Disinformation
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Disinformation
The Coronavirus pandemic is one of the first pandemics to occur during an era of high-level technology and social media. Social media platforms inform people of the safety measures and keep them connected and productive amid coronavirus. However, with the pandemic, a lot of conspiracy theories have flourished. Some groups of Chinese argued that the military used the virus as a weapon against China. Some people claimed that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon that was misfired and hit back the Chinese (Apuke & Omar, 2020). Government incompetence has led a lot of people into mistruths and emotions instead of truth and science. One of the greatest forms of disinformation about COVID-19 is President Donald Trump’s claim that shutting down the economy would increase the suicide rates to be far higher than those of coronavirus.
The truth is more than 250,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID-19. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the leading causes of death in the U.S.; however, statistics show that the number of suicide deaths in 2017 was approximately 47,000. Less than 25% of the total coronavirus deaths in less than one year. The main cause of suicidal death was also linked to mental illness and financial crisis and not economic shut down as the President claimed. Another study in 2017 concluded that the U.S death toll due to suicide increased at an alarming rate. Still, the rates were not tied to the recession but are attributed to socioeconomic conditions (Paz, 2020).
I suspected the information to be untrue because death caused by suicide is not contagious; therefore, it is not logical to compare the rate of suicide by the rate of death caused by a virus that spreads quickly and has not to cure. Besides, it is reasonable to expect that the President of the U.S will have enough information to know that an economic shutdown cannot lead to a higher death toll than coronavirus.
References
Paz, C. (2020). All the President’s lies about the coronavirus. The Atlantic, 9.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/all-the-president-s-lies-about-the-coronavirus/ar-BB11Exjq
Apuke, O. D., & Omar, B. (2020). Fake news and COVID-19: modeling the predictors of fake news sharing among social media users. Telematics and Informatics, 101475.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585320301349