It has been nearly a month since a new strain of the Coruna virus appeared in a province
Wuhan of China, which spanned more than twenty countries. In the aftermath of his appearance, panic spread on social media around the world.

As people search the Internet for information about an outbreak of the Coruna virus - which the World Health Organization has designated a global health emergency - they face a wide range of misleading, potentially dangerous information.

They were working on promoting real content about the disease, but they found misleading information published that offends their platforms, officials in charge of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube told Recode, a technology specialist.

The efforts of these communication platforms have not succeeded in stopping the spread of misinformation and deceptive videos that garnered thousands of likes and shares.

In this article we show the most widespread:

1- China makes a biological weapon
It is not clear where this new strain of the Corona virus originated, yet social media is promoting many theories suggesting that the virus outbreak may be linked to biological weapons research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research institute that includes the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory.

"It is believed that the Wuhan Institute of Virology is the place where the disease originated," says a Facebook post, which has been shared more than 4,000 times.

This idea is based, in part, on the comments of a controversial former Israeli officer in his articles that he shared with the "Washington Times", and his previous articles hinted that former US President Barack Obama may be a Muslim.

Despite the shock of biological laboratory theory, experts have told "The Washington Post" that there is no evidence to support these claims.

2- Smuggling the virus
Social media posts say the new Coronavirus, found in Wuhan, has been smuggled from a laboratory in Canada as part of China's secret pursuit of a biological weapon, a theory refuted by Politifact.

"Spies stole the Coronavirus from Canada and sent it to Wuhan for use as a weapon to kill foreign enemies," said a tweet at the expense of Republican Party official Solomon Yue - who has more than 100,000 followers.

#coronavirus is stolen from Canada by🇨🇳espionage & sent to Wuhan to be weaponized to kill foreign enemies. Now the deadly weaponized virus kills 80 Chinese & no foreigners & becomes Emperor Shithole's Chernobyl! https://t.co/aOyIbvmC39

- Solomon Yue (@SolomonYue) January 27, 2020

3- The vaccine already exists
There is another common theory about the existence of a vaccine for the new corona virus, and some even indicate that the vaccine has already been patented, and although no vaccine has yet been developed for this disease, a recent post on Facebook alleges that the corona virus was "prepared" for profit. From selling vaccines.

The publication includes video footage of the alleged new patent. In this case, and because Facebook's factual auditors verified the post and ascertained its falsity, the attempt to share the post made Facebook issue a warning saying that the independent fact-checkers said that this post contained incorrect information.

4- The virus will kill 65 million
In October 2019, the Johns Hopkins Research Center in the United States conducted a "test" aimed at modeling the global response to a potential pandemic, and many people online misunderstood the study, and mistakenly linked its forecasts to the potential death toll of a virus outbreak similar to what we are currently seeing with Corona Virus.

There are many tweets - including one that still has more than 140,000 likes - claiming that scientists predicted that the Coruna virus would kill 65 million people.

"We designed a model for the fictitious Corona virus epidemic, but we have clearly stated that it was not a prediction," the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security said in a statement, adding, "We do not expect now that the Coruna virus will kill 65 million people."

The Johns Hopkins Research Center in the United States has denied the authenticity of a attributed tweet that says the virus will kill 65 million people (websites)

5- 100 thousand cases
While more than 17,000 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed, a public health expert claimed in a statement to The Guardian newspaper that "tens of thousands of people are infected," but this number has not been confirmed.

However, many popular posts on social media platforms provide inaccurate statistics that will fuel feelings of fear and panic, and these publications attribute numbers to medical workers in Wuhan, the primary focus of the epidemic.

For example, one YouTube video that garners about eighty thousand views shows a person identified as a nurse, and says that up to 90,000 people have the disease in China alone. And on Twitter, too, an account that classifies a news store posts an audio clip claiming 100,000 people are infected with the virus.

It is worth noting that there are legitimate doubts about whether the Chinese government has been accurately reporting the impact of the virus, and for this reason the exact number of people infected with coronavirus remains unknown.

A video on YouTube that got about eighty thousand views of a nurse in Wuhan claiming that there are ninety thousand injured (communication sites)

6- Building a hospital overnight
Two government media outlets - Global Times and People's Daily - circulated a picture of a newly built building and claimed it was a hospital in Wuhan built in only 16 hours, but the picture is in fact a residential building.

How do technology platforms respond?
Social media companies have told Recode that they are working to reduce the impact of erroneous information about Corona virus in one way or another, to varying degrees.

And Twitter said - in a statement - there have been more than 15 million tweets about Corona virus in the past four weeks. The company added that it had not detected any "coordinated attempts to spread misinformation about this issue."

But this does not mean that there is no wrong information about Corona virus on Twitter, and the Twitter response simply indicates that the company has not found any evidence of deliberate misinformation campaigns by a party, such as a country or political group.

But the situation is more complicated with Facebook, where external auditors participate in the process of checking information on the platform.

A Facebook spokesperson, "Likud", stated that the platform works to reduce the distribution of posts that are classified as false, and to set alerts on wrong posts.

On Thursday, Facebook announced that it would take additional measures against erroneous information related to the Corona virus, including removing the wrong content that was detected by health authorities.

YouTube relies on its own version of checks, as the video platform displays short previews of text news articles about Corona virus in search results.

If you search for "Corona virus" on YouTube, for example, it will refer you to a documented article, such as an article in the New York Times about Corona Wuhan.

YouTube told Ricod.com that false information generally does not violate the rules of the statute unless it involves hate speech, harassment, deception, or incitement to violence.

Despite these efforts, it seems impossible for these platforms to remove every misleading post on Corona virus as soon as it is published.

As is the case with any type of misinformation, it is a game that never ends, but the continued spread of misinformation about the spread of the disease - after one month has passed - shows how important it is to contain the spread of misinformation, especially with its serious consequences.