If comedian Mark Humphries has crashed your timeline with ludicrous claims that 5G has caused the outbreak of COVID-19 or helped fake the moon landing, then Telstra's latest campaign to combat disinformation is having its intended effect | LisaVisentin
"In January and February, largely the pages and groups that circulated these conspiracies had hundreds or thousands of followers. By March and April it reached groups that had hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers," Professor Bruns said.
"The more likely you are to see this content spread over and over again, the more likely you are to affected by it and the more likely you are to end up believing it,"Professor Bruns said.which had spurred anti-5G protests across the country, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy released a statement in May declaring: "There is no link between 5G and COVID-19".
"5G is spreading coronavirus," Humphries declares in one video as he stares down the barrel of the camera, only to then dismiss the claim by adding that if radio waves could carry the virus "someone would have weaponised SmoothFM years ago". "In comparison to more traditional, factual-based social media campaigns about electromagnetic energy and 5G, the Mark Humphries social media campaign saw a 10-fold increase in engagement ," a Telstra spokesman said."It wasn’t designed to convince everyone. It was more so a way to engage our customers and the community using humour and satire to help challenge misguided beliefs and anti-science.
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