If you lost someone important to you, would
you share it online?
A lot of us would.
A social media announcement has become part of the ritual of big life events, from pregnancies
and engagements to deaths.
But what if sharing your grief made you a lightning rod for abuse?
And that's where I had gone on and told everybody on Twitter: “Yeah I just lost my husband
very suddenly to a massive heart attack.”
You’re listening to Trolled from BBC Trending.
I’m Rachel Schraer, the BBC’s health and disinformation reporter, and in this episode,
I’m investigating a viral film that’s whipped up a new and dark obsession in the
anti-vaccine movement.
I guess those key words really opened up floodgates for people telling us what horrible people
we were because we were vaccinated and how it was our fault.
Their belief is that Covid vaccines are driving a wave of sudden and suspicious deaths.
Now, any death that’s announced on social media, no matter the cause, can be used as
evidence.
It’s leading online mobs to track down bereaved people and harass them - and all grief is fair game.
The belief in a coming apocalypse.
Clips from the moon landing and the assassination of JFK flash rapidly on screen.
There’s only two ways to do it: one is to bring the birth rate down, the other is to
push the death rate up.
Jeffrey Epstein’s death.
9/11.
I’m now an anti-vaxxer, I wasn’t before.
All cut together with people talking about Covid and vaccines.
Somebody mentioned to go onto Google and type in: Died Suddenly.
The film, called Died Suddenly, appeared in late 2022 and quickly racked up hundreds of
thousands of views.
It offers up a story - of swathes of young people mysteriously dropping dead… of strange
clots found in bodies.
All supposedly caused by Covid-19 vaccines.
But there’s a problem - the evidence it uses to make this argument has been fabricated.
The film mixes real news reports about vaccine side effects with gory images of blood clots
lifted from old medical training videos, and a montage of people supposedly “dying suddenly”
who were actually fainting or having epileptic seizures - including footage from before Covid-19
even existed.
We should briefly go over what we do know - Covid-19 vaccines overall significantly
reduce the risk of dying or developing a long-term health problem.
This has been repeatedly demonstrated by independent scientists in lots of different countries.
There have been rare cases of very serious side effects from Covid vaccines, including deaths.
These deserve recognition and careful investigation.
But raising awareness about genuine cases of vaccine injury is a long distance from
the behaviour spurred on by the Died Suddenly film.
It’s been dubbed “ghouling” by some, because of the way deaths and personal tragedies
are being exploited.
The film gave them a hashtag and a place to congregate… that film and that hashtag and
being a part of this group that gets to go chasing people to make them feel bad.
Trisha is a former army analyst, scientist and teacher.
She and her husband James lived with a posse of cats and dogs in a quiet close on the outskirts
of Jacksonville, Florida.
We had just gotten married in 2021 after knowing each other since 1987.
We knew each other for 35 years.
And our lives went in separate directions.
But all that time, she held in her memory the boy who used to talk to her every night
on the phone after school.
I would even sneak the kitchen phone into my bedroom at night and I would hide underneath
all of my covers in the corner of my room so I could talk really, really softly on the
phone.
Now there’s a new day burned into her memory.
On November 7, my husband had a massive heart attack on our living room floor and he passed
away that day.
The first post that I got that was derogatory,
and I'm paraphrasing, was: “Your husband died because he got the vaccine.
That's what you get for getting the jab.
You're just killing each other.”
And it slowly became clear to her that her choice of words when she shared news of husband’s
death were an invisible tripwire.
I didn't even hear anything about the movie until I started getting attacked.
I used those key words, you know, when I said my husband died suddenly of a heart attack.
The key words “died suddenly” popped up in all of these search engines, I guess, and
that's what started it.
This is where the world of online conspiracy theories spills over into the mainstream.
Although Died Suddenly has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, if you ask most people
in your life, they most likely won’t have heard of the film.
But they might have seen strange comments appearing alongside the announcements of deaths
- of daughter of Elvis, Lisa-Marie Presley, British television presenter Paul O’Grady
or South African rapper Costa Titch.
It seems to have created a new routine.
Someone noteworthy dies, and like clockwork, ghouls descend to claim their death was caused
by vaccines… even when the cause has been reported as something different.
Even when the person had a long standing history of poor health or addiction.
The outcome might be grim, but it takes a canny creator to make such big waves online.
Hi Stew, I’m Mike.
Nice to meet you Mike.
Nice to meet you.
Yeah I’m just going to change my tie…
Stew Peters is the film’s presenter - and the driving force behind its creation.
He doesn’t usually talk to the media - not what he would call the mainstream media anyway.
