People across the globe are worried about the ongoing coronavirus epidemic. Since January, 2020 the virus has been spreading in different countries and the number of people being infected is increasing everyday. This is also a time when many speculations manage to escape on the internet and misinform people about the ongoing situation. However, efforts are being made to prevent such speculations from spreading and creating a panic like situation. Search engine giant Google is now hiding all the applications that are related to coronavirus from the search results on its Google Play Store.
The recent efforts are being made in order to prevent the spread of any false information among the people which can make things worse. So people who try to find applications with the key words like ‘coronavirus’ or ‘Covid-19’ will not be able to find any results on the Play Store. Until recently, such searches by the users gave plenty of applications that were related to coronavirus. The applications were about how to protect themselves from the virus and some of them also provided a good guideline for people who are actually dealing with it.
It included information about the right way to wash your hands and ways to quarantine yourself or others. But there were also applications that have false information and could have been dangerous. There were also possibilities that the unethical developers of applications could be taking advantage of cashing on the current situation by pushing some apps that contain unnecessary information and only meant to show advertisements and convinced people to get worried and sign up for premium features.
Google is not the only company who has stepped up to prevent spread of misleading information. In 2019, Pinterest had taken responsibility of showing information on cancer and vaccinations and showed information only from some of the reputed medical publications. Even Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook has given WHO (World Health Organization) free ad space and is redirecting searches for coronavirus to information from the WHO.
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