A few weeks after the “trials of sectarian aberrations and conspiracy”, organized by the government, Sonia Backès, Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, returns to the place of the main digital platforms in this matter. With reports increasing significantly in 2021, according to Miviludes, sectarian aberrations have spread to major social networks, starting with Facebook and YouTube.
Gurus carried away by the Covid-19 pandemic
The Secretary of State thus requests the implementation of warning messages from the main platforms under certain publications. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Facebook was particularly prominent in France for having massively spread conspiratorial posts about vaccination. The conspiracy theories were also widely spread on Twitter and YouTube.
Unlike Twitter, which always offers a chronological view devoid of algorithmic selection, the content that Facebook and YouTube broadcast is essentially curated by algorithms, which their creators sometimes have a hard time controlling or even understanding.
“Now there are a lot of 2.0 gurus gravitating around the web […] Thierry Casasnovas, the singer of raw foodism, ubiquitous on YouTube, is the subject of a legal process. But for ten years he has certified that eating raw cures cancer. This poses a serious public health problem. We are going to ask the platforms to work with us to find solutions”, announces Sonia Backès, still in the figaro.
Despite these numerous accusations, Thierry Casasnovas still broadcasts many videos on YouTube, where he has some 600,000 subscribers, for a total of almost 100 million views. On Facebook, where he is followed by 135,000 Internet users, the popularity of his posts has skyrocketed since the beginning of 2020, with the Covid-19 pandemic (see graph above).
Source: BFM TV
