One day in April of 2020 it hit me: “Where did John go?”

About a month into the pandemic, I’d realized that one of my friends on Instagram just suddenly stopped posting. He was a consistent social media poster, uploading one or two grid posts a week and posting to his Instagram stories almost every hour. John, an American, worked as a tour guide in Italy and lived a spectacularly wonderful life and I vicariously enjoyed the Mediterranean views through his account. Then all of a sudden, it ended.

I grew concerned and wondered if he was ok. Did something happen? I messaged him — no reply.

At that moment, I could have fallen down a rabbit hole, assumed the worse, latched onto answers that fit my paranoia: did he get Covid? Deported? Arrested? All these assumptions existed only in my head.

My point is that when faced with the unknown, we often fill the blanks with confirmation bias, making up a story for something even when it is illogical and unconfirmed.

In the the new true crime podcast, Tiffany Dover is Dead*, NBC News disinformation reporter Brandy Zadrozny goes into a deep dive exploration of how conspiracy theories are born, how assumed stories spread, and explains the methods she uses to debunk the sprawling conspiracy theory about Tiffany Dover.

Tiffany Dover is a very much alive nurse who works in a hospital in Tennessee. Dover became the subject of a large online conspiracy theory after she had received her Covid vaccine live on local television, but fainted at the microphone due to a Vasovegal episode. (Several people very close to me have Vegal issues, and they get dizzy standing up or feel faint with acute pain. It’s fairly common.)

When Dover fainted, a caring camera-person turned the camera away live on air. When Dover returned for an interview twenty minutes later to explain what had happened and that it had nothing to do with the vaccine, it was too late. Anti-vaxxers and online conspiracists had already shared the clip hundreds of times and it was going viral. The conspiracy theorists believed Tiffany Dover had been killed by the vaccine shot.

Following Dover’s Vegal episode was a series of extremely benign events. But, as Brandy Zadrozny illuminates on the podcast, the false information metastasized like cancer across the online conspiracy universe that inhabits too much of our internet spaces.

Adding to the conspiracy fuel was the fact that Dover, like my buddy John, was a prolific poster. But then, just like that, she stopped posting.

Social media has given rise to a new form of authority, one of confidence, charisma, and full of distorted reality. The online conspiracy influencers flaunt false information and push back against reality. At one point, in the second episode of Tiffany Dover is Dead*, a conspiratorial podcaster pushes back against the Tennessee journalist who actually interviewed Tiffany Dover by saying, “You’re not the fact-checker, I am the fact-checker. I have the upvotes, I have the views.”

These upvotes, views, clicks, and shares are metrics by which anyone can leverage any piece of bullshit and make it go viral — even when it the conspiracy they’re pushing contains no logic.

As journalist David Neiwert writes in his book Red Pill, Blue Pill: “The alternative universe of conspiracism may be ultimately the product of a mass of feverish imaginings by hundreds of different people, but it has rules.” One of the rules is that “any ‘official’ version or explanation of the story is necessarily false, while a wide variety of alternative, conspiracism-fueled versions may compete but are broadly deemed plausible.”

Zadrozny explores the eco-system of the conspiracy surrounding Tiffany Dover and the vast web of misinformation that not only continues to operate, but is rewarded by social media platforms. Conspiracy theories keep people online and are therefore profitable to the social media sites.

The reason Dover stopped posting on social media was because almost immediately after the television incident, anti-vaxxers and conspiracists flooded her account and started commenting asking if she was still alive. Like that of the late Gabby Petito, Dover’s accounts grew in following after the conspiracy started. Though she hasn’t posted since early 2021, Dover’s accounts are still inundated with unhinged comments.

Tiffany Dover is Dead* is an important podcast docuseries we should all learn from. We don’t know Tiffany Dover. We don’t know how it feels to be the center of an unhinged and vast conspiracy theory that isn’t based in reality. We don’t have permission to ask why she stopped posting on social media. It’s none of our business.

We live in a world where basic information can be weaponized, monetized, spread, and become a participatory environment. At the beginning of the first episode, Brandy Zadrozny admits that the fact that disinformation reporters have to exist is already an important note in this fight for truth and reality.

The podcast series is an important project to help us see how these narratives of unreality spread and how important the role of journalism is in our present. Rarely do we get a chance to see how much time and dedication is necessary to report on such a sprawling, out of control story whipping around the internet. Sometimes it seems that reporters like Brandy Zadrozny are the only things holding our fabric of reality together.

It’s very easy to find answers that fit our personal beliefs, but difficult to acknowledge that some things literally don’t have to have solutions. Maybe we should do our best to put aside our assumptions that fill gaps in our imagination and trust truth over conspiracy.

Oh, and John is back in the States. When Italy shut down, he decided to head back to the US. Why’d he stop using social media? I don’t know. It’s none of my business. I’m glad he’s living his life the way he wants.