US officials scheduled a nationwide alert for mobile phones and other devices in October to test an emergency warning system, but social media posts claim the signals will have harmful health effects, with some drawing on conspiracy theories about substances in Covid-19 vaccines. The assertions are false; these broadcasts are the same used for decades and are harmless, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and independent experts.
How Apple and Google let your phone warn you if you ve been exposed to the coronavirus while protecting your privacy thetelegraph.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thetelegraph.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
5G technology doesn’t cause COVID-19 but rumors that it does have spread rapidly across the globe, researchers report.
Researchers need to better understand how misinformation like this spreads in order to hone their intervention efforts and prevent misinformed perspectives from taking root.
A research team led by Elaine Nsoesie, a fellow at the Hariri Institute at Boston University, investigated how COVID-19 misinformation proliferated using the same epidemiological techniques for modeling disease transmission.
The researchers examined the spread of COVID-19 misinformation across eight English-speaking countries, including the United States, using Google Trends. The researchers focused on myths that the World Health Organization (WHO) “busted” on its website including the relationships between COVID-19 and alcohol, ginger root, the sun, 5G, and hydroxychloroquine.