BACKGROUND
This study focused on the online disinformation about taking food or supplements to prevent and treat Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on Sina Weibo（the Chinese largest new media microblog platform) during the first COVID-19 lockdown.
OBJECTIVE
In this study, we aim to investigate the disinformation of taking food or supplements to prevent and treat COVID-19 on Sina Weibo.
METHODS
We searched for relevant posts from February 20, 2020 to May 06, 2020through text mining techniques to identify those containing content of “ food or supplements could prevent the COVID-19”.In addition, the descriptive research was used to analyze disinformation datasets.
RESULTS
Of the 6601 original posts that were crawled from Weibo, we identified 2989 (45.28%) informative posts that spread false information about food or supplement by manual screening. The most frequent disinformation include Vitamin C(25.36%), garlic(22.38%), salt water gargle(14.32%), drinking more tea(12.98%), smoked vinegar(9.84%), onions(7.19%), drinking high alcohol(4.65%) could prevent or kill the COVID-19, the least frequent: sesame oil(1.81%), ginger(1.17%), brown sugar and boiled water with ginger, onion and garlic(0.3%) could prevent the COVID-19.
CONCLUSIONS
Spreading false information that food or supplements could prevent the COVID-19 seriously affected people's daily eating habits. The diet disinformation was wrapped in a pseudoscientific shell that make it difficult for the ordinary without professional knowledge to identify it.