THE news that Twitter had deleted 20,000 fake accounts linked to governments last week reminded me of the famous quote: ‘The first casualty, when war comes, is truth’.

How depressing then that at a time when the world needs to pull together to fight a deadly virus there is instead an outbreak of phoney propaganda reminiscent of global conflict when the phrase was first coined.

The social media giant removed thousands of accounts in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Honduras, Indonesia and Serbia that it claimed were being run by governments.

Saudi Arabia, recently criticised for spying on dissidents, had 5350 accounts deleted for ‘amplifying content praising Saudi leadership, and critical of Qatar and Turkish activity in Yemen’.

A report by US-based Coda Story claimed an online disinformation campaign tried to blame Qatar for the global coronavirus pandemic, saying it had known about the virus since 2015!

Now, we all know the tiny Gulf state is surrounded by enemies who have been blockading it since 2017 accusing it of cosying up to Iran and supporting terrorism, which Doha denies.

But this is pushing things a little far.

The claim came from a Saudi-based columnist, Noura Almoteari, who accused Qatar of paying China to ‘grow the virus’ and spread it in order to damage Riyadh’s post oil economy plans as well as the United Arab Emirates’ Expo 2020.

Almoteari coined an Arabic-language hashtag that translated to #Qatar_Is_Corona that was shared by hundreds of Twitter users.

Elsewhere in the Middle East, Egypt’s Minister of Religious Affairs accused the outlawed political party, the Muslim Brotherhood, of trying to spread the coronavirus amongst the armed forces, police, judiciary and the media.

Another Saudi commentator also went on television to accuse Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of trying to spread the virus to other Arab countries.

Iran also got in on the act, claiming there was an international conspiracy surrounding the virus, but Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei did not say who he thought was responsible, only that the epidemic helped provide the opportunity to rehearse a ‘biological defense drill’.

And the country’s president, Hassan Rouhani, called media reports of Iran’s struggle to contain the virus ‘one of the enemy’s plots to bring our country into closure by spreading panic’.

It’s not just in the Middle East that conspiracy theories have abounded.

Thousands of social media accounts linked to Russia claim the US created the coronavirus to ’wage economic war on China’, and in the United States the Republican senator Tom Cotton has been pushing a theory that the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory, rather than appearing among bats in an outdoor market.

Sometimes it’s not a conspiracy theory that’s trotted out, but just ill-informed comment from someone who should know better.

Like when the Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro promoted hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure for Covid-19, when it’s only been used before to treat malaria.

Which brings us to the Misinformer-in-Chief, Donald Trump, who had already accused the media of hyping coronavirus reports which were ‘panicking the markets’.

The US president also promoted the same spurious claims about a panacea for the pandemic that had been spouted by the Brazilian leader.

‘HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game-changers in the history of medicine,’ tweeted the White House. ‘The FDA has moved mountains – Thank you! Hopefully they will BOTH – be out in use IMMEDIATELY. PEOPLE ARE DYING, MOVE FAST’.

Twitter later temporarily banned Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, for saying hydroxychloroquine had a ‘100% effective rate treating Covid-19’.

‘If Trump is for something – Democrats are against it’, said the former New York mayor. ‘They’re ok with with people dying if it means opposing Trump’.

The Giuliani ban was in line with social media giant’s stated moved against anyone pumping out dangerous or misleading information.

Both Trump and Giuliani were slapped down by the Dr Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who said there was only ‘anecdotal evidence’ the drugs could help.

In a report in the LA Times doctors also warned the drugs could potentially cause the fatal condition, cardiac arrthythmia, if prescribed in incorrect doses.

A Twitter spokesman said: ‘Twitter recently announced the expansion of its rules to cover content that could be against public health information provided by official sources and could put people at greater risk of transmitting Covid-19.’ Sadly, it’s not possible to shut down the President’s Twitter feed but rules have been introduced whereby if a ‘world leader does violate Twitter Rules but there is a clear public interest value to keeping the Tweet on the service, we may place it behind a notice that provides context about the violation and allows people to click through should they wish to see the content’.

So, when someone like Fox News host Laura Ingraham says hydroxychloroquine had shown ‘very promising results’ and talks about its ‘Lazarus’ effects, her Tweet can be deleted.

But not when it comes from the leader of the free world who, frankly, should know better and act more responsibly.

Anthony Harwood is a former foreign editor of the Daily Mail.