After Covid-19 threat subsided, it seems that the news spreading on monkeypox has whetted rumour mongers and conspiracy theorists’ appetite. Once again, social media platforms have become inundated by misleading information.
In the Arab world, spreading misleading information was not limited to some social media users, but it also extended to senior doctors, media professionals and well-known public figures. Further, some media platforms have republished the same faulty news blindly without verifying what they have been publishing and re-publishing.
This report aims to list the pieces of misleading information associated with Monkeypox published on social media. The list demonstrates the extent of public interest and interaction with this topic.
Some articles and reports have been conveying fragmented and partly misleading information about monkeypox, including the idea that the virus is transmitted only through same-sex relationships.
Example:
News report
|
Article
The World Health Organization issued a
statement
on May 19 of last year when monkeypox began to spread saying that “the virus is transmitted from one person to another through respiratory secretions during prolonged face-to-face contact, skin diseases or recently contaminated items.” WHO also clarified that “close physical contact could be risky, but it is not possible to determine whether the virus is transmitted sexually.”
Several published articles have reported that the World Health Organization has linked the emergence of monkeypox to LGBT parties.
This information is based on misconstrued statements and faulty interpretations circulated by a large number of media and press platforms attributed to the former head of the Emergency Response Department at the World Health Organization,
David Heymann
who told the Associated Press, “the spread of the disease started during two wild parties held in Europe, namely in Spain and Belgium.”
Another report by the same agency explains that the party in Spain was celebrating the wedding of a gay couple. The role of homosexual practices was not mentioned clearly by the news agency as a confirmation of being the reason that has led to the spread of the disease. In fact, while reacting to that information, the World Health Organization did not confirm that sexual relations have played a role in spreading the virus.
A large number of media platforms fell for the mistake and published the erroneous translation of David Heymann’s statements.
Russia Today,
came top of that list which published a headline based on the faulty translation of Heymann’s statements in order to attract viewership. The post registered a total of fourteen interactions; however, the headline and the content itself were copied and pasted on more than twenty news websites and through an infinite number of social media accounts and profiles.
The World Health Organization
warned
against stigmatizing people with the disease and noted that any individual is susceptible to monkeypox, regardless of their sexual orientations.
A wave of hate speech and stigmatization of gay people across social networking sites followed the publication of this piece of misleading information, and the erroneous translation of David Heymann’s words.
A member of the Board of Trustees of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, Sheikh Mohammad Al-Sagheer has 1.2 million followers on Twitter. He tweeted that “the disease has spread after two parties attended by tens of thousands of homosexuals, and some people are still denouncing the use of the term ‘homosexuality pox.’”
Finally, Sheikh Mohammad Jibril who has 387,000 followers tweeted, “God has afflicted us with monkeypox as a result of abnormal relationships that HE (the almighty god) has forbidden from the heavens above.”
Some media figures who are trusted by a wide segment of audiences in the Arab and Muslim world promoted misleading information on monkeypox, among those was Al Jazeera broadcaster Ahmad Mansour.
Among the many posts that Mansour shared on monkeypox was an inaccurate translation of David Heymann’s statements cited above.
In another tweet on May 21 of last year, Mansour said, “God’s laws have interceded by afflicting them (homosexuals) with fatal diseases and pain.”
In a clear contradiction, Mansour promoted the conspiracy theory scenario again on May 24, 2022, when he posted a
tweet
saying, “The best way for pharmaceutical companies to make hundreds of billions is to spread epidemics; create panic and fear; and take global decisions to besiege people.” This tweet refers indirectly to claims that the virus was produced in the lab despite the confirmation of the
World Health Organization
many times that the virus is not novel and that it appeared for the first time in 1970.
Doctor Mohammad Ali Izz Al-Arab is a consultant in internal medicine at the National Institute of Liver and Infectious Diseases and the medical advisor to the Egyptian Centre for the Right to Medicine confirmed in an exclusive statements to
AlHurra TV website,
that “everything that is circulated about bioengineering the virus in a laboratory is not true at all. If this were true, what would guarantee that it could be controlled? Scientifically speaking, bioengineered viruses or those whose genetic sequence has been modified cannot be controlled. Moreover, there is the possibility that laboratory workers themselves would get infected.” He added, “It is not possible to select who would get infected with the virus or who would die, especially since any ready or pre-manufactured vaccine will not give a 100% immunity.”
