It’s not the sign of the devil: A case of political misinformation during the covid-19 pandemic
Earlier this week we noticed something weird happening in one of our Tweetdeck columns: Accounts linking to pages on GovTrack.us were also talking about how the number “6666” —yes, four sixes — is “the number of the devil.” While we’re not experts in beast numerology, that wasn’t the only thing we noticed they were getting wrong.
The accounts were linking to H.R. 6666, a bill in the United States Congress that, if enacted, would fund community-based covid-19 testing and tracing organizations. While there are always legitimate concerns about any legislation, and in this case concerns about government surveillance, deficit spending, and potentially corrupt use of tax dollars would all be legitimate (and not unique to this bill), these posts were spreading gross misinformation about what the legislation would do. Claims largely centered around government-forced testing, forced quarantining, and separation of families (which, we regret the need to say, are not remotely connected to the reality of the bill).
Snopes and Wonkette have also already written about this misinformation campaign — that’s how prevalent it is.
In the last few days, around 200,000 people visited our page for this bill — far beyond typical traffic — where we now have a clear explanation of what is actually in the bill. This all seems to have begun in a May 8 live stream viewed 800,000+ times by “Dr. Buttar” who said (incorrectly) that the bill would “allow individuals to come into your house and if you have a cough…to pull you and your loved ones away.” We also found posts on mainstream-seeming websites like The Washington Times promoting the misinformation:
This also jumped onto Twitter, including some verified accounts, with a fair number of retweets:
David K. Hill, a congressional candidate in Oklahoma’s 5th District, tweeted a link to the gross Washington Times article after we published this.
The bill was also called “evil,” with reference to the number, in a segment by someone named Ben Armstrong on the radio station WSAU.
The connection between the misinformation campaign and a symbol in Christianity is equally absurd. Bills are assigned numbers sequentially starting from 1. When H.R. 6666 got to the clerk that assigns numbers, there were 6665 bills that had come before it. While in rare circumstances legislators can request a number, that obviously wasn’t the case here.
While I’m sure some of these people are real, there is no way to know how many of the ~50,000 petition signers and retweeters are Americans unwittingly caught up in a disinformation campaign and not fake accounts run by a disinformation campaign, or witting participants in it.
When we replied to Twitter user Nate with more information, he dug in further. But some of these posts were taken down after we sent them or the site our summary of the bill (more on that below).
In response to our tweet to Nate, one account began making ominous statements at me personally:
(I’ve never heard of the funds mentioned in the first tweet, if they even are real.)
Change.org took down the petition after we sent them a message about it. The Washington Times article remains online. Two verified Twitter accounts that tweeted misinformation about the bill — including Glen whose tweet I included above — deleted their tweets after we replied with a link to our summary of the bill. (Thanks for being good people!) We don’t provide clickable links to the misinformation because we don’t want to promote those posts, but URLs are in the screenshots.
One of our goals at GovTrack is to help citizens stay informed about what Congress does. Misinformation campaigns like this actively mislead people and leave them less informed. Because we take our mission seriously, we felt it was important to describe the big picture of this phenomenon so our users can understand just how much they’re being misled.
This post was written by GovTrack.us founder Joshua Tauberer.
