Your Facebook Friend Has Some Thoughts To Share About Your Covid Vaccine

Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make Facebook a source of reliable information about the pandemic. Instead he created a perfect platform for conspiracy theorists

- By Sarah Frier and Sarah Kopit

Kaleese Williams had mostly stayed off facebook and Instagram before Covid-19 hit. But during the lock-down, the 37-year-old was stuck on her north Texas farm with her husband, their 3-year-old, and their chickens and goats. She was also cut off from a source of income. Williams sells essential oils for a multilevel marketing company in Utah called Young Living. She’d normally set up booths at conferences and other events, making a little money while socializing with passersby. “Quarantine is not a whole lot of fun,” Williams says. “So I started thinking, ‘What would be so wrong with me sharing on social media?’ ” Her plan was to take her essential oils business on Instagram, where she could sell to people she met there.

Williams decided to splurge on an online course called Ready Set Gram Pro. It promised to help her build a “highly engaged” community on the photo sharing app that would “generate consistent leads and sales.” By watching web tutorials and participating in Zoom sessions, she learned tricks to attract potential customers to her profile—for instance, by commenting on the posts of popular wellness influencers.

As she built her following to more than 1,000 users, she became engrossed by Instagram, especially the parts of the app dedicated to natural living. Williams was already averse to traditional medicine after feeling bullied during a bout of cancer in 2017, during which she says her doctor failed to disclose that a treatment she underwent could cause infertility. Now she was spending more and more time-consuming information about different forms of alternative medicine such as naturopathy and functional medicine.