Geraldine Wong Sak Hoi A stickler for detail, Geraldine first arrived at swissinfo.ch in 2014 to study rumours on social media as part of a collaborative research project known as Pheme. She now coordinates the Fact Checks by swissinfo.ch dossier covering (mis)statements about Switzerland, and continues to follow the trail of online misinformation.
More
Is the novel coronavirus a bioweapon created in a Chinese lab or something Microsoft founder Bill Gates created in order to profit from an eventual vaccine? Or did the virus even exist in the first place? One leader of anti-lockdown protests in Switzerland doubts it did.
In recent months the voices of Swiss conspiracy theorists and alternative media have been amplified, as they exploit both the crisis and social media platforms to spread rumours and reach a bigger audience.
It's all part of an 'infodemic', a term used by the World Health Organization (WHO) during the global coronavirus outbreak to describe 'an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources'. Unverified claims about the origins of the virus, symptoms and potential cures have had fact-checkers and public health authorities on alert, regularly debunking them.
Yet new research suggests that misinformation on Covid-19 in Switzerland, though present, is not as widespread as it is in countries where polarisation, low levels of trust in public institutions, and the weaponisation of science are leading people to click 'share' on unverified claims.
A flood of information, good and badIn a sign of just how widespread Covid-19 misinformation is, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that more than a quarter of the most popular YouTube videos on the coronavirus contained misleading information.
Videos by conspiracy theorists in French-speaking Switzerland, including a fashion heiress in Geneva urging her followers to reject protective face masks, have gained hundreds of thousands of views altogether, according to Le Temps newspaper . But a single video by a consultant 'living in the Swiss mountains', claiming a second Covid infection would be lethal, reached nearly two million views.
The Federal Office of Public Health cautions that "particularly during emergency or crisis situations [...] unverified information spreads more quickly than information requiring scientific verification." It has debunked some common misleading claims about Covid-19 in picture form. FOPH
'There's been a lot of uncertainty [about the virus] among authorities and researchers, and so that creates uncertainty among the population,' said Edda Humprecht, a senior research and teaching associate in communication at the University of Zurich. People were prone to share rumours, especially in the early days of the outbreak.
The theory that Bill Gates was involved in the origins of the virus convinced 8% of Swiss respondents to a Tamedia poll . A whopping 30% believed the virus was created in a lab.
Information overload could be seen across social media. The Covid-19 Infodemics Observatory, which has collected millions of tweets worldwide in the last six months, shows a sharp increase in Twitter chatter about Covid-19 in Switzerland early in the outbreak.
From 1,770 Covid-related tweets on February 20, activity jumped to 8,600 tweets on the 25th – the day the first confirmed case of the disease in the Alpine nation was announced –and to 10,000 by early March. Twitter activity remained relatively strong throughout the lockdown, never dipping below 6,000 posts per day.