Game of Truth: From Lie Detector to Profiling Software by Katia Elkaim

Nowadays, information - it's a cliché - travels at lightning speed and with it its share of speculation. Lies are everywhere and truth is often just wishful thinking, even though some claim to carry its banner with peremptory statements.

COVID, by its impact, remains an extraordinary source of propagation of the most hardened

delusions.

The most widespread fantasy is that COVID was caused by 5G, which weakens people's immune systems by allowing the virus to invade the body, even though the virus does the trick very well without this vector. According to the web extension "NewsGuard", which has committed itself to putting journalism to the sword of fact checking by analyzing the credibility of news sites in Europe and the United States, this theory first appeared in January 2020 on a French conspiracy blog, "Les Moutons Enragés" (The Furious Sheep).

The other persistent rumor is that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab by accident, proof of this being that the virus' genome contains a DNA sequence of HIV. In France, the spread of this hoax was facilitated by Professor Luc Montagnier, co-recipient of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the AIDS virus. In reality, this theory initially stems from an article published on the BioRxiv.org website, a platform that allows scientists to share studies before going through the scrutiny of scientific journals and peers. In this case, the authors of the source of this misinformation withdrew their article two days after its publication. It would even appear that the DNA sequence quoted is very frequent and also found in other viruses.

As a final example, Bill Gates' vaccine is said to contain a tracking microchip; of what? We don't really know, but in any case, it would trace us even better than what we manage to do on our own by surfing from morning to night on social networks.