The world is in the grip of two major outbreaks. The first is Covid-19, the novel coronavirus that originated in Wuhan, China, and has so far infected more than 93,000 people. The second is the wave of misinformation that has followed in its wake.
This second outbreak – which includes rumours about bat soup, bioweapons and 5G masts; mindfulness, garlic cloves and Vitamin C injections – has led the World Health Organisation (WHO) to create a new term to refer to the phenomenon: an “infodemic”.
This fake news has spread through “cure” books on Amazon, WhatsApp viral texts, and even the mainstream media. Now, according to data taken from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks the diffusion of viral stories, a small army of Facebook fringe groups are following suit and pivoting to a new hot topic: coronavirus misinformation.
The group Stop 5G U.K, created to air concerns about 5G, is responsible for many of these rumours. CrowdTangle shows it is the fourth ranking group in coronavirus posts over the last week – with 89 posts and 4,695 reactions.
Claims coming out of this group vary from China trialling vitamin c therapy as a Covid-19 cure and that the whole outbreak is a cover story and the deaths are really caused by 5G.
This fake news has spread through “cure” books on Amazon, WhatsApp viral texts, and even the mainstream media. Now, according to data taken from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks the diffusion of viral stories, a small army of Facebook fringe groups are following suit and pivoting to a new hot topic: coronavirus misinformation.
This fake news has spread through “cure” books on Amazon, WhatsApp viral texts, and even the mainstream media. Now, according to data taken from CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool that tracks the diffusion of viral stories, a small army of Facebook fringe groups are following suit and pivoting to a new hot topic: coronavirus misinformation.
The group Stop 5G U.K, created to air concerns about 5G, is responsible for many of these rumours. CrowdTangle shows it is the fourth ranking group in coronavirus posts over the last week – with 89 posts and 4,695 reactions.
Claims coming out of this group vary from China trialling vitamin c therapy as a Covid-19 cure and that the whole outbreak is a cover story and the deaths are really caused by 5G.
Other Facebook groups keen on coronavirus conspiracies include “We Support Jeremy Corbyn”, “I’M A BREXITEER” and the “Jacob Rees-Mogg Appreciation Group”, with hundreds of posts and tens of thousands of reactions. These posts incorporate political conspiracies – for instance, one post on the “We Support Jeremy Corbyn Facebook” group, states that “people have bugs like this all the time, the media are basically covering up the economic global crash which is coming and also the Brexit shit show.”
This post received 50 reactions and 126 comments, four times more than an average post on the
group.
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