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The fake, often homophobic theories circulating on all major social media platforms make it even more difficult, according to research conducted by the Center for Combating Digital Hate for the MIT Technology Review. These false claims make it difficult to convince the public that monkeypox can affect everyone and may deter people from reporting potential infections.

Some of this misinformation overlaps with known pandemic conspiracy theories attacking Bill Gates and the “global elite” or suggesting that the virus was developed in a laboratory. But many are directly homophobic and trying to blame the LGBTQ+ communities for the epidemic. Some Twitter posts claim that countries where anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is illegal are areas with the highest incidence of monkeypox or what he calls the virus “revenge of god.” In a video shared on Twitter last month, Congressman Marjorie Taylor Greene from Georgia falsely claimed that “monkeypox is really only mostly transmitted through gay sex.”

Homophobic comments to articles about monkeypox that had thousands of likes on Facebook were allowed to remain online, with a particular piece that garnered hundreds of disgusting reactions that were shared over 40,000 times via Telegram.

A YouTube video on a channel with 1.12 million subscribers contains false claims that monkeypox can be avoided simply by not going to gay orgies, not getting bitten by a rodent, or keeping a prairie dog as a pet. It has been viewed more than 178,000 times. Another video from a channel with 294,000 subscribers alleges that women contracted monkeypox “by contacting a man who probably had another contact with another man”; It has been viewed close to 30,000 times. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube did not respond to requests for comment in a timely manner for publication.

This type of stigma has real consequences – infected people who may not want to discuss their sex life are less likely to report their symptoms, making it difficult to track down new cases and control the disease effectively.

In reality, the virus can affect anyone and people are unaware of their sexual identity or activity. Julii Brainard, a senior research fellow in modeling at the University of East Anglia, says false information framing monkeypox that only affects men who have sex with men may convince people that the risk of contracting and spreading the disease is lower than it actually is. public health threats. “A lot of people will think, ‘This doesn’t apply to me,'” she says.

The fact that we’re still unsure of what ways monkeypox can be transmitted or how it currently spreads doesn’t help any of that. We know the virus is spread through close contact with an infected person or animal, but WHO said it is also investigating reports of the virus being found in human semen, suggesting it can also be transmitted sexually, but the sequencing data has so far provided no evidence. this monkeypox acts like an STD. It is also unknown which animal functions as the natural reservoir of monkeypox (the host that keeps the virus in nature), but the WHO suspects this is questionable. rodents.

While it’s still unclear how and where the outbreak started, WHO believes it began spreading person-to-person, mainly among men who have had sex with men, after the two glories, except in some countries in western and central Africa where the virus is regularly found. in Spain and Belgium. While typical monkeypox symptoms include swelling of the lymph nodes followed by eruption of lesions on the face, hands, and feet, many people affected by the latest outbreak exhibit fewer lesions developing on the hands, anus, mouth, and hands. genitals. This difference is likely to be related to the nature of the contact.