And while we managed to secure the interview, we weren’t entirely sure why he agreed to
speak to us.
My colleague Mike Wendling, who will be familiar to you if you’re a regular Trending listener, was
on location for us in Florida.
Yeah I had been negotiating for an interview for some time and his team only told me where
to go the day before we recorded.
We showed up at a small warehouse on a light industrial estate in a coastal town in Florida
called Vero Beach.
When our crew and I got there, Stew Peters and his team had already set up a makeshift
studio.
They were filming us as we filmed them.
Can you hear me?
Hi…
And I joined the call online.
Can you hear me ok?
Yep, I can.
It's very well known, very common knowledge now that a bio-weapon has been released on
humanity, and then it's just been relentlessly pushed as the safe and effective vaccine…
and it's killed unprecedented, records-smashing numbers of people.
These are strong claims so they need strong evidence.
Yet much of Stew Peters’ evidence in the film falls apart as soon as you look at it twice.
Several of the clips that you show are from people passing out before Covid vaccines were
available.
Many of them did not die.
Did you include them by mistake, or were you deliberately trying to mislead?
Oh, so here we go.
Ok.
So this is an attempt to try to discredit me or the film rather than talking about the
millions of people that are dying.
But if millions of people are dying, why didn't you use them as examples?
Do you feel that the ends justify the means then?
This film has saved millions of lives and you know that.
In fact, by comparing death rates before and after the vaccines were introduced, various
researchers from the UK to Israel have estimated that vaccines have saved millions of lives.
The evidence that Died Suddenly has done the same is… harder to come by.
So I'd like to go through a few examples with you if that's ok from the film…
Keyontae Johnson collapsed in December 2020 before the vaccines were available.
He's still alive and well, he played in the national college basketball championship this year.
Why did you include him in the film?
I'm on a very specific mission and that is to expose lies that are killing people.
But you want to ask me about one basketball player?
It's not just one basketball player, though, is it?
You showed a headline about someone dying suddenly.
I found that article.
It was about the death of a man named Eric Cruz - he died in a car crash in 2017.
Why did you include him in the film?
If you have so many examples to choose from of real death and injury, why did you choose
these examples that were so easy to disprove?
How about this?
Why haven't you included any deaths in your reporting?
I've reported on some genuine deaths from vaccines.
They're people who their deaths have been proven by doctors and it's on their death certificate.
The very small number of people who have died associated with the vaccine.
So then you acknowledge that people are dying from the weapon.
I put several other serious flaws in the film to Peters.
The blood clots he claims were pulled out of Covid-vaccinated bodies, which were actually
from a 2019 medical training video.
The birth defects he links to Covid vaccines which a reverse image search proved to be
photos of babies in a medical journal from 2011.
But he doesn’t seem to want to answer any direct questions.
One example we go over, the collapse of American football player Damar Hamlin, is particularly
revealing of Stew Peters’ confused logic.
You may remember that Damar Hamlin, the American football star, collapsed live on TV in early
January, during one of the biggest games of the year.
Most people watching it saw it as an unfortunate injury in a very violent sport, and he’d
taken a blow just seconds before collapsing.
But hardcore anti-vaxxers saw something much stranger and more sinister.
You believe he's dead.
You ever heard of CPR?
That’s a thing that when somebody dies you do to save their life.
They’re dead.
Damar Hamlin died suddenly.
What part of this are you having a hard time comprehending?
I don't know if he's dead.
I know he died on that field.
We all watched it.
Why else would they have to give him CPR?
He was dead.
Yeah, but death is generally irreversible.
Is it?
Oh, wow, this is unbelievable.
Ok, so I’m genuinely trying to understand this.
He thinks he’s justified in saying Damar Hamlin died suddenly because he believes Hamlin
did die, if briefly, and then was brought back to life with CPR.
That has some kind of logic I guess… but then Stew Peters makes a different claim - that
Hamlin is in fact dead and his death is being covered up.
You have said, you know his appearances.
His public appearances are fake.
What do you mean by that?
I mean, they're not real.
Ok, but specifically how?
Specifically they're orchestrated.
I don't know if it's a body double.
I don't know if it's a deep fake.
Eventually I managed to ask Stew what he thought of the trend that appears to have ramped up
after his film came out, and how that’s ended in people like Trisha being harassed.
At first, he told me no one should be harassed, but then quickly seemed less concerned by it.
All we're doing is saving more lives.
I think that's awesome.
And I'm happy to hear you report that.
Thank you.
I feel like I was only getting half of what
was going on from the video call.
You were in the room - what was he like?
Well he was polite enough before the cameras started rolling but as you can hear, his mood
shifted considerably once we started the interview.
