Disinformation and misinformation about the coronavirus has been so prevalent that the World Health Organization dubbed it an “infodemic.” Out-of-context images, misleadingly cut videos, false reports, conspiracies, and amateur maps have flooded the web, making fact-checking the coronavirus outbreak a huge undertaking.

One project spearheaded by the International Fact-Checking Network has grown to 48 participants across 30 countries. But professional fact-checkers aren’t the only ones trying to clean up a polluted information environment. There are also online sleuths and verification enthusiasts like OSINT HK (Open Source Intelligence Hong Kong).

We chatted with Trey Menefee, the founder of OSINT HK, over Telegram. Menefee, who’s based in Hong Kong, started the group last fall after the death of 22-year-old student Alex Chow during the pro-democracy protests. After Twitter users began investigating the incident, Menefee set up a group chat where online sleuths could drop bits of evidence they could use to piece together what had happened.

“It became kind of like the scientific process where someone could make a hypothesis and everyone else would either try to support it with more evidence or debunk it,” Menefee said. The group scoured Telegram channels, got data from HKmap.live, and tracked the locations of ambulances for their investigation.

In January, the Hong Kong protests were winding down, but the coronavirus epidemic had just begun. After Wuhan went on lockdown on Jan. 23, Menefee set up another Telegram channel, WuFlu monitoring, with a group that started out as 30 volunteers and has grown to 50 today.

“We started getting a lot of what I half-jokingly call ‘Bat Signals’ where people on Twitter were @’ing us to verify a flood of videos being posted,” he said. “Then we started scraping numbers and making our own dataviz like maps.”

Nathan Ruser, whom the Sydney Morning Herald recently profiled, created detailed maps of the spread of the virus at the scale of towns, not provinces like the official maps circulating at the time. Other volunteers, working off viral tweets, submitted reports, and material picked up from Chinese social media apps, verified images and videos. The most common type of misinformation that the group has seen are out-of-context images or videos, many of which it hasn’t been able to verify or debunk fully.

“Something happened, it looks recent and doesn’t have any reverse image search hits, but it’s not always what the poster captions re: what’s going on. Though sometimes it is,” said Menefee. “Like dead bodies piling up on Wuhan hospital floors. Sometimes we (or others) can narrow down the hospital, but we just note we don’t know for sure what’s behind a sheet.”

One conspiracy theory that won’t go away is that coronavirus is a bioweapon. “It makes no sense,” Menefee said — but that doesn’t mean it’s not persistent.

Figuring out what’s true and false is only one of OSINT HK’s projects. There’s also a shortage tracker map people can use to find basic necessities, and health safety PSAs in various languages.

Contributing to the OSINT HK Patreon gains access to group discussions, and Menefee said they’d be eager to teach people in other parts of the world how to do this type of work.

“I can often get the answer to almost any question on our topics in minutes,” he said, calling it “the best kind of hive mind.”

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