Politico reports:

For over a year, Anthony Fauci has been a bogeyman for conservatives, who have questioned his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of quietly undermining then-President Donald Trump.

But those attacks took on a whole new level of vitriol this week, to the point that one social media analysis described it as highly misleading and at least one platform pulled down some posts, citing false content.

It all stemmed from a tranche of Fauci’s emails that were published as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by various news outlets. Within hours of publication, the hashtag #FauciLeaks was trending on Twitter, accusing the nation’s top infectious disease doctor of lying under oath about the origins of Covid. It became a trending topic on Facebook too, where detractors added an inaccurate and more nefarious framing that the emails were secretly “leaked” — drawing on a playbook that has worked for partisans on the right in the past, despite the fact that Fauci’s publicly disclosed emails were not state secrets. [Continue reading…]