Died Suddenly might be riddled with obvious falsehoods.
But there’s one true thing the film points to, which might help to make the rest of its
claims sound believable.
There has been a rise in the numbers of people dying in many countries across the world since
Covid-19 emerged.
Deaths spiked in 2020 and early 2021, and then came down quite a lot after vaccines
were rolled out.
But we’re still seeing more people dying than we’d expect compared with the years
before the pandemic.
Various reasons have been put forward including the long-term damage caused to people’s
health by Covid infections, and disruptions to their wider healthcare during lockdowns.
A possible role of Covid vaccines has been studied but so far data is suggesting, in
fact, vaccinated people are dying at lower rates than unvaccinated people.
But this message is complex - it might take us years to understand exactly what’s going
on.
Stew Peters’ message, on the other hand, is simple.
So even if it’s more frightening, in some ways it’s perhaps more appealing.
In fact, Stew Peters isn’t the first person this narrative has appealed to.
I'm not really even sure exactly how they found me.
But what I do know is that it was very targeted.
Angie lives in rural Alabama.
She’s involved in political activism, campaigning for the Democrats.
And she’s a mother to five children - four still living.
She too fell foul of the morbid trend that’s been growing since Covid vaccines were rolled
out.
And then they found a tweet where we had announced the birth of Finn along with his little picture.
And they were trying to falsely link his death to me getting my Covid vaccine.
At two weeks old, Angie’s baby boy Finn died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, or SIDS.
I just remember waking and my husband screaming.
I remember the ambulance, the lights, the sounds, I still have PTSD when I hear ambulances
ride by, because it brings me back to that day.
I'm so sorry.
Within days, ghouls had found her tweet and her phone started blowing up.
Hundreds of messages telling her it was her fault her baby died.
Though she knew they were wrong, the guilt, the “what ifs” that come with the unexplained
death of a child, began to spiral.
And she was unnerved by how much work they must have put in to tracking down her story.
That was before the Died Suddenly film.
Trisha, on the other hand, believes she knows exactly how her trolls found her.
What Died Suddenly appears to have done is not create a brand new phenomenon, but supercharge
an existing one, handing a shortcut to trolls to find tragic stories and harass their victims.
We found that there is a fairly high level of what we would call coordination in the network.
It suggests that this activity might not be 100% genuine.
Naomi Smith is a digital sociologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland
Australia.
Along with her colleague Timothy Graham, she’s tried to map out the Died Suddenly film’s
spread, by analysing more than a million tweets using those key words.
Basically, if two accounts posted the same tweet within 60 seconds of each other at least
twice, they link them together.
They decided that was unusual enough behaviour that it was a fair sign these weren’t just
random accounts organically retweeting each other.
Instead, it was a clue this activity was planned.
That could be using bots or just a coordinated effort to manually share the film.
We asked Stew Peters about this.
He said they “didn't spend a dime to advertise Died Suddenly” on any platform - and that
it “went viral 100% organically”.
I think the reason why we should be worried about it is that this is driving real world
consequences.
Some of the people who have been retweeted in these Died Suddenly networks have been
harassed.
So when I say some of the accounts aren't genuine, that is mixed in with real people
accounts who take real world action.
While some of the early hype around the Died Suddenly film looks like it may be down to
clever marketing, it does seem to be real people who were piling on Trisha and Angie.
The big headline finding for us was the fact that this is mainly being driven by the hashtag
and by the Died Suddenly film account.
If Twitter de-platformed the hashtag and banned the Died Suddenly film account, a lot of this
harassment, misinformation, conspiracy-style talk would just go away.
So this is a solvable problem, technologically speaking.
Twitter did not respond to our questions about Died Suddenly and the way the film’s misleading
anti-vaccine claims spread on their platform.
The underlying factors that drive people to these beliefs - a loss of trust in institutions
because of genuine scandals and conspiracies, the trauma of a pandemic and the failings
or controversies in how governments managed it… they don’t have a quick or easy solution.
When it comes to the role of Died Suddenly in spreading provably false information and
appearing to incite harassment, though, Naomi Smith thinks there is a relatively simple
fix.
If we deleted the main documentary account from Twitter, a lot of this activity on this
hashtag would just fall off a cliff.
That’s it for this edition of Trolled from BBC Trending with me, Rachel Schraer.
A huge thanks to Mike Wendling, editor Flora Carmichael and Annie Gardiner for mixing this
episode.
If you want to get in touch about this report, then you can email me at rachel.schraer@bbc.co.uk
We’re also on Facebook and Twitter – just search for BBC Trending and follow us.
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