Whereas on May 21, Mansour claimed that “monkeypox virus is spreading because it is the wrath of God,” on the next day, he posted a tweet full of misleading information on a report published by the Nuclear Threat Initiative NTI claiming that the organization, which is supposed to be connected to the American businessman Bill Gates, expected, or rather planned to spread the monkeypox epidemic in May 2022, hoping to infect 3.2 billion people with fatalities reaching 271 million people.
Research shows that this scientific foundation is not connected to Bill Gates in the first place, but his charitable foundation had donated
250,000
US Dollars to NTI in 2018. NTI usually publishes research papers on possible scenarios predicting the possible spread of some diseases across the world in the future, as it did in this very research paper and two others, one on the spread of the plague, and the second related to biosecurity gaps. This is done in the hope to study ways to prevent them through training medical staff, and testing the resilience of health systems to deal with such possible scenarios.
Parts of the report may coincidentally align with reality, but it also includes some details that did not happen, such as the idea that the virus would spread after a terrorist attack using a robotic nurse, and that the attack would take place in a place called Brennia (Kottefaru, a small island in the Maldives). But no such attack has been reported, and it is worth noting that the archives of the World Health Organization show that monkeypox cases were discovered in Nigeria in 2017.
Ahmad Mansour was not alone in his erroneous tweets, as other media figures have done similar things like the anchor of Al Jazeera flagship program “The Opposite Direction”, Faisal Al-Qasim, who hinted in a tweet that the virus is bioengineered and could be controlled, stating that “It looks like the monkeypox show was not a success this time, so they cut the show short.”
In another tweet, Al-Qasim said, “The best way to combat monkeypox is to turn off the TV.”
Through his account which includes 437,000 followers, the Saudi journalist Hussein Al-Ghawi, also circulated inaccurate information and conspiracy theories related to ioengineering the monkeypox virus in a laboratory.
The rumour linking the NTI Foundation to the American businessman Bill Gates has spread like a wildfire, and the media professional Ahmad Mansour helped fanning the flames. The re-tweets peaked in intensity between the end of May and mid-June.
It should be noted that
Bill Gates,
co-founder of Microsoft, has an interest in philanthropy. His actual statements in November 2021, came during an interview with the chairman of the UK Health and Social Care Select Committee, Jeremy Hunt. Gates has warned during that interview of future epidemics and terrorist attacks which could use the smallpox virus.
In an interview with
Reuters
in December 2021, Bill Gates commented on conspiracy theories, his involvement in them and accusations against him on spreading viruses in the world. He said that he was “surprised by the number of crazy and evil conspiracy theories and how they spread on social media sites during the Covid-19 pandemic, but I would like to explore what is behind them.” He also said that “there are millions of posts online and “crazy” conspiracy theories about him and the US’s chief infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci that have partially taken root.”
Yahya Abu Zakaria, the Algerian journalist and presenter of the show, “Alam” or Pain on the Lebanese Al-Mayadeen channel, has also contributed to spreading rumours that support conspiracy theories, specifically on the issue that the monkeypox virus has been produced in a laboratory. He shared a
tweet
stating, “Who created the monkeypox virus other than the American Intelligence!”
Data from official health institutions have contradicted these allegations. The
most significant
of these stated that the virus was first detected in 1970 when a nine-year-old boy in the Democratic Republic of Congo was infected. After that first infection, eleven cases of monkeypox in humans were reported in eleven other African countries at various intervals, like in Benin, Cameroon, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Nigeria, Republic Congo, Sierra Leone and South Sudan.
The aforementioned bits of disinformation did not only target people of a specific sexual orientation group, some even took advantage of the news on the virus to attack the King of Morocco, Mohammed VI. Those people fabricated a rumour that he had monkeypox and used photoshop to add some pimples to the King’s portrait photo. Those conspirators even went on to accuse him of homosexuality at a time when the king was diagnosed with a covid infection in mid-June.
