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Coronavirus: how does it impact the economy? 4:00
New York (CNN Business) - False claims about how the coronavirus began, the number of infected people and the promises of magical priests are spreading on the Internet.
The rise of false or misleading online publications about the virus, which has infected thousands of people mainly in mainland China, could once again prove the ability of social media companies to handle viral misinformation on their platforms.
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Maarten Schenk of Lead Stories, a fact-checking organization that works with Facebook, said his team has observed the exchange of conspiracy theories on multiple social platforms about the origins of the virus.
"It always has to be something sinister," Schenk said about the misinformation of conspiracy theorists, which includes false claims that the virus was the creation of a government.
Some people, Schenk said, "do not trust the narrative about the number of deaths and infections." He pointed out that there are people who cite "secret military sources," which almost certainly do not exist, claiming that tens of thousands of people have died as a result of the virus, well above current estimates from official sources.
A Facebook spokesman told CNN Business that he was working with his fact-checking partners to discredit false claims about the virus. Once Facebook posts and links containing alleged facts are verified and considered false, a Facebook spokesman said, the platform "dramatically" cuts its distribution and people who see this content, try to share it or have already done so , they are aware that it is false. ”
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The company noted several data verifications, including one from PolitiFact that says: "No, there is no vaccine for Wuhan's coronavirus," and another from AFP that says: "The coronavirus that affects China was not created by a government agency. from United States".
A video that claims to show an explosion in Wuhan, the city of China in the center of the coronavirus, was posted on YouTube last week and has been viewed almost 90,000 times. The description of the video suggests that the explosion is related in some way to the coronavirus, but the video is actually from 2015, according to Lead Stories.
A Google spokesman told CNN Business about policy changes in recent years for Google and its YouTube video platform, which are designed to display information from authorized sources at the top of the search results. Like Facebook, the company does not completely eliminate false claims from its platforms.
On Twitter, users looking for "coronavirus" in the US UU. and other countries, including Hong Kong, Brazil and Australia, are first asked to visit official channels of information about the virus. In the United States, Twitter directs users to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, under a bold headline that says: "Know the facts."
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A Twitter spokesman told CNN Business on Tuesday that the company has not seen a coordinated increase in disinformation related to the coronavirus. In a blog post on Tuesday, the company said it had seen more than 15 million tweets about the coronavirus in four weeks.
While American tech companies have been in the spotlight on disinformation problems in the past, TikTok, an application owned by a Chinese company, is also analyzing how it handles the wrong information about the coronavirus.
US liberal monitoring group Media Matters for America published an investigation on Tuesday showing the dissemination of erroneous information about the coronavirus on TikTok, a video platform that is becoming increasingly popular in the US. UU. and has been subject to scrutiny by US lawmakers because their owners are from China.
"Our Community Guidelines do not allow misinformation that may cause harm to our community or the general public," a TikTok spokesman said in a statement provided to CNN Business on Wednesday. "While we encourage our users to have respectful conversations on the topics that interest them, we eliminate deliberate attempts to misrepresent authoritative news sources."
coronavirus