Opportunists used the cardiac arrest of an NFL player to promote deadly disinformation.
the Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin collapsed from cardiac arrest during an NFL game. Nearly right away—with little information about Hamlin’s condition publicly available—vaccine-disinformation purveyors hopped onto Twitter to promote the myth that athletes are dying because of the coronavirus shot.
By Tuesday, according to data from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit that studies disinformation and online hate, tweets containing the phrase “died suddenly” (which the group labels an “anti-vaxx trope”) had quadrupled, numbering almost 17,000—four times the daily average of about 4,000.
I spoke over the phone to the CCDH’s CEO, Imran Ahmed, to talk about the entire episode—and how it compares with previous vaccine-disinformation campaigns on Twitter. Ahmed did not hold back when discussing “the sociopathic, predatory nature of these people who prey on tragedy to spread bullshit.” (As of this writing, Hamlin remains in critical condition.)
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Can you talk to me a little bit about what you saw after the Hamlin collapse—what the volume of the anti-vax disinformation looked like online?
Imran Ahmed: First of all, it’s worth saying that anti-vaxxers have proven extremely opportunistic—parasites, really, who feed on the algorithmic salience of breaking news and current events to amplify their own narrative.
We have seen consistently that every time a high-profile death has occurred, very quickly, anti-vaxxers have jumped on and said, Yes, that happened because of the vaccine, and here’s the information about it. Right now, they’re trying to promote the anti-vax documentary Died Suddenly.
This is about gaming social-media platforms. They don’t actually care about the narrative content of the idea that a 24-year-old footballer who was vaccinated some time ago suddenly collapsed on the pitch. What they care about is the mathematical amplification that is theirs to enjoy, despite the fact they promote false information all the time, breaking the rules of the platforms. Platforms do not allow the deliberate spread of deadly disinformation. Nevertheless, these people are allowed to continue.
Nyce: Talk to me about how died suddenly became an anti-vaccine trope.
Ahmed: The idea that people are going to die as a result of the vaccine has always been a central charge. Anti-vaxxers only have three charges. One was that COVID’s not that bad. The second is that vaccines are bad. A third is you can’t trust doctors. There were only ever three themes that underpinned all the memes.
This is a classic example of the “vaccines are bad” type. And they’ve been saying for a long time that vaccines are going to kill people. What has proven to continue to be effective messaging is that in that short space between someone dying of unclear causes and the official medical examiner or coroner deciding what was the cause of death, anti-vaxxers will immediately jump in and use that space in which there is uncertainty to say, “The vaccine did it.
