Types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation | Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism

some of the main types, sources, and claims of COVID-19 misinformation seen so far... the number of English-language fact-checks rose more than 900% from January to March... coronavirus misinformation has almost certainly grown even faster...

most (59%)... various forms of reconfiguration... true information is spun, twisted, recontextualised, or reworked... (38%) was completely fabricated... no examples of deep fakes... reconfigured misinformation accounts for 87% of social media interactions...

top-down misinformation from politicians, celebrities... public figures ... 20% of the claims ... accounted for 69% of total social media engagement... . misleading or false claims about ... public authorities... the WHO or the UN, are the single largest category of claims identified...

On Twitter, 59% of posts rated as false in our sample by fact-checkers remain up. On YouTube, 27% ... Facebook, 24% ...up without warning labels...

reconfigured content saw higher engagement than content that was wholly fabricated... ‘misleading content’ (29%), contained some true information, but the details were reformulated, selected, and re-contextualised in ways that made them false or misleading...

images or videos labelled or described as being something other than they are (24%)... some call ‘malinformation’... few pieces of misinformation across the sample appeared intended to generate a profit....

much misinformation... questions the actions, competence, or legitimacy of public authorities ... difficult for those institutions to address or correct it directly ... How many people will accept as credible a government trying to debunk or refute misinformation that casts that very same government in a negative light?...

important that fact-checkers ... increase coordination to limit overlap ...there will be no silver bullet ... ‘cure’ for misinformation about the new coronavirus