The voice of the woman, introducing herself as “Elisabeth … you know, Poldi’s mom,” sounded genuinely concerned.
A friend of hers, who was a doctor at the university hospital of Vienna, had called her with a warning, she said in German. The clinic had noticed that most patients with severe symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus pandemic, had taken the painkiller ibuprofen before they were hospitalized. Tests run by the university’s laboratory, she added, had found “strong evidence that ibuprofen accelerates the multiplication of the virus.”
With lightning speed, an audio recording of the message spread among German-language users of WhatsApp, the messenger service owned by Facebook. Quickly, similar recordings referring to alleged research from Vienna in other languages like Slovak also began circulating on the service.
But the WhatsApp message was based on fake information.
“Nonsense,” said Johannes Angerer, a spokesperson for the Medical University of Vienna. “We neither discussed this internally, nor do we conduct any research into the potential effects of ibuprofen on COVID-19.”
While there have been warnings against the use of anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen to treat coronavirus-like symptoms, including by France’s health minister, everything the voice recording said about research efforts at the medical school had been made up, he stressed.
The university released statements to flag the messages as fake within hours after first hearing about them Saturday morning. But the proverbial horse had bolted: German-language Google searches for the keywords “ibuprofen” and “Corona” spiked on Saturday around noon, according to data from the search giant. Over the weekend, the university’s website collapsed temporarily.
The case provides an example of how, as the novel coronavirus spreads across the globe, a wildfire of false and unverified information about the pandemic is following in its wake. On private messaging services like WhatsApp, well-intentioned but fearful individuals are forwarding messages with misleading or doctored information. Other cases range from warnings over made-up extraordinary measures governments might take to keep people in their homes to false numbers of deaths and the level of preparedness of medical services.
“We are aware of an increasing number of false information about the COVID-19 outbreak appearing in public discourse, including on social media,” European Commission Vice President Věra Jourová, whose portfolio includes the EU’s efforts to fight fake news, told POLITICO in an email.
But she also acknowledged that “we need to understand better the risks related to communication on end-to-end encryption services.”
A wave of misinformation
The Vienna fake is far from an isolated case of such digital misinformation — and others often follow a similar pattern that involves people claiming to share insider information with friends and family that they’ve gained access to.
Among Belgian WhatsApp users, an audio message has been circulating with a woman claiming the hospital she worked in had triggered “the maximum pandemic plan.” Other voice recordings warned people of a complete lockdown of the country and urged them to stock up on food.
Poland was hit by a wave of rumors about the government introducing zoning to cities and cutting off transportation to Warsaw. One audio message, recorded by a man who claimed he had a journalist friend with close ties to political decision-makers, said that as of last Sunday, the president would introduce an “emergency state” and that people wouldn’t be able to leave their houses for three weeks.
In France, users forwarded an audio message of a woman who said that she has “a very very very well placed uncle” with ties to national ministers from whom she got information that the whole country would soon be in full quarantine. And in Portugal, a widely circulated voice message suggested that information on the number of infected people in the country was downplayed by official sources, with a man saying: “Forget the numbers the television is talking about. There are thousands of infected in Portugal, confirmed.”
In Ireland, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar pleaded with people on Twitter: “I am urging everyone to please stop sharing unverified info on What’sApp groups. These messages are scaring and confusing people and causing real damage.”
Jourová, who is drafting new proposals on how to protect EU democracies from misinformation, warned that her office was “concerned that some [false claims] can lead to public harm, such as false claims that drinking bleach cures the virus, or abuse the situation for material gain.”
Her office is “is in regular contact with online platforms” to address the issue, she added.
Experts have warned that, as Facebook has clamped down on misinformation on its main platform, its messenger service WhatsApp, which was bought in 2014, is increasingly becoming a key arena for the spread of misinformation. The social networking giant has invested millions of euros to clamp down on falsehoods on its main network, so people have turned to WhatsApp because it is less regulated and allows people to share personal messages with large numbers of people.
In a statement, the company said that it is “committed to doing our part to tackle viral messages,” among other things by “reducing the number of people you can forward a message to.” In recent years, Facebook has limited the ability of people to forward WhatsApp messages in an attempt to stop misinformation from spreading like wildfire, and has teamed up with governments to help them share official announcements on the platform.
“We encourage all users to check the facts online before sharing messages that have been forwarded to them, and we encourage users to engage directly with trusted and official sources for important information,” a company spokesperson added.
Still, the rise of WhatsApp represents the latest turn in the cat-and-mouse game between those spreading misinformation — often people who are doing so unwittingly — and the global platform’s ability to thwart such activities.
For Claire Wardle, a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, who has tracked WhatsApp’s role in spreading falsehoods, the platform allows people to share personal details — something many are eager to do in a time of crisis.
“So much of this is about emotion, and audio is an emotive medium,” she said. “That phenomenon, which dates back to what we saw in India, is finally coming to Western Europe. People are turning to WhatsApp because they have more to say, and they want to speak directly to their friends and family.”
This article is part of POLITICO’s premium Tech policy coverage: Pro Technology. Our expert journalism and suite of policy intelligence tools allow you to seamlessly search, track and understand the developments and stakeholders shaping EU Tech policy and driving decisions impacting your industry. Email [email protected] with the code ‘TECH’ for a complimentary trial.
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