WhatsApp spread a third of the hoaxes about Covid during the first wave

The Covid pandemic has had a weapon that has allowed it to multiply its expansion and virulence.

, nor the use of a mask, nor hand washing have served against her.

The false information during the first three months after the declaration of the State of Alarm was a good breeding ground for SARS-CoV-2 to gain strength.

These (mis)information elevated hydroxychloroquine to the altars of anticovid remedies,

, spread that the virus was manufactured and released by China, that its expansion was connected to 5G technology, or that

What kind of lies or half -

truths have been impacted?

What dissemination channels used these lies?

What has been the role of the researcher and scientist in the dissemination of these hoaxes?

These are some of the questions that answered the research project RRSSalud in which involved a multidisciplinary group of experts from the University of Navarra, led by

, supported by the Program Aid Equipment Scientific research BBVA Foundation, whose recent results have been published in

.

The investigation focused on the first three months after the declaration of the State of Alarm, on March 14, 2020, in Spain.

"At the end canards handle 533 [who used the context of the pandemic for broadcast] and on that corpus analyze their morphology, platform, text, image, sound ..."

The research data dismantles several fallacies.

The first clear point is that, in those first three months, most of the lies had no political or health management of the pandemic (33%), contrary to what was a widespread impression, content

, who has also been involved in this project.

"

, government, pandemic management issues and it is true that there were quite a few, but above were the hoaxes that were linked to Science and issues more related to the health: treatments...", says Erviti.

And it is that

of all the false information disseminated in that period.

Another fact that surprised many participants of the study is that WhatsApp was the most used for the dissemination of these disinformations (24.77%) platform, followed by Twitter (11.93%) and

).

And in a conclusive and general way, messaging platforms and social networks were the main ways of spreading and reaching these lies.

The microbiologist Ignacio López-Goñi,

who has participated in this research, acknowledges: "I never would have thought that WhatsApp would be the transmission channel for the largest number of hoaxes. WhatsApp is a messaging service and we use it normally to communicate with family, friends and for very specific things".

The laboratory as the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the most widespread hoax

Within this false scientific information, the most recurrent theme had to do

), with medical treatments (25%) and with vaccines (15%).

The researchers point out as "one of the main sources of misinformation about the origin of the coronavirus" the dissemination of unreviewed research (

) published in the specialized journal

, on January 31, 2020.

The article suggested that the new SARS-CoV-2 virus was manufactured combination of

.

The preliminary investigation was dropped after three days of its publication, following errors discovered in bioinformatic analysis and interpretation.

But the damage was done.

and promoted the false notion that SARS-CoV-2 was genetically engineered in a laboratory," the research points out.

The dominant lobe was deception (62%), which was simply false information;

followed by

where the data were located in a false context and, thirdly, exaggeration (14%).

Attribution to foreign scientific sources

Salaverría explains a procedure "that drew attention and was repeated in several hoaxes" and that "was to attribute the origin of scientific discovery course to counteract the virus in a foreign research center."

That is to say,

or Japan and some name of a doctor or department was put. In some cases they invented it, but they counted on the fact that the media in Spain would hardly contact the institution abroad to verify the investigation. "

In short, the communication professor explains that "there was this distance from the specialized source, so that when one read the news one had the feeling that

Hoaxes also they simulated the behavior of the virus in its expansion regardless of frontiers

.

"We have seen that in some areas a certain misinformation was contagious and, after a while, this contagion reached elsewhere and this has happened quite often ,

" says Salaverría.

The investigation also revealed that the sources of this misinformation were real, that is, it

, compared to 30% of those that had an anonymous origin.

In 24% the source had been falsified and in 4.2% it was fictitious.

Statements by Joan Ramon Laporte at the Health Commission.EM

Within three non - anonymous sources,

This category was dominated by health professionals (44.12%), researchers (29.41%) and international scientific organizations (17.65%).

In addition, health and scientific sources dominated three of the four types of hoaxes

(hoax, decontextualization, exaggeration), ahead of government sources, and most of these hoaxes were based on deception.

For example, a hoax published on May 7, 2020 claimed that

and falsely attributed the claim to Chinese ophthalmologist Li Wenliang, who warned about the coronavirus outbreak and ended up dying from the disease. .

