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The Infodemic: How Facebook helped the Plandemic spread, Cameroon’s missing president and the first fruit of China’s facemask diplomacy in Serbia

Welcome back and, as always, a very special welcome to our new subscribers. Hit reply anytime, if you have questions, ideas or suggestions. 

We are tracking the global spread of coronavirus disinformation and how it’s shaping the pandemic response. Here are a few narratives, both real and fake, that have caught our attention today. 

Facebook and YouTube continue to enable the spread of Covid-19 disinformation. Here’s an incredible example:

• Using two comparative datasets from a social media monitoring tool called CrowdTange, the author of this piece dissects and visualizes the role Facebook groups played in spreading the “Plandemic”, a slickly produced documentary featuring discredited virologist Judy Mikovits
• The visualizations show how incredibly fast the medical misinformation and conspiracy theories featured in the film spread across Facebook groups, leading users back to the documentary on YouTube 
• The big conclusion: debunking does not work 

Privacy may be on its way out everywhere, but not in New Zealand, which has launched its own coronavirus app named NZ COVID Tracer. Here’s how it is different from others: