COVID-19 Fact and Fiction #12

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.*

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MORE MISINFORMATION ON FLU VACCINES

Image source: Facebook

Inaccurate claims about the flu vaccine and its relationship to the novel coronavirus continue to circulate, despite the best efforts of fact-checkers.

This week PolitiFact, factcheck.org and Reuters have checked inaccurate claims suggesting that the seasonal jab for the flue leads to false positives in coronavirus tests or even that the jab contains the virus itself. Both suggestions are incorrect.

According to PolitiFact, a Facebook post stating “If you have had a flu shot in the last 3-5 years, you will probably test positive” for COVID-19 was labelled “nonsense” by Davidson Hamer, a global health and medicine professor at Boston University.

A claim that the flu vaccine “has been biologically weaponised to cause coronavirus” was debunked by Reuters, whose fact-checkers noted: “There is no evidence to suggest that the influenza vaccine contains the novel coronavirus or causes COVID-19.”

 

HYDROCHLOROQUINE AND 5GL

Image source: Facebook

Again a claim linking 5G mobile technology to the coronavirus outbreak is being spread on Facebook, this time concerning another controversial item in the disinformation folly, hydroxychloroquine.

“Hydroxychloroquine cures this ‘virus’,” a Facebook post states. “It just so happens this is the treatment used for radiation sickness!! Let that sink in!”

Opponents of 5G have called out radiation sickness as one of the adverse health effects associated with the technology.

Fact-checkers at Full Fact and PolitiFact found there was no clear evidence that hydroxychloroquine was an effective treatment for COVID-19 and it is not used to treat radiation sickness either.

 

INFODEMIC

Fact-checkers and misinformation researchers around the globe not only try to correct the record on false and inaccurate claims around COVID-19 but also attempt to understand and track the spread of the “infodemic”.

On the one hand, researchers found that a quarter of the most viewed COVID-19 videos on YouTube, viewed by millions of users worldwide, contained misleading information and “may play a significant role in successfully managing the COVID-19 pandemic,” the researchers said.

On the other hand, social media investigators found that nearly half of all Twitter accounts posting about the virus were likely to be bots, twice as much bot activity as predicted based on previous natural disasters, crises and elections, according to Kathleen M Carley, a researcher with Carnegie Mellon University.

In Australia, the misinformation campaigns seem to be rather successful, with one in five surveyed young people (18-34) reporting that they think 5G mobile technology is spreading the coronavirus.

And a brand-new Australian report suggests that theory has been amplified on Twitter through the “coordinated” efforts of clusters of Pro-Trump, QAnon and Republican partisan accounts (emphasis mine).

 “The whole idea of bots is really quite contentious at the moment, but there’s really no other conclusion that we can draw from this, other than some of these accounts are using some sort of automation,” Dr Timothy Graham said, one of the authors of The Australian Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology report released today (June first 2020).

 “They might be semi-controlled by humans but how they’re behaving in these networks, at least in some clusters, is text-book bot-like behaviour. We can’t know for sure but there’s overwhelming evidence based on this approach, where groups of accounts repeatedly retweet the same content within one second of each other.”

 

INTERPRETING STATISTICS IN ITALY

Image source: Facebook

A claim made by an Italian politician that 96.3 per cent of more than 32,000 COVID-19 deaths in his country were actually from other causes is false, according to Full Fact.

The source of the claim turned out to be a report from the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (Higher Institute of Health) on April 20 which had found that of 21,551 Italians who had died with COVID-19, just 3.7 per cent had no co-morbidities.

“This means that 96.3% of the people who had died in Italy after testing positive for the new coronavirus had also suffered from at least one condition,” Full Fact noted. “It does not mean that the virus did not cause their death.”

 

HISTORY REWRITTENImage source: Facebook

A quote shared widely on Facebook reads “The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions,” and is said to have come from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. “In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.”

A caption accompanying the post (dated May 12) states: “This is what’s happening to us now … little by little.”

But fact-checkers at PolitiFact and Reuters note that comparing current coronavirus restrictions to Hitler’s ideology is based on misattribution. The Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History, which studies 20th-century German history, told Reuters the words were misattributed and had “never been written in Mein Kampf”. PolitiFact noted that the quote also misrepresents Hitler’s beliefs and actions. “Instead of small changes that slowly eroded the rights of the German people, Hitler made large changes over a short period.”

 

FROM WASHINGTON, D.C.

This week, an official fact-check warning label by Twitter appears to have been a tipping point for Mr Trump who responded to having his tweets about postal voting labelled by the social media platform by signing an executive order intended to challenge protections provided by US law that prevent social media companies being sued over what gets posted to their sites.

“In a country that has long cherished the freedom of expression, we cannot allow a limited number of online platforms to hand pick the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet,” Mr Trump defended his order.

Mr Trump then went on to claim the warning label placed on his tweets were done in a matter “that clearly reflects political bias”.

“As has been reported, Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet,” he said, “As recently as last week, [Democratic] Representative Adam Schiff was continuing to mislead his followers by peddling the long-disproved Russian Collusion Hoax, and Twitter did not flag those tweets.”

But as factcheck.org has covered the assertions that it is a “hoax” to suggest his presidential campaign had ties to Russia are not quite correct, with the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller establishing “multiple links between Trump Campaign officials and individuals tied to the Russian government”. Ultimately, however, “the investigation did not establish that the Campaign coordinated or conspired with the Russian government in its election-interference activities.”

Meanwhile, Mr Trump has doubled down on his claims that led to the Twitter warning and a slew of fact checks, tweeting in all caps:

“MAIL-IN VOTING WILL LEAD TO MASSIVE FRAUD AND ABUSE. IT WILL ALSO LEAD TO THE END OF OUR GREAT REPUBLICAN PARTY. WE CAN NEVER LET THIS TRAGEDY BEFALL OUR NATION.”

 

PLANDEMIC INFODEMIC

The New York Times has tracked how the coronavirus misinformation spouted in the movie “Plandemic” spread online, comparing the viral video to other conspiracies as well as moments in pop culture.

This graph shows how the video garnered nearly 2.5 million reactions, including likes, shares and comments, in less than two weeks, while a Taylor Swift concert and reunion of actors from “The Office” captured a fraction of that attention.

 

SOME HELP WITH RECOGNISING FAKE NEWS

 

*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.