A good example of a scientific hoax -which cites the research- based on decontextualization is the one published on March 20, 2020, which included false information about the effects of the coronavirus, and falsely attributed these statements to the Spanish doctor

from

.

In this case, Dr. Caubet acknowledged that he shared the message through social networks, although he did not write it.

On the other hand, government sources were cited more frequently in

hoaxes than in the hoaxes category.

Health and scientific sources contributed the most to hype hoaxes, ahead of companies and members of the public.

The example illustrates this canard is refuted information by the

Newtral on March 25, 2020, stating that t

That misinformation was attributed to

, who said that based on preliminary data from a study, it might be helpful to recommend people get as much sunlight exposure as possible.

However, they never claimed that sunbathing could prevent infection.

Do scientists also spread hoaxes?

"Indeed, in the work we have found that one of the main sources of these hoaxes was the researchers themselves. We have identified a series of problems in the production processes of Science and communication of Science, which can degenerate into disinformation. In the study we basically identified

hasty science, decontextualized science, misinterpreted science and falsification without a scientific basis," explains Salavarría.

Faced with the same question,

reasons that during these years of the pandemic "we have experienced a

science

And it is that, as the researcher explains, "before the pandemic, the news about Science was given at the end of the result:

... Whatever it was. But

The "very clear" if this

of Science "has been given with vaccines, according to López-Goñi." We have seen how vaccines are made, how vaccines are evaluated.

And it

happens that science takes time.

In science we are used to the rectifications, but pandemic has not been time to make those corrections.

They have been published

, preprints, which are not reviewed.

This was done because it could not wait a year and a half after its publication, but sometimes,

Here more data and conclusions of the investigation

dropdown

The procedure used to identify research canards as unquestionable was to look at the canards that had been previously detected by verification platforms (

): Efeverifica, Maldita.es and Newtral.

"These are the three platforms that in 2020 had the seal of the

, which gives the seals of quality, recognition of the verification procedure.

The study identified four fundamental categories of problems or types of hoaxes,

1)

That is, when scientists seek to obtain results quickly and this speed leads to sacrificing a series of methodological protocols to guarantee that the results are valid.

2) Science decontextualized

.

When you take a scientific content from a media and extrapolated.

For example, research has been done only in mice or in a very small number of people and is advertised as the discovery of the origin of this or that disease or this or that remedy.

3) Misunderstood science

, which has to do with the difficulty or lack of researchers to be able to explain things well, but also due to the lack of training on the part of journalists to understand scientific aspects with the necessary precision.

Here there is a double responsibility of both scientists and journalists.

4)

, which is the supreme disinformation, when you assert something and feignest.

I attribute some foreign research center, which does not even exist and that kind of misinformation we have also found during the pandemic.

People without any scruples who invented absolutely everything.

Recipes for the next hoax pandemic

If this pandemic is going to be followed by others, as several scientists have pointed out, we should be prepared so that,

, they lie to us less.

How can a society prepare for the next pandemic of hoaxes in Science?

The three researchers of this work that we have interviewed have answered the question.

López-Goñi's response:

"Society's scientific training should be increased, because that way it will be less manipulable. We will be able to control hoaxes better as we increase the scientific and technical level of society with more training in these areas. Because everything this will happen again.

, because we live in a global and globalized world. What we have learned is that problems are transmitted at such a speed that they are already global problems. They are not problems of one community or of a group".

Response Ramón Salaverría: .

"As responsible behavior recommended in relation to viruses, it can be said regarding misinformation must be properly select the sources from which one gets the information.

Those sources. reliable be official sources, expert researchers. in

addition, confirm and verify information. Especially when information surprising or sensitive, because we have given notice that sometimes hoaxes are worth content that generate any impact emotional".

Response from María del Carmen Erviti:

"Here the main thing, as in many other issues, is training and education. This pandemic has given a lot of scientific production and this knowledge that has been generated in these years, also in misinformation, must be studied and draw conclusions from them to apply them.

age. Equip us with weapons so that we can know what our own cognitive biases are, to how we can identify some of that information that is going to reach us and is not credible."

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