Pacific leaders are becoming increasingly worried about Covid-19-related misinformation targeting their community.
The misinformation, some being spread online, is creating fear and is undermining efforts to tackle the virus, Pacific leaders and health officials said.
Pakilau Manase Lua of the Pacific Response Coordination Team said people were spreading false facts about Covid-19 over private messages online.
A person who is part of a group actively monitoring conspiracy theorists online, who 1 NEWS has agreed not to identify, said “a lot of the conspiracy activists seem to be based in Pasifika and Māori communities”.
“It's usually attacking someone's credibility, questioning their family, all sorts, and some of them can get quite violent.”
Pacific Cabinet Ministers have been briefed because of the volume of material being shared, including rumours about the Pacific family at the centre of the latest Covid-19 cluster in Auckland.
Ethnic Communities Minister and Associate Health Minister Jenny Salesa said it was concerning that some people were following some of the false information they saw on social media.
But, she said this was “only a few [people], I’d say”, and most people were aware of what was fact.
Today, Health Minister Chris Hipkins said: “Social media is not a reliable source of information with regard to these [Covid-19] cases.”
He said the Ministry of Health wouldn’t be providing around-the-clock updates to clamp down on misinformation, as people who need to know if they are affected by a Covid-19 case would already be told.
Mr Hipkins said the purpose of consolidating all Covid-19 case information at 1pm was to allow health authorities time to test the accuracy of the information it was announcing to give people as complete a picture of how the cases were related to each other as possible.
Government’s Covid-19 team is also hitting back, debunking the myth that the cluster in Auckland is linked to a managed isolation facility.
“There is no evidence to support this,” they tweeted.
Officials are also creating Pacific-language videos with factual information to battle false facts.
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