How Eriksen’s collapse at EURO 2020 pushed anti-vax narratives into the mainstream

JUNE 23, 2021 — JORDY NIJENHUIS AND HANNAH RICHTER

On day two of the Euro 2020 games, the world watched as Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch, during a game between Denmark, Eriksen’s home country, and Finland. After being successfully resuscitated, it was only a matter of minutes before the global anti-vax movement jumped on the Twitter propaganda train, to blame Eriksen’s collapse on the COVID-19 vaccine. However, there is just one problem with this theory: Eriksen hasn’t been vaccinated yet. 

A number of the original tweets have since been deleted, so it is difficult to find where the initial rumours began. Luboš Motl, a Czech national, appears to be one of the initial tweeters, stating that the chief medic and cardiologist spoke on an Italian radio station and confirmed that Eriksen had the vaccine. His tweet was picked up and amplified by Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter and known COVID-19 denier.* 

Motl has since deleted his tweet, even issuing an apology for it. But the damage was done. Despite no proof of the radio interview, Berenson’s tweet had already reached his 270,000 followers, and paved the way for a spew of anti-vax conversations, from across Europe all the way to the US. 

Data collection carried out by the European Observatory of Online Hate shows that The Netherlands was highly involved in conversations around this narrative too, with their own top COVID-19 denier pushing the anti-vax rhetoric into wider online discussions around Eriksen’s collapse. The Dutch dance teacher and founder of the anti-vax movement Viruswaarheid (Virustruth), Willem Engel, sparked outrage after publishing a tweet linking Eriksen’s cardiac arrest to the corona vaccine. In the tweet, he called for an immediate stop of the vaccination programme after watching a Danish player ‘drop dead’ on the pitch.*

As with Berenson’s tweet, data shows that Engel’s comments were immediately followed by fierce discussions on social media. Both anti-vaxxers and pro-vaxxers shared the tweet widely. Anti-vaxxers, unsurprisingly, supported Willem Engel's statement, and added their own stories and conspiracy theories to it. On the other side, we see that people who are in favor of vaccines and public figures shared the tweet claiming that this is ultimate proof of the ‘toxicity’ and ‘stupidity’ of Willem Engel’s movement. Within hours the online conversation around Eriksens’ cardiac arrest turned into a heavily polarised discussion around Engel’s tweet.

An investigation of tweets mentioning Eriksen in the Dutch anti-vax movement show a very one sided conversation with only one message: there is a link between Eriksen and vaccinations. Engel is referenced a lot, mainly through hashtags — throughout the conversations, his name is the third most used hashtag. However, the attention span seems to be rather short. On the day of the incident itself and the day after, the amount of tweets within the movement were around 300. After two days it went down to 50.

The amount of tweets originating from the Dutch anti-vax movement may seem low, and it might feel like a niche discussion on Twitter. Unfortunately, when we take a closer look at all the tweets in the Dutch language, we see that the narrative of the anti-vaxxers became intertwined with the broader conversation around Eriksen, and the total number of tweets linking Eriksen with vaccines increased. The word cloud below shows the most used words in all of the tweets about Eriksen in the Dutch twittersphere. The word ‘gevaccineerd’ (vaccinated) is almost as big as the words ‘get’, ‘well’, ‘soon’. Therefore, in all the conversations around Eriksen, vaccinations were almost as prominent as ‘get well soon’ wishes. We see this in the hashtags surrounding Eriksen too. #willemengel (9th most used) and #stopwillemengel (11th) were mixed with the narrative about the incident.

This seems to be a fruitful strategy for propagandists and conspiracy theorists: wait for an impactful or emotional event to happen, create a few offensive or toxic tweets, enable the online discussion to start, and watch your messages be amplified and carried to audiences you have never reached before. With big Dutch news outlets also reporting on the tweet, often using a screenshot in their articles, they also amplified the false information and gave Willem Engel even more prominence. 

These strategies are not new or surprising, but we as a society seem to be tricked by them over, and over again. And in our constant battle against dis- and misinformation, this is what we are facing. Facts and figures are never verified, and apologies or retractions rarely receive any attention, allowing the false information to become part of broader narratives.

*We have decided not to include any of the original tweets, be it screenshots or direct links, as we clearly do not want to amplify this false information any further.

This article was originally published on www.daretobegrey.com