[imagesource: PA]

I can just about stomach influencers touting average products and scoring free meals with a little punt here and there, but some things need closer scrutiny.

Surely you should stop monetising your children? One day, studies will emerge showing the long-term effects of being forced to open prezzies and eat cereal with a camera shoved in your face, and it won’t be pretty.

But I digress, and let’s focus on the matter at hand. We’ve seen our fair share of vaccine-related influencer drama here in South Africa, and now there’s some disturbing news coming out of France.

A number of French social media influencers say they have received financial offers to spread negative publicity about the Pfizer vaccine, reports The BBC:

They say an agency claiming to be based in the UK has contacted them by email offering a “partnership”.

Léo Grasset, who has 1.17m YouTube subscribers, tweeted (in French) that a “colossal budget” was promised from a client “who wants to remain incognito”.

He said that the address the agency had given appeared to be bogus.

He said the LinkedIn profiles of the agency’s alleged employees he had managed to find later disappeared, but not before he noticed that “everybody there has worked in Russia”.

Grasset posted screenshots, also in French, of further instructions:

C’est étrange.
J’ai reçu une proposition de partenariat qui consiste à déglinguer le vaccin Pfizer en vidéo. Budget colossal, client qui veut rester incognito et il faut cacher la sponso.
Éthique/20. Si vous voyez des vidéos là dessus vous saurez que c’est une opé, du coup. pic.twitter.com/sl3ur9QuSu

— Léo Grasset (@dirtybiology) May 24, 2021

He was told not to use words like “advertising” or “sponsored video” when posting, and to present the views as his own.

Perhaps the most disturbing information he was asked to spread was a blatantly false claim that the death rate among those vaccinated by Pfizer is almost three times higher than among those who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine.

All it takes is a quick Google search to fact check a claim like that, but only a tiny percentage of those who scroll past a tweet, or screenshot on Facebook, are ever going to bother doing that.

Several other French social media influencers, all of whom are involved in the health and science field, said they had been contacted with a similar offer.

Et Ça Se Dit Médecin, a hospital intern with more than 85,000 Instagram followers, told France’s BFMTV that he was offered €2,050 ($2,510; £1,775) for a 30-second story on his account.

A report back in April, compiled by the European Union, stated that Russian and Chinese state-run media were systematically trying to sow public mistrust in vaccines developed in Western nations.

The influencers were requested to publish links on social media directing people to a leaked report containing data that supposedly substantiates the claim about Pfizer being three times more deadly, even though the report in question contains no information on mortality rates.

In addition, they were told to use language along the lines of “the mainstream media ignores this theme”.

French health minister Olivier Veran said: the attempts were “pathetic” and “dangerous”, adding that they would not work.

Sadly, they do work, because as previously mentioned, a large percentage of the general population seems to favour screenshots over fact-checking.

As The Daily Maverick points out, some South African ‘influencers’ are more easily paid off than their French counterparts.

[source:bbc]