Fact Checking the Infodemic

It's almost impossible to keep up with current news on the COVID-19 pandemic, and even harder to separate the real news from the fake. For example, I got caught by a post on Facebook a couple of weeks ago saying that Walmart was going to close its stores and move to curbside pickup only. I don't know what the original source of that "news" was, but I should have checked into it deeper before reposting it.

Now Magazine has assembled a list of sites that you can use to the veracity of news related to the pandemic. I've posted before about fact-checking sites, but these are specific to the pandemic.

When even world leaders like U.S. president Donald Trump and Brazil's president Jair Bolsonaro are spreading false information (or in Trump's favourite parlance, fake news), it can be hard to know which information to trust. The best advice is to check the source of your information, prioritizing the veracity of public health agencies, governmental bodies and trusted media sources over unsourced social media posts, YouTube videos and self-publishing platforms like Medium. It also helps to engage in lateral reading, verifying a piece of information across various sources or reports.

But practising media literacy is almost a job in and of itself. That's why public health agencies, journalism organizations (like Journalists For Human Rights, which is offering free misinformation workshops for people in media), universities and tech companies have all invested in free, publicly available fact-checking tools. We've gathered five of them and given you a sample of their debunked coronavirus claims. 

Update: Here's another site, the COVID-19 Misinformation Portal, created by researchers at Ryerson University in Toronto.