Experts say Facebook is struggling to stop dangerous misinformation about coronavirus in languages other than English, after Romanian-language posts saying lemons kill the virus spread like wildfire on the site over the past couple of days.



After being contacted by BuzzFeed News, Facebook removed several viral posts in Romanian claiming to share advice from a "Professor Chen Horin" at the nonexistent "Beijing Military University" saying drinking hot water with lemon slices can kill the virus.

The message is a subtle variation on a long-running online meme giving "advice" from the same professor saying lemons can kill cancer cells. This has had the widest reach on Facebook in Spanish.

The more recent twist — saying lemons kill the coronavirus — has also recently had some traction in English, with the most shared post by a popular Ugandan musician.

The message on an Italian-language website has had hundreds of thousands of views according to data provided by the website Viral Magazine, but similar posts on Facebook have had smaller reach, suggesting Facebook is onto the problem.

The same message in Romanian, however, had tens of thousands of shares across multiple posts, which were removed when reported to Facebook by BuzzFeed News.

