China’s abrupt easing of its zero-COVID policy last week has led to a spike in cases and rising fears of the virus. Over the last three years, the authority has used big data to monitor the movement of people and thus control the spread of the virus. Now that the government is gradually undoing some of these tech-enabled restrictions, individuals are turning to private tech firms to manage the pandemic.
At the dawn of the pandemic in 2020, DXY, an online community for health professionals, swiftly introduced a fact-checking feature to fight COVID disinformation. But such grassroots efforts soon faded into the background as COVID cases remained rare in China and treatments happened at centralized, government-directed facilities.
The C …
