More than a century ago, about 50 million people died from the 1918 flu pandemic, which affected a third of the global population. At that time, challenges limited medical practice and public health interventions, and information sharing only took place by telephone, mail or direct person-to-person communication. Currently, the world is experiencing a new pandemic, COVID-19, which is affecting human health and threatening millions of lives. At the same time, the internet has become an important global source of health information [1], and communication is conducted over giant digital social media platforms capable of sharing information with great transmission speed, reach and penetration, and thus reaching billions of people to help fight the spread of the new coronavirus [1, 2]. However, misuse of the internet poses a risk to public health, so governments should develop strategies to regulate health information on the internet, but without censoring the population [3]. The internet exerts a powerful influence on news. It is used to transfer government power to society, which today is a society that is pressing governments to make decisions, sometimes based on false news, or “Fake News.” In this sense, the biggest problem with health information on the internet is that valid and reliable sources are hard to find.

Due to the importance of the internet for communication and health research, several systems and tools for evaluating the information available online have been developed. Indicators applied to a website can provide an index of the quality of its informational content. For example, the most widely used scoring systems are the Health on the Net Foundation Code of Conduct (HONcode), the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) benchmarks and the DISCERN instrument. From this perspective, a recent study evaluated the quality and readability of online information about COVID-19 on the top 110 sites selected by Google Trends in English and Spanish; it revealed that only 1.8% of them have the HONcode seal. According to the JAMA benchmark, 39.1% of these sites do not meet any of the criteria required by this tool, and only 10.0% of the sites meet the four quality criteria required by JAMA. And based on the DISCERN scores, 70.0% of the sites were classified with a low score, and none had a high score [1]. During the Munich Security Conference, held on February 15, 2020, the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated that “we are not just fighting an epidemic; we are fighting an infodemic”—an information epidemic [4].