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Coronavirus in Moray: Fake news about Covid-19


By Alistair Whitfield

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The public is being urged to report false and misleading information on social media about the coronavirus.

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It follows an investigation which found more than 46,000 Twitter posts a day directing people to coronavirus misinformation.

One article about a doctor who claimed to cure people with an anti-malarial drug and zinc was among the top five most shared articles on Covid-19 in the UK last week.

A series of fraudulent posts with doctored screenshots of an official government website have also appeared online offering tax refunds.

The investigation was conducted by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) sub-committee on online harms and disinformation.

The committee’s intervention comes after the DCMS announced it was setting up a new unit to tackle fake news around the coronavirus on social media platforms.

Ian Murray, executive director of the Society of Editors, said the calling out of fake news and disinformation regarding the Covid-19 crisis on social media was important.

However, Murray warned there were dangers in taking too draconian steps to try and prevent the spread of misinformation during this time.

He said: "We must be careful that in an attempt to suppress misinformation, rumour and speculation, that the digital platform providers are not backed into a corner where they take too broad an approach to removing or preventing false information.

"We do not want genuine news being suppressed by algorithms created in haste to trawl the net removing poorly identified content.

"The best method of combating false information and fake news is to shout-out and debunk such examples and to urge the public to rely on the mainstream media which is founded on well researched, edited, fact-based content."

As part of its Campaign for Real News, the Society of Editors has previously warned the public should not consider social media platforms as accurate sources of news on coronavirus.

The DCMS sub-committee has said that examples sent in by members of the public will be considered as evidence to be presented to the Government and to social media companies.

The DCMS committee chairman Julian Knight MP said: "The deliberate spreading of false information about COVID-19 could have serious consequences.

"Much of this is happening on social media through private channels, putting the onus on friends and family to identify whether the information they are seeing is misleading.

"There have been some shocking examples in recent weeks and we want people to send us what they’ve come across.

"We will call in social media companies as soon as the House returns to explain what they’re doing to deal with harmful content like this to help give people the reassurances they need at this difficult time.

"Tech giants who allow this to proliferate on their platforms are morally responsible for tackling disinformation and should face penalties if they don’t."

The DCMS is running the Don’t Feed The Beast campaign to give the public five easy steps to follow to identify whether information about Coronavirus may be misleading:

  1. Source - make sure information comes from a trusted source
  2. Headline - always read beyond the headline
  3. Analyse - check the facts
  4. Retouched - does the image or video look as though it has been doctored?
  5. Error - look out for bad grammar and spelling

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