Fake News and the Coronavirus

BC author, Crawford Kilian, publishes the excellent H5N1 blog, which despite its dated title, is my goto source for news about disease outbreaks. He also publishes occasional articles on the news site, The Tyee, such as this one about fake news about the coronavirus outbreak, which seems to be spreading faster than the disease itself.

A couple of days ago, searching for coronavirus news, I found a story claiming that China’s coronavirus death toll as of Feb. 1 was somewhere around 25,000, out of 150,000 cases. The official figures at that point were 304 deaths out of 14,380 cases. The story was on a site called CCN.com, reporting mostly on digital currencies and sports with a dash of regular news. (CCN stories have appeared on the main page of the Google News aggregator, which says something about the credibility of either CCN or Google’s algorithms, as we shall see.)

CCN based its report on one in the English-language newspaper Taiwan News. The Taiwanese story said that daily coronavirus updates on the Chinese social media site Tencent had several times posted high figures that suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by much lower ones. Unidentified “netizens” had not only noticed the changes but had had the presence of mind to do a screengrab of one on Feb. 1.

Well, it was exciting and scary, but the report had some very dubious assumptions. I started thinking like a disaster novelist, pitching a thriller about a pandemic breaking out, to a serious editor who can see the holes in any plot.