In the weeks leading up to Italy’s first Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020, the most widely shared articles on Facebook from the Italian news website Oltre.Tv were about keeping bacteria out of the house by leaving shoes outside and using garlic and honey to ward off coughs. The website had long been flagged by Italian fact-checkers for spreading disinformation. And as the pandemic ramped up, so did the site’s claims — that the Italian government wanted to see more coronavirus deaths, that protective masks can cause diseases and dementia and that the pandemic was a lie, propagated by Big Pharma.

According to Claudio Michelizza, founder of the Italian fact-checking site Bufale.net, during the first wave of Italy’s coronavirus crisis, “disinformation websites contributed to the climate of uncertainty. People started believing that Covid was planned.”

The online spread of misleading narratives is a particular cause for concern in Italy. According to an April 2021 report by the global activist platform Avaaz, Italian speakers are the non-English users in Europe “least protected” against disinformation on Facebook, with 69% of the content examined not fact-checked by the platform’s moderators. And while social networks like Facebook and Twitter have removed many “superspreader” accounts, a multitude of smaller pages still seem to fly under their radar — including Oltre.Tv, which had operated on Facebook since 2011.

In December 2020, the global misinformation-tracking organization NewsGuard identified an network of seven Italian websites and Facebook pages that shared each other’s posts and articles almost simultaneously. The network includes Oltre.Tv. NewsGuard calculated the network’s reach at over 1.5 million followers. Since then, a sister site to Oltre.tv has appeared — Gasp.News — that publishes and shares similar content.