The Gateway Pundit, a far-right website that often spreads conspiracy theories, published an article on December 29th that was false, implying that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had withdrawn authorization for all P.C.R. tests for detecting Covid-19. The article received 22,000 likes, comments and shares.
Videos of at- home Covid-19 tests showing positive results after being soaked in drinking water and juice have gone viral in recent weeks, and were used to push the false narrative that coronaviruses rapid tests don't work. Health experts say that some household liquids can make a test show a positive result, but the tests remain accurate when used as directed. A TikTok video showing a home test that came out positive after being placed under running water was shared at least 140,000 times.
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The Canadian website Rebel News posted a video on January 1 titled "Rapid antigen tests debunked". The comments section was a hive of misinformation. One comment with more than 200 likes said the test was to keep the case as high as possible to maintain fear and incentive for more restrictions. And of course profit.
Researchers say that misinformation about Covid-19 tests has gone up in recent weeks as coronaviruses have gone up again.
The health crisis is in danger of being stymies by the burst of misinformation. There have been spikes in false claims about the vaccine, masks and the severity of the virus. Health experts say that misinformation is a key factor in vaccine hesitancy.
The categories include false statements that P.C.R. tests don't work, that the counts for flu and Covid-19 cases have been combined, and that at- home rapid tests are unreliable.
In the last three months of the year, the themes jumped into thousands of mentions, compared with a few dozen in the same period in 2020.
The increased demand for testing due to Omicron and the higher prevalence of breakthrough cases has made it easier for misinformation to be spread, according to a researcher at the University of Washington. She said that the false narratives support the idea of not trusting the death count.
The Gateway Pundit didn't reply to the request for comment. TikTok has policies that prohibit misinformation that could cause harm. The videos shared by The New York Times are in line with the Covid-19 misinformation policies. The Gateway Pundit article was warned by Twitter for violating its coronaviruses misinformation policy and for containing false information about widely accepted testing methods. The company does not take action on personal anecdotes.
Facebook worked with its fact-checking partners to label many of the posts with warnings that directed people toward fact checks of the false claims, and reduced their prominence on its users' feeds.
The challenges of the pandemic are constantly changing and we are monitoring for emerging false claims on our platforms, according to a Facebook spokesman.
There are legitimate questions about the accuracy of Covid-19 tests, and no medical test is perfect. There is a risk of a false positive or a false negative result. There is a chance for false positive results when users don't follow instructions, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The tests are generally accurate when used correctly, but in some cases can show a positive result when exposed to other liquids.
Dr. Patriquin said that using a fluid with a different chemical makeup means that result lines might appear unpredictably.
There have been some products that were faulty. About two million of the at- home testing products that Ellume had shipped to the United States were recalled last year.
coronaviruses tests are reliable at detecting people with high levels of the virus. It does make debunking the lies on social media more difficult, but experts say our evolving knowledge of tests should be a distinct issue.
Ms. Koltai said that tackling misinformation is difficult because of the uncertain nature of science.
Many of the lies contained in the falsehoods are the same ones that had been reported in the past.
John Gregory, deputy health editor at NewsGuard, said that the surge matches the misinformation industry's pattern during the Pandemic. Whatever the current mainstream story is, they seek their own narrative to undermine it.
The C.D.C. withdrew its request to the FDA for emergency-use authorization of a specific test at the end of the year. The C.D.C. later said that hundreds of other Covid-19 tests are still available from other manufacturers.
There were posts on Facebook that claimed the agency had stopped supporting P.C.R. tests. CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned social media analytics tool, shows that the most widely shared post in July collected 11,500 likes, shares and comments. The post said that the C.D.C. advisory meant that P.C.R. tests couldn't distinguish between the flu and the coronaviruses, when in fact the agency had just recommended the use of tests that could simultaneously detect and distinguish between the flu and Co.
The claim never fully went away despite being fact-checked within days. The Gateway Pundit article revived the claim at the end of the year, collecting nearly double the earlier post's likes, shares and comments on Facebook. The article went viral on the social media platform.
Mr. Gregory said that a similar phenomenon had occurred with social media posts that claimed various liquids had tested positive for coronaviruses.
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A video shows coronaviruses turning positive after being tested on fruit juice.
coronaviruses tests turned positive after being tested on fruit juice, according to a video on YouTube. It had over 102,000 views. In the same month, a video with the same results was posted on the internet.
A number of similar videos with the same theme appeared on TikTok.
The power of misinformation is shown by the re-emergence of false narratives even after social media companies labeled them a year earlier.
She said that narratives can peak at different times.
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