How WeChat and Weibo fight coronavirus fake news

Rampant rumors about the novel coronavirus spread on Chinese social media, causing panic

Reading Time:4 minutes

The coronavirus has killed more than 400 people in China, surpassing the death toll from Sars in 2003. (Picture: AFP)

Published: 5:00am, 5 Feb 2020Updated: 5:57pm, 14 Feb 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

It should have been a time of celebration, but the coronavirus turned my Chinese New Year holiday into one of suspicion and fear. Wild rumours spread quickly on WeChat and Weibo, promising solutions to keep people safe from the mysterious threat.

Sure, some fake news is easy to spot: I won’t be dropping sesame oil into my nostrils any time soon. But others aren’t so clear-cut, and this flood of misinformation is testing our ability to separate the real from the fake – and challenging platforms to stop it at the source.

“There’s a high amount of information saturation, with some causing a lot of panic,” said Zhu Wei, professor of communications law at the China University of Political Science and Law.

Rumours that might cause panic include alleged city lockdowns and patients escaping from hospitals. Some can be harmful to people’s health, like rumours that strong alcoholic drinks and smoking can prevent people from contracting the virus. Claims about cats and dogs being able to spread the coronavirus have even reportedly led to people throwing their pets from tower blocks.

A more benign and widely believed rumour was that popular CCTV news anchor Bai Yansong was going to interview the renowned Chinese epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan. Zhong is a key figure who led China’s response to the 2003 Sars outbreak and was the first to publicly confirm that coronavirus can spread through human-to-human transmission.

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