Quite clearly, yes. When people see content more often, there's a simple frequency bias in our psychology that we believe it's more likely to be true. Platforms are force-feeding disinformation to people through their newsfeed, which is an act of publishing.
There's this myth that what you see is the content of a billion people—of course you don't. You see a timeline that's structured specifically for you. This is not a global discourse. This is a discourse that's controlled by algorithms, which are designed for commercial impact. You saw it again and again in the witness testimony of people who were charged with crimes related to the January 6 insurrection in the Capitol—about four blocks down from my house here—or it's in the testimony of my friends and my colleagues who work in the medical profession, who told me about people who were choking to death in ICUs, begging for a vaccine that they had once thought would harm them and it was now too late to administer. Many of those people went on to die. There are human beings, there are tragedies and there are families today bereft, directly because of the disinformation that was pumped actively, as an act of deliberate publishing, to people.
There are victims of terror attacks. I was speaking in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life synagogue quite recently. Again, we see the effect of these conspiracy theories being force-fed to people such that they think it is acceptable and normal, and that other people would approve that they've killed people because of the god they worship or who it is they choose to love.