusion about real-world events. News of a virus outbreak in China would be used by white nationalist influencers to incite racial hatred. Propaganda packaged into a scientific preprint would dominate the news cycle and mislead millions. A poorly-suppressed smirk from Anthony Fauci at a Trump news conference—rather than the facts of the pandemic itself—became what informed our attitude toward collective action or inaction. In this new information environment, science, institutional knowledge, and even notions of objective reality have taken a back seat.
We’ve also adapted to the new reality. Instead of using information to better inform ourselves, we all seem increasingly inclined to use information for popularity, persuasion, profit, or power, like the influencers we came to admire. If our messages, posts, or hot takes got a lot of engagement, we felt validated in our worldview, became more engaged in the topic, and became increasingly radical in our expressions about it. The platforms, in turn, created the mechanisms for a hollow form of “keyboard activism” that makes us feel like we have participated in the causes we care about. Most of us channel this energy into fighting with people we will never meet; performative outrage, pile-ons, or even modern-day witch hunts might indeed be a bit more than just “humans being human.” Silicon Valley moved fast and broke things with no idea how to put the pieces back together. Everybody laments the polarization of society, but few can escape it. In the information age, it seems that digital natives have not become global democratic citizens like Internet 1.0 promised. Instead, we have gathered on social networks where we are nudged and encouraged to join new digital tribes, fighting for supremacy over contested digital territory and ideological worldviews. As a result, we have collectively polluted our shared digital ecosystems with mostly uninformative or misleading junk content that emotionally triggered us to engage. Even worse, we are increasingly drowning out informative content and relevant voices in the process. Today, scientists and institutions might still believe that citizens value and deserve information that is relevant, accurate, timely, contextual, and truthful, but they cannot reach us. Collectively, we have chosen to get our information filtered by influencers we trust.
Unfortunately, influencers, as they currently exist, even with the best intentions, are a bad deal for society. There are few regulations and no enforcement on what can be said or shared online to gain attention and to make one’s digital product stand out from the crowd so one can profit from it. Unaccountable influencers, needy audiences that want to be entertained or find community and an oligopoly of profit-seeking big tech platforms define what type of information has value in society. Their complex interactions largely determine what and how information flows in our online environments. Their motivations, incentives, and competition are the largest forces that influence our shared public discourse and, with it, possibly our perceptions of what is real, good, or true.
Today, the largest influencers share information for the sake of popularity, persuasion, profit, or power rather than the public good. They tell us what we want to hear and what keeps us engaged, but not necessarily what we need to know to make informed decisions. Notions of truth or scientific reality are often an obstacle to great stories, but fiction can be tailored and optimized for niche audiences. All influencers are incentivized to amplify information that furthers their ideological, strategic, or financial goals. Most influencers lack the training, will, or resources to produce fair, accurate, and thorough public-good journalism, and the few that do often lose out in the “winner takes all” competitive market for our attention. The most cynical or dishonest amplifiers might even abuse their newfound power to target, stratify, and manipulate us from within the supposed safety of our homes. Scarlett was not the exception; she was the norm for COVID-19 influencers during the pandemic and beyond. If we are not careful about whom we trust, our attention, money, and ultimately, our agency may all fall prey to the next influential charlatan who comes ambling along.
The outlook is dire. We seem trapped in this new exploitation economy, where the loudest voices and the deepest pockets largely define what we should hear and who we should hear it from. Ordinary scientists cannot compete for our attention, even if they are not bullied out of the conversation by the new competition. Yet, without their insights and research, how can we tell intuition from fact?
I believe that to truly understand where the pandemic came from, we have to stop getting manipulated by our own desires. We must demand and adopt a “weight-of-evidence”-based worldview, as well as equip ourselves to identify and elevate the most knowledgeable voices.
And I know exactly where to start.
Adapted from Lab Leak Fever: The COVID-19 Origin Theory that Sabotaged Science and Society by Philipp Markolin.
Copyright © 2025 by Philipp Markolin. All rights reserved.
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