Tips to help you detect fake news about Covid-19
Living in the midst of the novel Coronavirus pandemic, the spread of fake news and false information is alarming and on the rise – subjecting the public to disinformation and living in constant fear.
Carina van Wyk, head of education and training at TRi Facts, Africa Check’s training, research and information unit, said that there are several useful online tools available to verify whether content such as images and videos have been tampered with or have been shared in the wrong context.
In an email interview with threestreamsmedia, Van Wyk said that the most important thing is to “question everything you see online or receive via WhatsApp”. When asked about a checklist to help the public in identifying fake news, Van Wyk said the only way is to follow the golden rule of fact-checking, “when in doubt, check it out,” she said.
Van Wyk said that before sharing information about the novel Coronavirus or Covid-19, people should follow these golden rules:
- Pause, and ask yourself: Does it make me scared, angry or satisfied? Think about why the information might have been created and shared.
- Trace the origin of the information, and be very careful if there is no source.
- Is the image or video you’re looking at really related to Covid-19 or was it taken long before the first recorded case of the disease? To establish this as well as where it was taken, do a quick search for the image or a screenshot of the video on Google Images, TinEye or RevEye Reverse Image Search.
- Compare information you want to share against information from trusted and official sources.
In an effort to combat this wide spread of false and inaccurate information, the World Health Organisation (WHO) regularly holds press conferences with simultaneous interpretation in various languages in order to improve communication with the whole world.
“Covid-19 has been followed by a massive ‘infodemic’ – an overabundance of information, some accurate and some not; making it difficult for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it,” WHO spokesperson Fadéla Chaib, based at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, said in an email interview.
The WHO has partnered with social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and WeChat, to detect and limit the spread of misinformation. “WHO and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) with support from UNICEF are set to work with telecommunication companies to text people directly on their mobile phones with vital health messaging to help protect them from Covid-19,” Chaib said.
A dedicated massaging service in Arabic, English, French and Spanish has been set up with WhatsApp and Facebook, to keep people safe from the pandemic. “This easy-to-use messaging service has the potential to reach two billion people and enables the WHO to get information directly into the hands of the people that need it,” Chaib said.
The WHO’s interactive chatbot on Rakuten Viber, is also now reaching 2.6 million people with reliable evidence-based information and is available in 16 languages. According to the official WHO website, the messaging service can be accessed through a link that opens a conversation on WhatsApp. Users can simply type “hi” to +41 79 893 18 92 to activate the conversation, prompting a menu of options that can help answer any Covid-19 related questions.
According to Chaib, a similar chatbot has been launched on Facebook Messenger in multiple languages, which will allow the WHO Health Alert to reach up to 4.2 billion people – helping people protect themselves from Covid-19, prevent its spread and understand the facts related to the disease, which extends to the publishing of health advice on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and the WHO website.
Chaib said the WHO recently launched a Google SOS alert to make sure people searching for information about the novel Coronavirus see WHO information at the top of their search results.