The Social Dilemma caught one of its TikTok conspiracists off guard

When she posted a TikTok in March, Chelsea Gilliland wasn’t thinking about anything other than how dumb coronavirus conspiracy theories could get. Taking on the persona of someone who believed the conspiracies, Gilliland recorded herself talking about how the coronavirus could be a cover-up for a much bigger issue — a conspiracy theory she had seen going around social media. She thought it was a clever joke, and that the point would be obvious to anyone following her.

But when she saw a clip of her TikTok included in The Social Dilemma, a top trending Netflix documentary, she started to rethink things. The film paints her as an example of social media’s well-documented issues with misinformation — and it only includes a snippet of the...

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