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As coronavirus spreads, so does fake news

Facebook's new "physical harm" standard is one that Twitter and Google ought to adopt

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Photo: Shutterstock

Bhaskar Chakravorti | Bloomberg
The news about the Wuhan coronavirus is bad and is getting worse. In terms of its potential for devastation, the current virus is in close competition with its 2003 cousin, the SARS coronavirus. China’s economy is far more essential to the global economy now than it was in 2003, giving new meaning to the old nostrum, when China sneezes, the world catches a cold. And this time the world’s capacity to catch that cold is far worse, in part due to the rise of social media. 

Seventeen years ago, during the SARS scare, the world wasn’t hooked to social media. Today,