![]() 23, Wuhan’s authorities decided to temporarily shut down its public transport as it tries to halt the outbreak of a new strain of the virus. 20 that an expert from China’s National Health Commission was allowed to clearly state on a CCTV News program that people should not go to Wuhan and those who are there should not leave the city if they didn’t have an urgent need to do so. And the Chinese government kept its silence. He was the first victim of something that didn’t even have a name. Despair rose when the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission officially announced the death of a 61-year-old man from this new virus. (Only recently it has been proved that humans can contaminate each other.) In the first week of the year, official sources in the affected Chinese province repeated that the new illness came from animals and that it could not be spread from person to person. Authorities, however, were very quiet about the disease. A food market that used to sell wild animals, like bats and bamboo rats, had already been officially closed after being considered the possible link between the cases. In January, when the group of eight was arrested in Wuhan, at least 27 cases of a strong and strange pneumonia had been detected in the city. And that the outbreak only became internationally known after Yanyong Jiang, a respected physician, broke the Chinese government’s silence in April 2003, putting it into action against the growing epidemic.Ĭhen suggested that people in Wuhan might have felt the same way lately. She remembered that the Chinese government maintained secrecy around its SARS cases for a long time. When Chen joined my mini-project, she wanted me to understand how bad SARS was for the region in 2003. We also wanted to check if they are still in jail - not an easy task. We’ve spent hours over the last few days trying to figure out the names of those people, along with their ages and professions. Summer Chen, editor-in-chief at Taiwan FactCheck Center, joined me in my fact-finding journey about the arrest of those eight “misinformers.” One of the most popular falsehoods shared so far in Taiwan’s social media channels, for example, is a claim about nicotine being capable of curing the 2019 coronavirus, which is not true at all. ![]() In the last few days, Taiwanese citizens have been targeted with tons of misinformation about the new virus - and they are getting worried about it, too. I face language and time-zone barriers, so I reached out to fact-checkers in Taiwan (which is adjacent to China) and requested support. Since then, I have been struggling to find data about the eight Wuhan “misinformers” - and I have come up against a void. Were these people actually false news producers? Or were they just sharing content about what is now known as the 2019 coronavirus?Ī researcher who studies misinformation in China asked me at the beginning of the week if I had information about those eight people who had been arrested for spreading “falsehoods about the new pneumonia” - and I didn’t. More than 20 days have passed since those detentions, and still the world doesn’t know much about what occurred with that group. ![]() The people who were allegedly arrested had posted on Weibo (a Facebook-like social media platform) and/or in other messaging apps that Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, was back. 3, Agence France Press reported that police forces from Wuhan, the capital of the Chinese province of Hubei, “had punished eight people for ‘publishing or forwarding false information on the internet without verification.’” By that time, police forces had posted a note on their social media channels, informing people about the detention and requesting citizens in Wuhan to obey the law and refrain from spreading misinformation. The most surprising aspect? In China, it can also get people arrested. Coronavirus, which has killed at least 17 people and landed in the United States this week, is the newest source of misinformation sparking health fears worldwide.
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