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As it attempts to combat health disinformation, YouTube is allowing certain healthcare professionals to apply for verification. Starting Thursday, licensed healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses and mental health professionals can apply to make their channels eligible for YouTube’s health product features, which labels them as an authoritative source on a medical topic. It also will promote their videos at the top of someone’s search. (Perna, 10/27)

Twitter will soon roll out prompts in users' timelines reminding them final results may not come on Election Day. They're all examples of a strategy known as "prebunking" that's become an important pillar of how tech companies, nonprofits, and government agencies respond to misleading and false claims about elections, public health, and other hot-button issues. (Bond, 10/28)

The Instagram headline was pithy and alarming: “Head of Pfizer Research: Covid Vaccine is Female Sterilization.” And the report, from a murky source, could have had real-world consequences, coming in 2020, just as the U.S. rolled out the first vaccines to combat the coronavirus pandemic. That made the story a perfect tool for an educator trying to teach high school students how to separate fact from fiction — a survival skill in a culture drowning in a tsunami of information. (Rainey, 10/26)

A new study in PLoS One conducted by Ohio State and University of Kent researchers suggests that people who believe in COVID-19 conspiracy theories are at a greater risk of believing in other conspiracies. The authors of the study said believing COVID-19 was a "hoax" was a gateway to other conspiracies, including the belief that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election. (10/27)

The top Republican on the Senate health committee said in a report on Thursday that the coronavirus pandemic was most likely caused by a laboratory incident in China. The report offered little new evidence, however, and was disputed by many scientists, including those whose research suggests that the outbreak originated instead at a live animal market. The report, released by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, grew out of a joint inquiry with the committee’s Democratic chairwoman that proponents of the effort hoped would add a measure of bipartisan credibility to a highly charged debate. (Mueller and Zimmer, 10/27)

Dr. Sherri Tenpenny, a osteopathic doctor from Northeast Ohio who went viral for saying that vaccines cause magnetism, is under investigation by the Ohio State Medical Board. (Wu, 10/27)