FAKE NEWS WHICH SPREAD FASTER THAN THE CORONA OVER 11 PORTALS, 29 FB PAGES WITH TOTAL 38 ANNOUNCEMENTS

In just one day the fake news about the arrest of a professor from Harvard which has been accused of allegedly creating it, and then selling the coronavirus to China, rapidly spread out from India, through the USA and to the Balkan.

This video is the complete opposite from the content itself which can be seen on the aforementioned link and a headline stating that the professor of nanotechnology in question has been arrested for “creating” and “selling” the coronavirus to the Chinese authorities.

This manipulation appears on the social network Facebook early this morning Central European Time on April 5th on a Facebook profile like the one of Alex Alvarez which is now blocked by the Facebook administration. Alvarez on April 5th uploading the aforementioned video wrote a post:

“USA has just discovered the person who created and sold the coronavirus to #China. Dr. #Charles Lieber, Head of Division of chemistry and biology at #HarvardUniversity, USA. He was arrested today according to sources from the FBI, is stated in the first post.”

Shortly thereafter the post is forwarded by many other users on Facebook, but also on Twitter, and the same day it arrives and becomes viral everywhere in the Balkan, special targets are Serbia, North Macedonia and Montenegro.

What really happened?

It is true that the professor from Harvard University in USA, Charles Lieber has been arrested. That happened at the end of January under accusation of giving a false statement regarding funds he had received from China. According to the American Department of Justice professor Lieber had been hired as a leader of a research team at Harvard which was supposed to implement a research project in the field of nanotechnology with funds of up to $15 million. The funds for this research team had been transferred by the National Institute of Health and the Department of Defense on the basis of a concluded agreement.

According to the agreement, which had been concluded with the professor as a team leader, he and any other of the members of the research team during the implementation of the agreed project were not allowed to engage in any similar activities due to conflict of interest reasons. Despite this provision in the agreement, the Professor as an associate of Wuhan University, People’s Republic of China, had been hired professionally and received a substantial sum of money from the Chinese authorities which he tried to cover up. In his public statement he did not mention his relationship with Wuhan University and the money he received from them, and was detained on January 28th. This news in its true version had been published at the time by many news media in the USA.

Nevertheless the relationship of the professor from Harvard as an American with China and especially Wuhan where the coronavirus pandemic started was excellent soil for creation of a manipulation which will become viral on the social networks in just 24 hours.

How did this fake news spread?

Throughout the region, what is viral on the social networks in the world fast becomes a news media headline after portals such as vidovdan.rs or the notorious tabloid informer.rs and many other of that type known for their pro-Russian and nationalist content post it on their websites.

Almost concurrently the news appears among the headlines published on 5th April in North Macedonia. The first to forward the news from Serbian Informer is the portal Аktuelno24.com.mk. Then in just an hour the fake news spreads everywhere through web portals well-known for publishing fake and manipulative news. After the publication on Актуелно.24 followed a publication on Think.mk. Then followed vecer.mk, vesnik.com, infomax.mk, zase.mk, markukule.mk, press24.mk (which later erased this news) and index24.mk and reporter.mk. In total 11 publications have been registered in North Macedonia which allowed the news to appear on aggregators like Grid and Time.

Most of these portals that transmitted this disinformation spread their posts through the social network Facebook. Below is an overview of the number of Facebook pages and groups that shared this disinformation as well as the total number of posts on these Facebook pages and groups.

This news has the most shares on the infomax.mk website.

The table below is a list of the top 10 FB pages with the highest number of followers out of a total of 29 that published the news. The total number of followers on these 29 Facebook pages is 1,806,587.

In addition to the publishing on the Facebook pages of the mentioned portals the news is being shared as well on Facebook groups like “Здраво Македонијо” where the fake news has been posted 5 times, then the group “Политички Постови Република Македонија” which shares the news 3 times and the group “INFOMAX News Macedonia” which has shared the fake news 2 times.

The fake news of the arrest of the professor from Harvard has most interactions on the Facebook profile of aktuelno24.com.mk (8.556), then follows think.mk (2.422), infomax.mk (898), vecer.mk (586), vesnik.com (196), zase.mk (100). In total 12,797 interactions have been recorded on the Facebook pages of these portals.

All of the aforementioned portals are well-known to part of the public as generators of fake news.

NOVATV & F2N2