COVID-19 Fact and Fiction #5

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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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.