This 30,000-person online chat tells you where to buy masks during the coronavirus outbreak

Hong Kongers flock to 2-week-old Telegram channel and homespun website for crowdsourced coronavirus information

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People line up to purchase protective masks in Hong Kong’s Kowloon Bay district on February 5. (Picture: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg)

Karen Chiu

Published: 5:58pm, 11 Feb 2020Updated: 3:40pm, 13 Feb 2020

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

When Tang sensed that the stock of face masks in Hong Kong was starting to dwindle two weeks ago, he saw that something else was also in short supply: Information about where to buy them and how much they cost. The deadly coronavirus outbreak has set off a scramble for the much sought-after commodity, creating lines of thousands outside shops and overwhelming shopping agents who help customers ship back overseas purchases.

Tang, a college sophomore who asked to be identified by his surname, had an idea: What if someone pulled together that information and shared it online in an organized way? He polled people about the plan on LIHKG, an anonymous forum similar to Reddit, where his post quickly got more than 100 upvotes. “I thought LIHKG is probably the easiest way to solicit public opinion,” he said. The next day, he created a Telegram channel called “Masks and Hygiene Products Supplies Information.”

The channel gives participants one simple task: Whenever you pass by a pharmacy, go in and see if there are any masks for sale. If the answer is positive, submit the information to the channel via a Telegram bot. It also encourages people to report scams.

The idea took off within days, especially after it was highlighted in other popular Telegram channels that share coronavirus-related information, such as HKGETV. Today, Tang’s channel has more than 35,000 subscribers receiving dozens of updates on their phones each day.

Other grassroots information sharing efforts have also sprung up online in Hong Kong. Since the city confirmed its first coronavirus infection in late January, more than three dozen additional cases have been reported, including one death. Computer engineer Nandi Wong and his friends saw that people were looking for a one-stop site to find all the information they wanted to know about the spreading disease.

The idea behind the website wars.vote4.hk emerged from a Telegram group, Wong told Abacus. It’s made up of members who met through g0vhk, a platform of volunteers who aim to combine open source programming and crowdsourcing to make information more transparent to the public.