Amid news of the heavy rains turning the Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert into a flooded fiasco, social media has seen a deluge of misinformation claiming that an Ebola outbreak has hit the event, causing a lockdown and mass panic. Rest assured, there’s no evidence of Ebola at Burning Man, so where did the story come from and what is Ebola?
One widely shared post showed a fake screenshot of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) account on X (formerly Twitter) stating that an Ebola outbreak had been confirmed in Black Rock City, Nevada, where the festival is taking place.
Most people sharing the misinformation appear to be trolling or joking around, but plenty of users seem to have taken the false claims seriously.
The account behind an anti-vaxxer COVID conspiracy documentary commented: “If the Ebola outbreak at The Burning Man Festival is confirmed to be true, you can be sure that it was a pre-planned and calculated operation by our own Government.”
These claims are totally fabricated and health authorities have not issued any such warnings.
Fortunately, X has since added Community Notes to some of the erroneous posts in a push to clear up the confusion, which read: “Whether it was deliberate misinformation or just a Twitter/X joke that got out of hand, there are apparently people who believe this. It’s not true.”
However, if you search "Ebola" or "Burning Man" on X, you'll be swamped with jokes and false claims about the supposed outbreak with no...
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