There’s a cabinet in my apartment that tells the story of how journalism broke during the pandemic. Vitamins, supplements, mushroom coffee from the Midwest, superfood powders from the Amazon, prebiotic syrup from Japan, bone marrow protein from England, liver detox from a lab — each bottle represents a different “expert” I encountered online, a fragment of information that promised to reveal what mainstream media wouldn’t tell me. About 90% of these purchases were triggered by social media ads that positioned themselves as news sources, alternative journalism, citizen reporting.
This cabinet is a physical manifestation of the COVID-19 infodemic — the first time in human history that a global crisis unfolded entirely within social media platforms, where the line between news, advertising, and conspiracy theory dissolved completely. Traditional journalism competed directly with wellness influencers, political provocateurs, and foreign disinformation campaigns. The World Health Organization adopted the term, warning that we were fighting not just a pandemic, but an “infodemic” — a parallel epidemic of misinformation that spread faster than the virus itself.
I had become both victim to and perpetrator of this information chaos, an unlicensed curator of alternative facts, dispensing health advice to friends based on Instagram stories and Facebook ads that masqueraded as investigative journalism.
