The false social media posts started just hours after protesters first began chanting and carrying banners around the Minneapolis neighborhood where George Floyd, an African American man, died handcuffed in police custody.
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"A good deal of this, if not all of this, is intentionally trying to stoke the racial flame that has been ablaze in the United States almost since slavery started 400-plus years ago," said Lanier Holt, a communications professor at Ohio State University who studied in Minneapolis.

While the falsehoods may have been unwittingly amplified by some, they have likely been planted by those preying on existing racial tensions, Holt said.

"They put out that false information to get that narrative in the minds of people who already have these ... pre-existing biases," he said. The online misinformation so far appears to have fallen along those racial divides.

In the seven weeks since Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order to protect people from losing their homes during the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of eviction cases have stacked up in Florida courts, waiting for the order to lapse. They include more than 250 in Hillsborough County alone....
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DeSantis recently extended the stay on evictions until June 2, but even attorneys are unclear what will happen next.

The rush to protect tenants from homelessness has resulted in a confusing patchwork of local, state and federal protections, most of which have little or no legal precedent.
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Muddying the waters further is the federal CARES Act, which prohibits evictions in residential properties that receive government subsidies, such as Section 8, or that have federally backed mortgages — that is, mortgages owned or secured by government entities such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The CARES Act’s eviction suspension expires July 25.

The researchers noted that the classes involved many people engaging in high-intensity exercise in a small space — a pretty ideal environment for COVID-19 spread.

"The moist, warm atmosphere in a sports facility coupled with turbulent air flow generated by intense physical exercise can cause more dense transmission of isolated droplets," the authors said. The number of people in a class also appeared to play a role in disease spread: Typical-size classes, with up to 22 participants, resulted in disease spread, while small classes with fewer than five people did not result in any spread of COVID-19, the report found.

Interestingly, one of the infected instructors also taught yoga and pilates, but none of these students became infected. The authors hypothesized that the lower intensity of these activities did not result in the same level of transmission as the high-intensity fitness classes.

Overall, "because of the increased possibility of infection through droplets, vigorous exercise in closely confined spaces should be avoided during the current outbreak," the authors concluded.

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