The covid-19 pandemic brought a great challenge for communicators and scientists: combating "fake news", an English word that means false news. The term quickly became known around the world, although many researchers and journalists consider it inappropriate due to the contradiction it brings: news should never be false or, if it is false, it is not news, it is a lie.
Concerned about the advancement of misinformation in the country and the growing need to bring qualified information, based on scientific evidence, Unicamp is starting, on this website, a new range of combating fake news. The track must contain content that expands people's knowledge on a wide range of subjects that often reach the public as “information”, but which are nothing more than lies, as has been happening in relation to vaccines against Covid-19.
Videos recorded by Unicamp professors will be published, such as the head of the Chemistry Institute and member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and UNICAMP Task Force, Luiz Carlos Dias, infectious disease doctors and professors from the Faculty of Medical Sciences (FCM) of Unicampo, Raquel Stucchi and Maria Luiza Moretti, the pediatrician and professor José Martins Filho, as well as the physicist and member of the Disinformation Study Group on Social Networks (EDReS) at Unicamp, professor Leandro Tessler.
The videos are being recorded by teachers in their homes, using their own equipment, as Unicamp still has a large portion of its employees working remotely, especially those who do not work in essential services.
In addition to the videos, also published in a listing on Official Youtube of the University, the track to combat fake news on the Unicamp Portal will also publish texts and audios. Some content already available deals with immunity against Covid-19 among those who have already had the disease, fake news about the anti-vaccine movement and Covid-19 in children. Don't forget to follow along!
