New research from the University of Alberta tracked conspiracy theories about monkeypox on TikTok that made false claims about everything from vaccines to Bill Gates.
A study published Tuesday in health journal JAMA Network identified misinformation trends in videos published on the social media site in May 2022, a few weeks after media began reporting on outbreaks of monkeypox around the world.
U of A's Health Law Institute researcher Timothy Caulfield said the themes that emerged in the videos were like "COVID 2.0."
"You just can't believe how consistent it is. Often monkeypox is the entry point and then they start ranting about vaccines and then they start ranting about bio labs in Ukraine," Caulfield said in an interview Tuesday.
"You believe one conspiracy theory, you're more likely to believe all the conspiracy theories."
Caulfield and his co-author, Marco Zenone, collected 864 videos about monkeypox on TikTok and found that 153 of them espoused a conspiracy theory.
Caulfied said that within an average of 30 hours of being posted, the videos altogether were viewed 1.5 million times, liked 75,000 times and shared 14,000 times.
"Misinformation spreads incredibly quickly. It emerges incredibly quickly and does damage very, very quickly," he said.
The study identifies 11 different themes and types of misinformation, the most common being the false assertion that monkeypox is the next planned pandemic.
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