Baghdad: Browse through Arabic-language social media pages and you could walk away thinking COVID-19 is an American hoax, isn’t deadly and can be swiftly cured with a garlic clove.
Arab pages on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are full of news about the new coronavirus, from benign inaccuracies to full-throat conspiracy theories.
As the government paints to stop the spread of the new coronavirus, activists across the Middle East are mobilizing to fight Arab “infodemia” that are as harmful as the infection itself.
“We are solving the news and saving lives,” Baher Jassem, an Iraqi activist from the Tech four Peace collective, who moved from his four-year crusade against false political and economic news to COVID-19, said.
Every few hours, the collective pages of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter post screenshots of news about the virus, accusations of new cures for celebrity deaths due to illness or a reassuring wave of cures.
The photos are marked with a red stamp indicating “false message” with a correction and links to more accurate information. Your accounts are successful in more than one million subscribers.
“We don’t just need to reveal lies. We need to spread the word about the coronavirus, the right way to protect itself, the remedies that are circulating,” Jassem told the AFP.
The correction crusade may not have arrived before: the region is experiencing a much-feared peak of COVID-19.
The increase in the case rate in Iraq rose to more than 2,000 until the end of June, or only about 3,000 per day this month.
Lebanon, Oman and Algeria experienced peaks in new instances in mid-July, while Saudi Arabia and Jordan experienced peaks last June, but appear to be stabilizing.
Doctors in Iraq blame online misinformation: their patients have insisted coronavirus is an American conspiracy, or people are actually dying from a sarin gas attack, or that Iraq’s blistering heat would halt the virus’s spread.
Medics say such false information could make people less likely to wear masks in public, abide by social distancing or wash their hands regularly.
Misinformation about COVID-19 has been spreading in various languages since the pandemic’s early days, but the proliferation in Arabic is particularly dangerous because of the lack of quality reporting, activists told AFP.
Reporters Without Borders pointed to the tightening of the authorities on media in the Middle East in 2020, i.e. on COVID-19 data.
As a result, activists said, news consumers are suspicious of the information they find in traditional outlets and more likely to entertain conspiracy theories.
“Media education is non-existent. Iraqis can go through Facebook and Twitter, but they can actually see another 50 resources and differentiate what is done and what is fiction,” said Faisal Al Mutar, an Iraqi activist founded in the United States and founder. ideas beyond borders.
IBB has partnered with Wikipedia to translate more than 250 pages detailing the origins of COVID-19 and spreading them in Arabic.
This is not a simple task given the diversity of Arabic dialects, said volunteer translator Issam Fawwaz in Tripoli, northern Lebanon.
“The scientific terms aren’t standardised. A term used in Syria, Lebanon or Jordan is totally different from Egypt or Morocco,” while some English terms have no Arabic equivalents, 33-year-old Fawwaz told AFP.
But conviction in the impact of his work has kept him going.
“This is personal for me. I was one of those people that used to believe fake news, but I was lucky to have people who pushed me to use my brain,” he said.
“One person persuaded by a fake news story can spark a calamity in his community.”
Fighting the fireplace with a fireplace
Fatabayyano, a Platform based in Jordan founded in 2014 and whose call as “Verify”, fights the fireplace with fireplace.
“Fake news is spreading faster than genuine news, and the amount of incorrect information on WhatsApp is surely huge,” said Motaz Al Thaher, Fatabayyano’s media director.
WhatsApp has a 75% penetration rate among Internet users in the Middle East, according to 2019 through Northwestern University in Qatar.
People use it to stay in touch with friends and family, but also for percentages of links, images and audio messages about news, unverified.
There are few regulations to combat incorrect information on WhatsApp, Thaher said, because the messages are encrypted and the platform reports suspicious messages like Facebook and Twitter.
So Fatabayyano created its own channel, sending fact-based coronavirus reporting to thousands of WhatsApp users simultaneously.
The messages include links to long science-based Arabic articles on Fatabayyano’s website, bright virus-related graphics on its Instagram page and punchy one-minute videos to its nearly 800,000 Facebook followers.
“Rumors are viruses too!” read the new subtitle the logo of the crusade.
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