Coronavirus Fake News

China Coronavirus

When life gets scary, it's important to think twice about information.


The outbreak of the coronavirus is a good example. As the numbers of people affected and dying grows daily, the amount of misinformation surrounding the outbreak expands globally. Some of the information is considered misleading and unhealthy.

News reports have begun to circulate stories about fake news and the coronavirus. This presents a ripe opportunity to use information fluency to identify fake news claims.

Many people are attracted to a possible solution known as Master Mineral Solution (aka Miracle Mineral Solution or MMS). Here's a sample copied from the testimonial page:

I was teaching a class and all of the sudden, I got a head cold ... This rushed on me like a freight train! I was miserable until evening, then I thought I would take a mega-dose of CDS that I had in the fridge. I just poared some in a glass, added some water to it, and down the hatch! I guess now, it was equal to a 6 drop dose of MMS. Within, say, 2 or 3 minutes, the "cold" left like the wind blowing a raincloud away. Clear as a bell!

Before you go online to place an order--this is also touted as a cure for coronavirus--do some fact checking. 

Try an investigative query like Miracle Mineral Solution coronavirus. Then examine the results:

• Are they positive or negative?
• Who is the publisher?

A summary of the results for the first ten results from this search in Google shows that none of the sources have positive things to say about MMS, using words like "bleach," "QANON," "conspiracy theory," "dangerous," "toxic," "acute liver failure," "vomiting" and more. The sources include rollingstone.com, thedailybeast.com, salon.com, vice.com, businessinsider.com, nypost.com, nymag.com, armstrongmywire.com and inews.co.uk.  These aren't necessarily considered authorities on health issues. But the preponderance of negativity regarding MMS raises a red flag.

Now, if we had confirmation of such claims from a recognized authority, that might convince us not to try MMS. So another query is tried, taking one of the keywords commonly found in the first results: medical authority coronavirus bleach.

The first result includes this information in the snippet (abstract): "But medical authorities, including the US Food and Drugs Administration, have ..."  This invites further reading. Browsing the article, clicking links on the FDA-related information, leads to this page on the fda site: 

FDA warns consumers about the dangerous and potentially life threatening side effects of Miracle Mineral Solution

Here is another Red Flag. If you have students, see what other medical authorities they can find.

Backlinks

Backlinks, or incoming links or "links to" are links to a URL found on other URLs.  They may be internal links, such as 21cif.com/ found on 21cif.com/tutorials/ or external, as in the case of 21cif.com found on coolhub.imsa.edu.


External backlinks may be valuable in researching the credibility of a site.  Backlinks help to answer questions like, Who links to 21cif.com? Why? Do they have any authority?


For years, a good way to find backlinks to a page was to use the link: operator  (e.g., the query:  lilnk:21cif.com). Search engines have made changes to link: so that fewer results are obtained. 
Yahoo.com did away with link: altogether.  Google is probably still the best choice, but they return only a fraction of what they once did.


This is where specialized search engines and databases comes in handy. 


Open Site Explorer (http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/) provides more complete backlink results than Google. It's a free service and easy to use. Results can be filtered to eliminate all the internal links.


Using a backlink checker is a step in the investigative search process. But just knowing how many backlinks there are isn't enough. Evaluating the referential credibility of a link target requires looking at the (representative) sites to see if they have authority and why they are a backlink.  Who would you expect to backlink to 21cif.com if it is a reputable site?


Who do you find?

Challenge Revisited: Pump Price

Back in 2005, I first posted the Pump Price Challenge.  I had to update it a few times due to inflation and additional sites that people were finding.

Now in 2011, the question could be: How much did people pay for gas at the pump in 1920? How much would that be in 2011 dollars?

The value of the dollar keeps changing due to global economics and inflation so this is definitely a moving target.

The challenge is to find an authoritative site (think: who is an authority on inflation?) so you can convert the price of a gallon of gas in 1920 into the most current dollar information.

This isn't a particularly hard search, but it requires finding a site that is regularly refreshed.

Challenge One: Find an authoritative site where information on inflation is regularly updated.
Challenge Two: use that to determine what a gallon of gas in 1920 costs today.
Challenge Three: use the most current information to determine what a gallon of gas purchased in 1981 would cost in 2011 dollars. (Yikes!)

I found a good site, but there could be more. I'll consider other alternatives for redesigning the pump challenge.

Bias, Power and Authority

By itself, bias is unremarkable. It's a part of being human. Bias doesn't always amount to much, especially if no one pays attention.

Bias with power is a different matter. Without power, Anders Behring Breivik's biases may have come to nothing. But when coupled with power, they proved to be devastating.

Posing as a meaningful authority, Breivik directed his victims to a horrible end. There was no need to object, until he started shooting.

Bias online has some similarities. Most of the time, bias in blogs and articles and images has no meaningful impact on the reader. Biased information with power attracts attention. More accurately, it could be said that individuals empower the information to which they attend. That's when biased information can lead to problems.

For online readers, the question that must be asked is: who is the authority?  In Breivik's case, he was posing as an official and little could be done to investigate his credibility on the spot. Online information is different in that regard. It can and should be investigated. Otherwise you may never know if you are opening yourself to bias that has real, assumed or faked authority. 

It's unfortunate that something bad has to happen to make one more cautious. It happened on a large scale after 9-11 and now security measures will increase in Norway. After you fall prey to deception or bias online, you tend to become more skeptical.  Hence, the need for investigation.

Try this. Here's a challenge that's based on a medical theme. It's not hard to find bias against alternative medicine. But should you be skeptical of these views? Does the author have the appropriate authority? How do you know?  These are good questions for students to grapple with.

Using Google, locate a site with medical authority that is skeptical of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).  Post your answers here.