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Context
Fact check

Many of the social media posts featured here are quoted directly from their source. Where specific false claims have been made, fact-checking information is available in the ‘context’ section. General claims without specific allegations remain without fact checking.

As of November 2024, COVID-19 is likley to be mentioned on the death certificate of around 250,000 people in the UK, and we recognise that many of the posts featured in this project may offend some readers. We have selected the posts carefully, and the chosen posts are used as evidence of public distrust. We in no way endorse any of these claims.

References
  1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medicine/article/coronavirus-conspiracy-beliefs-mistrust-and-compliance-with-government-guidelines-in-england/9D6401B1E58F146C738971C197407461
  2. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/policy-institute/assets/confidence-in-institutions.pdf

Introduction

In the months that followed the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, in the UK, and just about everywhere else, scientists and our politicians scrambled to find answers to key questions about how the virus spread and how to contain it. In that time, people’s lives underwent the kind of disruption not seen since the Second World War. As the health crisis intensified, hospitals were overwhelmed and with government scandals multiplying, many began to question those in charge. Some went further and offered their own narratives, definitively declared: “China manufactured it”, “the virus isn’t real, it’s the government trying to control us”, “the elites created this crisis AND they are profiting from it”.

By the time politicians and scientists had some answers to those key questions, many people had become antagonists to covid guidelines, anti-vaccine communities snowballed, and many more were hesitant to line up for their shots. While only a significant minority in the UK engage with conspiratorial thinking, trust and confidence in government and institutions continues to fall. In the context of the pandemic, this became a threat to public health¹. For this project and throughout the pandemic, we monitored social media channels, especially Telegram, which became a hub for anti-vaxxers and the vaccine hesitant. In the detail of these conversations, we tried to grasp what was informing the public’s faltering trust in our institutions².

We saw many people aggrieved because of personal experiences with the NHS, the police or their local politicians. Others were entrenched in ideologies of doubt and conspiracy long before this pandemic got started. What interested us in these conversations was the number of references to scandals and events in recent British history that appeared to be colouring and evidencing people’s suspicion of authorities’ response to the pandemic – the likes of the Iraq War, Jimmy Saville, and the phone hacking scandal. This project documents some of those events, focusing on institutional privacy, security and surveillance controversies and tries to understand how events like them have contributed to the decline in trust, and pandemic-related skepticism.

This project tries to understand why the rabbit hole is overflowing.

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