'I know educated people that are heeding inaccurate medical advice they have seen shared on social media and in private messages. Screens are not only useful to antitrust agencies they can also be powerful tools for plaintiffs and defendants in antitrust cases. 'From my own experience, yes I do think this has an impact,' she said. Lisa-Maria Neudert, a researcher at Oxford University's Project on Computational Propaganda, said such misinformation could hamper efforts to control the spread of the virus. WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart said the platform had also donated $1 million to factchecking organizations 'to support their life-saving work to debunk rumors.'ĭespite the moves and official warnings, viral messages touting conspiracy theories and phoney medical advice have continued to spread online, raising alarm about the supposed dangers of infection from 5G phone masts or eating ice cream. agencies to launch a service for sharing official health guidance about coronavirus. WhatsApp, which has over 2 billion users worldwide, said on Wednesday it had partnered with the WHO and other U.N. WhatsApp has previously restricted the number of people to whom users can forward messages after viral rumors on its platform triggered a wave of mass beatings and deaths in India in 2018. 'People can quickly send and resend images, text and voice notes, and it all happens in private, making it really, really difficult to counteract those claims.' 'I think there's a sense of security and community that exists in these group chats that gives anything shared there a mark of authenticity,' said Anna-Sophie Harling, head of Europe for the U.S.-based misinformation monitoring center NewsGuard. Twitter followed social media competitor Facebook on Wednesday in barring users from posting misleading information about the coronavirus, including denials of expert guidance and encouragement of fake treatments.īut the rapid spread of one such message in the Netherlands shows the challenges faced by private chat platforms, such as text messages or Facebook-owned WhatsApp, where content is harder to police and often perceived as coming from a trusted source when shared by friends and family. The coronavirus crisis, which has killed almost 9,000 people worldwide and threatened economic misery for millions more, has been accompanied by what the World Health Organization (WHO) has called an 'infodemic' of misinformation.

'I shared it because it came from a trusted source. There are more than 30 different species and dozens of subspecies of lemurs, ranging in size from the 1 ounce. Lemurs are woolly-furred, long-tailed, arboreal animals that are found only on the island of Madagascar off the Eastern coast of Africa. But I trust my mum very much,' 35-year-old told Tim van Caubergh told Reuters. One of the coolest lemur facts is that they can easily jump 6 times their body length. 'I probably wouldn't have paid any attention to this if I'd seen it from a stranger on Facebook.

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