Global health. The current scenario and future perspectives

303 Amid a digital and multimedia ecology, this practice has extended to researching and verifying material circulating in digital environments. The Covid-19 pandemic triggered media outlets to reactivate, or create, fact- checking units for content related to the pandemic. In the Ibero-American context, the most critical areas described by previous research are the origin, spread and lethality of the virus, as well as the best practices on health-care, and how both local officials and international organizations managed the pandemic (Ramon-Vegas et al., 2020). In the Chilean experience, the social uprising of October 2019 fostered an ecology of organizations dedicated to fact-checking (independent, university-based or media-based 71 ) . Although not all survived in the months after the uprising (Martínez, n. d.; Núñez-Mussa, 2019), some regained prominence during the pandemic. In fact, at the beginning of 2021, they founded the Association of Fact-Checkers in Chile (Varela, 2021). Those who work on fact-checking do not have the capacity to verify every piece of disinformation or deceptive information that circulates on different platforms and mediums, including instant messaging applications. It is very difficult to dismantle or undo a false or misleading content once it has gone viral (Carrasco-Farré, 2022). Therefore, professional fact-checkers necessarily need to focus their resources and make decisions for editorial approaches on what to pay attention to and, therefore, which contents to check. It has also been shown that the impact on the virality of malicious or false content depends on whether those who spread it are high-profile individuals or public figures. In other words, a false or out-of-context text/video/tweet generates more traffic if shared by an influencer or politician than if it comes from an unknown source (Simon et al., 2020). Global collaborative work has been crucial in identifying hoaxes/disinformation/malicious information in Covid-19 coverage and how these have evolved across different medium s 72 . 71 Some examples are #24Data by TVN, fact-checking by La Tercera, Fast Check, factchecking.cl , Mala Espina and Watchdog, among other initiatives that emerged and remained during the toughest months of news coverage on the pandemic. They addressed only issues related to Covid-19 or have a broader agenda. They publish with varying regularity and address statements made by public figures or check whether viral content is real or manipulated. 72 Like the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) that brings together over a hundred organizations of different sizes and located in different parts of the world and contributes to identifying and verifying the accuracy of content about Covid-19. Available at: https://www.poynter.org/coronavirusfactsalliance/ (Retrieved on August 6 th , 2022). In the Latin American case, it is possible to consult a database of checked content on this platform: https://chequeado.com/latamcoronavirus/. (Retrieved on August 6 th , 2022). In Latin America, the platform https://chequeado.com/latamcoronavirus/ i s a database about fact-checked content (Retrieved on August 6 th , 2022).