The world is dealing with an unprecedented health crisis caused by a new virus. With new insights in the way COVID19 spreads, in the way the virus behaves and in the way to deal with the pandemic every day, it is now more important than ever to safeguard the information we share is accurate and fact-based. We have to inoculate ourselves against the fake news and misinformation that infect our newsfeeds and timelines at this crucial moment by fact-checking.

For the duration of the pandemic, I will try to give you an overview of the main issues in CoronaCheck, an Australian email newsletter with the latest from around the world concerning the coronavirus.*

SOME SERIOUS ANTI-VAXXING

Image source: plandemicmovie.com

Regular Facebook users have almost certainly come across a viral video in recent days: the 27-minute trailer for a yet-to-be-released film called “Plandemic: The hidden agenda behind COVID-19” continues to spread widely despite censoring efforts by Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter. The movie’s makers maintain it will “expose the scientific and political elite who run the scam that is our global health system”.

The glossy trailer features a long interview with Dr Judy Mikovits, described by the Washington Post as a “well-known figure in the anti-vaccination movement”.

According to PolitiFact, however, a number of the claims made by Dr Mikovits in the clip are “either unsupported or outright false”, including her claim that she was jailed without charge.

Dr Mikovits makes other claims without any evidence to support them, including that the coronavirus was “clearly manipulated”, that the virus is a derivative of SARS 1, that hydroxychloroquine is effective against coronaviruses generally and that the flu vaccine increases the odds of getting COVID-19 by 36 per cent. The fact-checkers also debunked Dr Mikovits’s claims that the flu vaccine contains coronaviruses and that wearing a mask can make you sick.

Retraction Watch, which tracks retractions of scientific studies, has published at least 10 posts on the discredited scientist since 2011.

DON’T QUIT SMOKING?

In late April, headlines suggested that according to a French study smokers may be less likely to contract the coronavirus. The study found that just 4.4 per cent of COVID-19 patients admitted to a Paris hospital were smokers, as were 5.3 per cent of people suffering from the virus at home but that the smoking rate in the general population is 40 per cent for people aged 44-53 and 11 per cent for 65-75 year-olds.

But USA Today pointed to an overview of studies observing the effects of nicotine in severe COVID-19 cases made by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information which found instead that “smoking is most likely associated with the negative progression and adverse outcomes of COVID-19”.

The newspaper also spoke to other researchers, who urged caution regarding the French study. Academics writing in The Conversation noted that the “counterintuitive results may be due to several biases”, that the study had yet to be peer-reviewed, and that it was completed at “pandemic speed”.

BILL GATES REVISITED

Image source: Facebook

In COVID-19 facts and fiction 3, several false claims about Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who seems to act as a lightning rod for coronavirus misinformation, especially it concerns a COVID-19 vaccine.

This time the false claim relates to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has contributed more than $250 million to the fight against the novel coronavirus.

A Facebook photo showing the outside of the foundation’s headquarters emblazoned with the sign “Centre for Global Population Reduction” was photoshopped, according to fact-checkers at Politifact, Snopes and Lead Stories.

“There is no such thing as the Center for Global Human Population Reduction,” Lead Stories concluded. “It is just one in a long chain of false rumours about Gates in circulation.”

WHO CREATES FAKE NEWS?

Image source: BBC

As we have seen in previous articles, misinformation and disinformation are being dispersed faster and more widely when riding on the back of the global health crisis. But who is responsible for starting and spreading rumours, hoaxes and conspiracies? According to the BBC, viral misinformation spreaders often fit into one of several categories.

1. The ‘joker’, who posts misinformation for a laugh. The readers who aren’t in on the joke, pass it on as if it is true.
2. The ‘scammer’, who uses the pandemic deliberately to fool people into handing over money.
3. Politicians, such as US President Donald Trump
4. Celebrities, for example, actor Woody Harrelson.
5. Conspiracy theorists.
6. And last but not least, relatives. “They’re trying to be helpful and they think they’re doing something positive,” the BBC suggests. “But, of course, that doesn’t make the messages they pass along true.”

WILDLIFE RETURNS

Image source: Facebook

We’ve all seen the many images of wildlife reclaiming urban centres in coronavirus lockdown, but some have been fake or misleading. In the newest example, fact-checkers at Snopes found that an image of hundreds of flamingos in the canals of Venice is the result of digital manipulation.

The photo was created by an artist on Instagram, who clearly categorized her image as “art” and told commenters the photo wasn’t real. On Facebook, however, the image has been shared more than 19,000 times, without any qualification.

FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.

In March, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared that the social media giant was tackling “misinformation that has imminent risk of danger”, including claims that drinking bleach could cure COVID-19, which he described as being “in a different class”.

However, when US President Donald Trump mused about introducing disinfectants and UV light into the body as potential treatments for the COVID-19, Facebook, as well as Twitter and YouTube, declined to remove Mr Trump’s statements, arguing that he did not specifically direct people to drink or inject disinfectants or use UV lighting in an attempt to cure or prevent the disease.

