Photo:
MIRROR
I have seen myself how quickly a serious message can turn into disinformation via the small detour Facebook, which leads thousands of people astray.
This is how it happened: Last year I asked myself whether German doctors had actually been prescribing more hydroxychloroquine.
The aging malaria drug was praised against the corona virus by such respected medical advisors as US President Donald J. Trump or Brazil’s head of state Jair Bolsonaro and even taken by them.
There was a brief debate among experts as to whether it could be used for Covid 19 diseases (everyone now agrees: no).
It was never approved for the treatment of Covid-19 in the European Union.
And yet it was prescribed en masse by German doctors, as shown by figures from the AOK's Scientific Service prepared for SPIEGEL.
My article about it appeared and all kinds of media picked up the research.
So far, so normal.
But on Facebook the news tipped into the world of lies.
Two French websites claimed that we had reported that "Germany has four times fewer deaths from Covid than France because doctors prescribed massive amounts of hydroxychloroquine."
The claim was shared thousands of times on the social network, much commented on and manifested itself there as a kind of alternative truth.
The background is an emotional argument about the French physician Didier Raoult.
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Malaria drug hydroxychloroquine
Photo:
Kevin E. Schmidt / dpa
He propagated the use of the malaria drug and found numerous supporters of his theses on the treatment of Covid-19 in France.
Even the special credibility of the SPIEGEL was brought up as an argument in the false report, which then reads roughly as follows: “And the SPIEGEL is not a junk sheet as we know it from the French press.
It is a serious, investigative magazine and the most influential and most widely read weekly newspaper in Germany. «What sounds honorable does not change the fact that I have never claimed that fewer people died in Germany because of the use of hydroxychloroquine.
Rather, the text does not deal with this connection at all;
rather, I tried to show by facts that physicians apparently had prescribed an inadequately tested therapy for their patients.
The French daily newspaper »Liberation« - commissioned by Facebook to check the facts of certain postings in France - has identified the controversial posts for what they are: inventions.
Her summary: "Wrong, the German magazine never wrote that."
But until the »Liberation« published its article, countless people were likely to have read, shared and commented on the false claim for months.
I received a lot of e-mails which basically said what I had uncovered and why politicians had not reacted long ago.
Sadly, I think more people believe the hoax on Facebook than the fact check reached readers.
After all: some readers have apparently reported the postings with the inventions on Facebook, so the colleagues from »Liberation« were able to come into play and correct the matter.
But that the truth is slower than the lie is unfortunately a well-known problem of fact checkers.
Strange digital world: Wikipedia and linear television
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Wikipedia statistics
Photo: Wikipedia
When it comes to TV viewers, people like to speak of the »second screen« in the language of advertisers.
This means that people are surfing the Internet on their mobile phones or tablets while they are watching TV.
A Wikipedia statistic has impressively shown which websites they seem to be actually calling.
On January 12th
started the third season of the well-made series »Charité« with a double episode.
A little later, the list of the most popular articles on Wikipedia was at the top: Charité, Charité, Eiserne Lunge, Otto Prokop, Ingeborg Rapoport, Poliomyelitis.
In addition to an entry about the series and the clinic, it is about the most important medical device of the season, two of the historical characters around whom the episodes revolve, and a disease that a child suffers from in the plot.
I dare to predict that tomorrow, Tuesday, the following entries will be among the most read: the biography of the gynecologist Helmut Kraatz and the article about the bismuth.
At 8.15 p.m., two more episodes of »Charité« will be broadcast.
And if you want, you can view them all beforehand in the ARD media library.
External links: three tips from other media
"CRISPR Test Uses Cell Phone Camera to Detect SARS-CoV-2" (English, one minute's reading)
A reliable test result for the novel coronavirus within 30 minutes and without expensive laboratory equipment, instead using a smartphone?
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have come up with something.
»Zoox: This is Amazon's Robotaxi« (German, two minutes to read)
An Amazon subsidiary has presented an e-vehicle that can move autonomously using six sensors on the roof even in bad weather.
»Snapchat Wants You to Post.
They're Willing to Pay Millions "(English, 5 minutes to read)
This is how teenagers become millionaires in one fell swoop: In order to make a new function that was copied from TikTok better known, Snapchat gives users more than a million dollars every day, who disseminate particularly successful content.
The "New York Times" classifies that.
Enjoy today's World Snowman Day (#WDOSM)!
Your Martin U. Müller