Since the end of January, a network of journalists, organizations and media have been allied to verify information about the new coronavirus. In the past two months they have found at least 1,500 fake news and falsehoods in 60 countries and 15 languages, circulating with the same virulence as the pandemic.
Before the Covid-19 disease spread all over the planet, the fake news was already a product of our time and an instrument of power. The #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance calls them, like the World Health Organization, an “infodemic”. So this network detects them and cleans them up.
The Poynter Institute of Journalism’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is leading this initiative.
Brazilian journalist Cristina Tardáguila is the deputy director of IFCN, and founder of Brazil’s first data verification agency, Agencia Lupa.
This week she told in the Televisión Española public television’s Telediario (the news show) that widespread anxiety makes it easier for people to share false information. In Spain –which at the time of this article’s publication is the fourth country in the world with the most cases of Covid-19 diagnosed in healthcare centers–, they found up to 200 false information, which in that country are called bulos (hoaxes). Eighty percent of them came from WhatsApp. In fact, researchers at Science Flows, of the University of Valencia in Spain, happen to be conducting a scientific study on the hoaxes received by that messaging network.
“We now understand that panic makes people want to help their families and friends, and that’s what makes people share the misinformation,” Cristina Tardáguila said. The most important thing is that when you have information about coronavirus, don’t share it before you are sure it’s true. The attempt to protect can be harmful.”
The #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance created a Twitter list with the fact checks and publishes weekly reports.
But the richness of their verification work lies in a database they built with fake news detected by 100 fact checkers in at least 45 countries, and then verified. The list is updated regularly. It also includes press articles.
If, for example, we look at the findings about the United States –today, on March 27, the country with the most diagnosed coronavirus infections on the planet–, we find falsehoods like the death of Tom Hanks and the confession of his admiration for Trump before he died; a plan by Bill Gates and the Vatican to depopulate the planet with a vaccine against the virus; a Pulitzer Prize to Fox News for its coverage of the pandemic; a helicopter spraying from the air to disinfect from the coronavirus. Or unproven information such as that there is definitive proof that chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine cure Covid-19 disease with total effectiveness.
For Spain the database of falsehoods throws a not very different tone: that inhaling the steam of boiling water for five minutes kills the virus; that internet access will be free for two months; that the government will declare a state of emergency; that the Ministry of Education will approve the exams of all students not going to school at the moment.
And in the other countries, the falsehoods do not vary much either. The alliance has proven to be false messages referring to people with type A blood being more likely to get the coronavirus; or that a man vaccinated his dog against the virus before the pandemic and therefore SARS-Cov2 is not a new virus; that holding one’s breath without coughing can determine whether the body has become sick with Covid-19; that, according to UNICEF, Maracaibo in Venezuela is protected from the coronavirus because it is very hot; that kitchen foods combined with the heat of the sun prevent and cure the virus; that the Simpsons predicted the pandemic; or that Nostradamus did for that matter; and that scientists found HIV protein-like sequences in this coronavirus.
Like the virus that currently keeps a third of the world’s human population confined, fake news don not discriminate between borders, languages, cultures, territories or level of education. There are leaders in charge who also spread them. Their damage may be irreversible.
Hence the work of verification begins with the users of internet and social media.
In the interview with el Telediario’s Ana Blanco, Cristina Tardáguila reiterates the recommendations that experts have been making for years: “Those who receive messages on WhatsApp and are not able to identify the name of the person, the city where they speak or write from, the date on which the supposed news was recorded, the exact location of the story and are not able to identify any record of this story in the press, are very likely to be watching a hoax. In other words, it is better not to share it.”
The shock of the pandemic seems to be opening a change of perspective, though. A group of researchers from the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Italy set up an observatory on January 20 to identify fake news on Twitter. In 120 million messages that they have already studied, they found that when the pandemic approached a particular country, the dissemination of unreliable information decreased there, reported Jordi Pérez Colomé for El País. The journalist clarified that during this crisis fake news has continued to exist, disseminated by bots and humans, but its reach has lessened “and the search for information from more consolidated sources has increased.”