Thinking About the Spread of Li-meng Yan's COVID-19 Pseudo-scientific Report---How to Avoid False Information?

In September 2020, Li-meng Yan, a self-proclaimed virologist, published a pseudo-scientific report claiming that China had created a deadly coronavirus in a research laboratory. Subsequently scientists came from Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University and other top American universities studied her papers at a rare rate. Although her arguments were widely regarded by scientists as "defective," its viral spread proves that pseudoscience, which is under the guise of science, can easily spread on social media.

Viral Spread of False Information

Back in 2018, Aral and his team at the MIT Media Lab put their novelty hypothesis to the test by analyzing 11 years of data from Twitter, and found: false news becomes 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth. A complicated combination of psychological factors is at work whenever a reader decides to share news, and otherwise smart people can become part of the cycle of disinformation. If the news involves politics, it gets yet another virality boost, because it’s so emotionally charged. And to Aral, the Yan report has every attribute of a false news story that was primed to go viral. And to Aral, the Yan report has every attribute of a false news story that was primed to go viral.

Epidemic Control Should Be the Top Priority at the Moment, while Li-meng Yan and Bannon’s Behavior to Creating Conspiracy Theory is Deplorable.

According to the description of the website Zenodo, where Li-meng Yan published the paper, this is a public resource library for academic research. Everyone can upload their research results to this website. In addition, genetics scholar Kevin Bird at Michigan State University and biology professor Carl Bergstrom at Washington University have noticed that the research institutions that this paper attach are the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation, two sister non-profit organizations created by Bannon. According to documents published last year on the Rules of Law Association website, Bannon had served as the chairman of the organization. These two institutions have not conducted any academic research before and there is no information on these two institutions in Google Scholar.

How Could We Avoid Such False Information?

If we calm down and think about it, we will find that Li-meng Yan’s report is full of illogical information:

First, the report was not carried out by a scientific research institution, but funded by a political organization. Second, her report has no original data. Third, it has not been peer reviewed or even submitted to a peer reviewed journal. Forth, the cited literature in her report is also unscientific, among which many has not been peer reviewed

Nowadays, if one wants to read scientific papers or reports, he/she can obtain professional medical journals with an impact factor greater than 1 in PubMed, a professional medical literature library. This will help people distinguish between scientific articles and pseudo-scientific junk.