In a video posted on April 15, a netizen released a video titled “The AIDS scam must fall”. For forty minutes, we see him developing a theory according to which AIDS is a “false pandemic”.
As a reminder, AIDS is the most serious form of a virus called HIV. But if we listen to the Internet user in question, this virus does not exist. And its 40 million victims would be due to something else: “These people use drugs (…) and certain drugs in particular which are poppers. (…). It creates phenomena of intoxication, especially when it is taken repeatedly over years”.
What was long considered to be AIDS would in fact be poisoning due to taking drugs? Well no, that’s completely wrong. This theory was actually raised, but at the very beginning of the disease in the 1980s. It was thought that taking poppers, a drug very present in the gay community at the time, was the cause of Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the most characteristic infections of AIDS. But very quickly, researchers proved that this was a misinterpretation.
With Oh My Fake, we explain all this to you in the video placed at the top of this article.
Be strong against fake news
Oh My Fake on Snapchat Discover, it’s the 20 Minutes program that makes you strong against fake news, and more broadly invites you to understand the springs and psychological biases that encourage sharing and virality. Beyond knowing if “It’s true or it’s false”, the important thing is rather to understand “Why did we believe it? », by analyzing the mechanisms that make rumours, often fake, attractive to the point that even seasoned minds – like yours! – can succumb to it.