It has been nearly a month since a new strain of the Coruna virus appeared in a province
Wuhan of China, which spanned more than twenty countries. In the wake of his appearance, panic spread on social media around the world.
As people search the Internet for information about an outbreak of the Coruna virus - which the World Health Organization has designated a global health emergency - they face a wide range of misleading, potentially dangerous information.
They were working on promoting real content about the disease, but they found misleading information published that offends their platforms, officials in charge of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube told Recode, a technology specialist.
The efforts of these communication platforms have not succeeded in stopping the spread of misinformation and deceptive videos that garnered thousands of likes and shares.
In this article we show the most widespread:
1- China makes a biological weapon
It is not clear where this new strain of the Coronavirus originated, yet social media is promoting many theories suggesting that the virus outbreak may be linked to biological weapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute that includes the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory.
"It is believed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the place where the disease originated," says a Facebook post, which has been shared more than 4,000 times.
This idea is based, in part, on the comments of a controversial former Israeli officer in his articles that he shared with the "Washington Times", and his previous articles hinted that former US President Barack Obama may be a Muslim.
Despite the shock of biological laboratory theory, experts have told "The Washington Post" that there is no evidence to support these claims.
2- Smuggling the virus
Social media posts say the new Coruna virus, found in Wuhan, has been smuggled from a laboratory in Canada as part of China's secret pursuit of a biological weapon, a theory refuted by Politifact.
3- The vaccine already exists
There is another common theory about the existence of a vaccine for the new Coronavirus, and some even indicate that the vaccine has already been patented, and although so far no vaccine has been developed for this disease, a recent post on Facebook alleges that the Coronavirus was "prepared" for profit. From selling vaccines.
The post includes video footage of the new vaccine claimed to be patented. In this case, and because Facebook's fact-checkers verified the post and ascertained its falsity, an attempt to share the post made Facebook issue a warning saying that independent fact-checkers said that post contained incorrect information.
4- The virus will kill 65 million
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Research Center in the United States conducted a "test" aimed at modeling the global response to a potential pandemic, and many people online misunderstood the study and mistakenly linked its forecasts to the potential death toll of a virus outbreak similar to what we are currently seeing with Corona Virus.
There are many tweets - including one that still has more than 140,000 likes - claiming that scientists predicted that the Coruna virus would kill 65 million people.
"We designed a model for the fictional Coronavirus epidemic, but we have clearly stated that it was not a prediction," said Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security - in a statement.
5- 100 thousand cases
While more than 17,000 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed, a public health expert claimed in a statement to The Guardian newspaper that "tens of thousands of people are infected," but this number has not been confirmed.
However, many popular posts on social media platforms provide inaccurate statistics that will fuel feelings of fear and panic, and these publications attribute numbers to medical workers in Wuhan, the primary focus of the epidemic.
For example, one YouTube video that garners about eighty thousand views shows a person identified as a nurse and says that up to ninety thousand people have the disease in China alone. And on Twitter, too, an account that classifies a news store posts an audio clip claiming 100,000 people are infected with the virus.
It is worth noting that there are legitimate doubts about whether the Chinese government has been accurately reporting the impact of the virus, and for this reason, the exact number of people infected with coronavirus remains unknown.
6- Building a hospital overnight
Two government media outlets - Global Times and People’s Daily - circulated a picture of a newly built building and claimed it was a hospital in Wuhan built in only 16 hours, but the picture is in fact, a residential building.
How do technology platforms respond?
Social media companies have told Recode that they are working to reduce the impact of erroneous information about the Coronavirus in one way or another, to varying degrees.
Twitter said - in a statement - that there have been more than 15 million tweets about Coronavirus in the past four weeks. The company added that it had not detected any "coordinated attempts to spread misinformation about this issue."
But this does not mean that there is no wrong information about the Coronavirus on Twitter, and the Twitter response simply indicates that the company has not found any evidence of deliberate misinformation campaigns by a party, such as a country or political group.
But the situation is more complicated with Facebook, where external auditors participate in the process of checking information on the platform.
A Facebook spokesperson told "Likud" that the platform works to reduce the distribution of posts that are classified as false and to set alerts on wrong posts.
On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would take additional measures against erroneous information related to the Coronavirus, including removing the wrong content that was detected by health authorities.
YouTube relies on its version of checks, as the video platform displays short previews of text news articles about Coronavirus in search results.
If you search for "Coronavirus" on YouTube, for example, it will refer you to a documented article, such as an article in the New York Times about Corona Wuhan.
YouTube told Ricod.com that false information generally does not violate the rules of the statute unless it involves hate speech, harassment, deception, or incitement to violence.
Despite these efforts, it seems impossible for these platforms to remove every misleading post on Coronavirus as soon as it is published.
As with any kind of misinformation, it is a game that never ends, but the persistence of spreading misinformation about the spread of the disease - after one month has passed - shows how important it is to contain the spread of misinformation, especially with its serious consequences.
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