[alyas]

The new coronavirus is the first global pandemic to unfold on social media, said Karen Hao and Tanya Basu in the MIT Technology Review, and it has not gone well. Earlier this month, the World Health Organization called the virus an “infodemic” because of the “overabundance of information—some accurate and some not.” Social media has helped some journalists get “a more accurate picture of the situation” inside China than state media has provided. And several Chinese doctors used the internet “to raise alarms about the severity of the situation,” before being swiftly censored by Beijing. Unfortunately, the rapid spread of misinformation also “sets the coronavirus apart from previous viral outbreaks,” such as SARS in 2003. WHO has been working with Facebook, Twitter, and China’s Tencent and TikTok apps to staunch the flood of fake posts, including claims that Shanghai has been “shut down” and that the virus can be cured by cannabis. But they are fighting against an “avalanche of content.”
source : http://www.vikilix.com/2020/02/26/disin ... -epidemic/