https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-how-one-particular-coronavirus-myth-went-viral/

By the time false information appears in your social media feed, you probably aren’t seeing the original post. Instead, the untruth is often first published by an obscure website posing as a legitimate news site, then several and sometimes dozens of other unreliable sites republish the same story, often verbatim or with just a few words changed.

Picture an internet-wide game of telephone, except the players aren’t children at a schoolyard but tech-savvy peddlers of dangerous misinformation during a global pandemic. It’s easy to track who said what in a circle of five children. Online, tracing a false claim back to its source can be nearly impossible. But we at NewsGuard were able to track one such toxic claim relating to Covid-19 back to its source, showing how easy it is for misinformation to travel the globe.