The real photo used was taken from a speech King Mohammed VI made on the occasion of the twenty-first anniversary of his accession to the throne at the end of July 2020, known as “Morocco’s Throne Day”.
These fabricated tweets included a photo showing King Mohammed VI alongside another man. Research later showed that the image was doctored by adding the face of the King to a photo of two people who made news headlines in Malta in November 2020 after they were shot dead.
Majid Al-Ani is another source of disinformation who calls himself “the king of immunity” and ranks top among those who spread inaccurate information related to health issues.
His twitter account was activated in January 2022, and has been discovered while researching material for this report. Though his twitter account is new, he seems to have amassed 17,000 followers, and his Instagram account has 7,000 followers, while his Telegram channel has attracted nearly 26,000 subscribers.
Further searches led us to learn that this was not his first account, other accounts were shut down because their content had promoted incorrect news and information, and therefore violated Twitter guidelines, as the image below shows.
A number of other accounts were found in Al Ani’s name, including: 1- @MajidmohammedM1 2- @asad12q80 3- M2Alani
Examining Al-Ani’s posts reveal that he was one of the first people to start a rumour in Arabic linking monkeypox to the Coronavirus vaccine. In a tweet , he said, “There is no monkeypox; rather, this is the herpes virus that infected those who received the vaccine and whose immunity was compromised by the genetic components of the covid injection. Herpes only affects people with weak immunity, and this is one of its distinctive characteristics.” This tweet was shared more than 800 times and received more than 1500 likes.
The exact text of Al-Ani’s tweet was repeatedly posted on social media platforms through independent tweets; responses and comments; or by re-circulating the false information via screenshots.
Conflating the Coronavirus vaccine with monkeypox counts as disinformation. On June 20, Rochelle Walinsky, the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US issued a
statement
to provide some information about monkeypox. She said, “The rash resulting from the [monkeypox] infection may appear similar to syphilis or herpes”, she did not mention any links between monkeypox and herpes or the Coronavirus vaccine.
The only link made between the Coronavirus vaccine and herpes appeared when Israel announced that six women had developed shingles after receiving the first or second vaccine dose within a period ranging between three to fourteen days. This led some scientists and doctors in Israel to link the onset of the disease to receiving the vaccine.
William Schaffner
is the contact person for the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US. He is also a specialist in infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee in the USA. He provided a definitive response by stating that linking the vaccine to smallpox is a logical fallacy.
He adds that even the Israeli scientists who discussed this relationship in Rheumatology acknowledged that “the study is not designed to determine a causal relationship.”
Schaffner continued, “Israel gave the vaccine through one of the Pfizer programs to nearly half the population of 4.7 million people at the time, that is approximately 40% of the total population. Six cases out of nearly five million people cannot count as a warning sign or even as a validation of a link between the emergence of the disease and the vaccine.”
Al-Ani’s posts show an ongoing attack on Coronavirus vaccines. Al-Ani’s Tik Tok account is followed by 140,000, and his videos have received a total 395,000 likes, and the hashtag #Majed_Al-Ani has gained about 36 million views.
What is clear is that social media platforms need to activate stricter policies in combating rumours and disinformation about monkeypox, especially in Arabic, as they did during the Coronavirus pandemic.
Last April, the director of “News Companies Partnerships” in the Middle East and North Africa Mohammad Omar
announced
that more than twelve million posts and contents containing disinformation in various languages were removed from Facebook and Instagram.
In July of the same year, Facebook banned the hashtag
"#VaccinesKill.
Additionally,
Twitter has
removed 8,493 tweets with disinformation about Covid-19 virus and has
suspended
2,400 accounts permanently.
The Tik Tok platform is still in the process of announcing measures to limit videos that violate “community guidelines.” It announced that “more than
102.3 million video clips
of the total number of videos around the world were removed during the first quarter of 2022 for violating these guidelines.” At the beginning of the year, Tik Tok has established
the first advisory board for safety in the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey.
Better measures are still expected to help curb the spread of disinformation.