One of the first posts about the 5G conspiracy was regarding a connection between 5G and the COVID pandemic on a French conspiracy site called Les moutons enragés. This site loosely translates as “The rabid sheep.”
Gregory, a senior analyst at NewsGuard, got an early glimpse of the 5G conspiracy theory, but it didn’t take long before fake news started to spread globally. Two days after the blog post, a Belgian newspaper called Het Laatste Nieuws released an interview with a local doctor, who floated the uninformed claim that the COVID outbreak may be linked to 5G phone towers installed near Wuhan, China. The article was taken in a few hours, but the conspiracy theory went viral and had already spread to English-language Facebook pages.
Gregory stated, “There’s a crowd that has been saying that 5G is harmful to human health for years, ever since 5G was first being proposed [and] well before any towers or networks were online. This is just their latest attempt to push those claims, tying them onto this current news story.”
Theories about the relationship between the COVID and 5G have expanded into all sorts of wild speculation. Some think that 5G networks cause radiation, which triggers the virus.
Others think that reports of the coronavirus were a cover-up for the installation of 5G towers. Some push the idea that 5G and coronavirus are part of a broader plan to “depopulate” Earth.
As weird and strange as these conspiracies seem, they’re also extremely harmful. People who believe these theories, act on them, harming themselves and others. By April, conspiracy theorists were already setting cell towers on fire in Europe and starting to bond with anti-vaxxers.
Conspiracy theorists have also stated that Bill Gates might be behind the pandemic. This is currently the most popular COVID-19 conspiracy theory online. Though conspiracy theories rarely go away