Tsunami of fake news hurts Latin America's effort to fight coronavirus

Tom Phillips in São Paulo, David Agren in Mexico City, Dan Collyns in Lima and Uki Goñi in Buenos Aires
Published onSun 26 Jul 2020 05.00 EDT

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As Latin America battles the advance of Covid-19, which has now claimed more than 160,000 lives in the region, it is also fending off a tsunami of online disinformation designed to bamboozle and deceive.

From the Mexican state of Chiapas to Ceará in Brazil, social networks are awash with quack cures and fantastical conspiracies that can carry an all-too-real human cost.

The misinformation streaming through millions of Latin American mobile phones and computers ranges from the bizarre to the ridiculous.

In recent weeks, there have been claims that Brazilian coffins were being filled with rocks to inflate the country’s Covid-19 death toll; that drones were being used to deliberately contaminate indigenous communities in Mexico; that the CIA was helping spread the coronavirus in Argentina; that seafood in northern Peru was not safe to eat because the corpses of Covid-19 victims were being dumped in the Pacific Ocean; and even that the World Health Organization chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had been spotted boogying and boozing at a bar on the São Paulo coast.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/26/latin-america-coronavirus-tsunami-fake-news