Mr Trump may not have given a specific directive but others did take the next step, and the social media companies can’t keep up.

According to an investigation by the New York Times, hundreds of Facebook groups and pages and thousands of tweets pushing unproven UV therapies remained live as of April 30, a week after Mr Trump’s comments. More than 5,000 posts, videos and comments promoting the use of disinfectants as a virus cure remained on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

Things that don’t cure and/or prevent COVID-19

#22: CBD oil
“There are no credible animal or human studies showing CBD [cannabidiol] has any effect on SARS-CoV-2 or the course of COVID-19 infection.” – Professor C. Michael White,  Head of the Department of Pharmacy Practice, University of Connecticut, The Conversation

*The facts in this article are derived from the Australian RMIT ABC Fact Check newsletters which in turn draw on their own resources and those of their colleagues within the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), of which RMIT ABC Fact Check is a member.

The world is dealing with an unprecedented health crisis caused by a new virus. With new insights in the way COVID19 spreads, in the way the virus behaves and in the way to deal with the pandemic every day, it is now more important than ever to safeguard the information we share is accurate and fact-based. We have to inoculate ourselves against the fake news and misinformation that infect our newsfeeds and timelines at this crucial moment by fact-checking.

For the duration of the pandemic, I will try to give you an overview of the main issues in CoronaCheck, an Australian email newsletter with the latest from around the world concerning the coronavirus.*

SATIRE IN THE NAME OF FITZGERALD

Image source: Facebook

A letter attributed to F. Scott Fitzgerald, supposedly written by the Great Gatsby author during the Spanish influenza pandemic, continues to be shared widely on Facebook despite being debunked.

The letter, purportedly sent by Fitzgerald to a friend in 1920 and including references to his wife Zelda and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway, is, in reality, a parody written by Nick Farriella for the satirical website McSweeney’s, according to fact-checkers at Reuters and Snopes.

Farriella tweeted on March 18 that his creation had been turned into “fake news” but continues to be shared, including as recently as April 29 on Facebook.

MOSQUITOES JOIN THE MYTHS

Image source: Twitter/Peter Kyle MP

Mosquitoes can indeed spread certain diseases such as malaria through their bite but fact-checkers at PolitiFact and Associated Press found there’s no evidence that COVID-19 can be spread by the insects.

A Tik Tok video suggesting the coronavirus could be caught from mosquitoes which had bitten someone infected with the virus had been viewed more than 1 million times.

The World Health Organisation has stated that to date “there has been no information nor evidence to suggest that the new coronavirus could be transmitted by mosquitoes”, and Joseph M. Conlon, a representative of the American Mosquito Control Association, told PolitiFact no coronavirus had shown the necessary replication inside mosquitoes or ticks for the virus to be passed from person to person via insect bites.

KEEP YOUR DISTANCE

Image source: Twitter/Peter Kyle MP

Photos may not be what they seem. The team at Full Fact in the UK have put together a guide on what you should know about photos of overcrowded public places that suggest a lack of regard for social distancing rules which are distortions of reality through the use of telephoto lenses and different camera angles.

“It’s important to say that these images aren’t fake: they are authentic images, but choices the photographer makes can result in very different impressions of a scene,” Full Fact says.

In one example, a regular jogger in England explained in a Twitter thread how a photo of 40 people apparently crowded together along the Bournemouth foreshore actually showed an area half a kilometre in length.

In another example, British Labour MP Peter Kyle tweeted out the two images above.
“Same spot. Same moment. Same camera,” he announced. “Can the media please stop popping to our beautiful seafront and using zoom lenses to give the impression people are selfishly endangering others. Overwhelmingly they are not. Photos can lie just as words can.”

MISINFORMATION SUPERSPREADERS

from Darren McCaffrey, Euronews

With a worldwide increase in media consumption due to the pandemic the insidious danger of misinformation has also increased. The analytics firm NewsGuard found dozens of popular Facebook pages that are publishing, repeating and sharing false stories about the coronavirus across Europe. The offending pages each had more than 40,000 likes on Facebook and had a combined following of more than 13 million users; larger than the population of most European countries.

NewsGuard reports that the hoax social media pages have been targetting audiences in English, French, German and Italian to share myths that the novel coronavirus had been created in a lab, or engineered as a bioweapon, despite no evidence to support the theory. Some of the posts have had little or no supervision from Facebook, which is under intense pressure to monitor fake news during the pandemic.

Matthew Holroyd explores the phenomenon of “superspreaders” of false information.

Things that don’t cure and/or prevent COVID-19

#21: Eating papaya salad
“It’s a bogus claim. The most effective way to protect yourself from infection is to wash your hands regularly, wear facial masks, and keep social distance from 1-1.5 metres.”– Dr Thira Woratanarat, department of preventive and social medicine at Thailand’s Chulalongkorn University, quoted by AFP

*The facts in this article are derived from the Australian RMIT ABC Fact Check newsletters which in turn draw on their own resources and those of their colleagues within the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), of which RMIT ABC Fact Check is a member.