- We studied a dataset of 38,564 YouTube comments, drawn from three Covid-19-related videos posted by news media organisations Fox News, Vox, and China Global Television Network.- Through topic modelling and qualitative content analysis, we found the comments for each video to be heavily dominated by conspiratorial statements, covering topics such as Bill Gates’s hidden agenda, his role in vaccine development and distribution, his body language, his connection to Jeffrey Epstein, 5G network harms, and human microchipping.In our data, examples of borderline content include comments that raise doubts about Bill Gates’s motives in vaccine development and distribution and those that suggest that he is seeking to take control in a “new world order.” These comments implied or linked to theories about using vaccines as a means for controlling or tracking large populations of people.Sundar’s (2008) study of technology effects on credibility found that “when users were attributed as the source of online news, study participants liked the stories more and perceived them to be of higher quality than when news editors or receivers themselves were identified as sources” (p. 83).Sundar and others (see Liao & Mak, 2019; Xu, 2013) have argued this can be explained by the “bandwagon heuristic” in which users’ collective endorsement of content has “powerful influences on publics’ credibility judgments” (Liao & Mak, 2019, p. 3)."