Fake news
It has been increasingly criticized, due in part to Trump's misuse, with the British government deciding to avoid the term, as it is "poorly defined" and "conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference".
Because new misinformation emerges frequently, researchers have stated that one solution to address this is to inoculate the population against accepting fake news in general (a process termed prebunking), instead of continually debunking the same repeated lies.
[1][24] In the context of the United States of America and its election processes in the 2010s, fake news generated considerable controversy and argument, with some commentators defining concern over it as moral panic or mass hysteria and others worried about damage done to public trust.
In a 1995 interview with Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, he said, "Let's say I call myself the Institute for Something-or-other and I decide to promote a spurious treatise saying the Jews were entirely responsible for the Second World War, and the Holocaust didn't happen, and it goes out there on the Internet and is available on the same terms as any piece of historical research which has undergone peer review and so on.
[18] Considerable research is underway regarding strategies for confronting and suppressing fake news of all types, in particular disinformation, which is the deliberate spreading of false narratives for political purposes, or for destabilising social cohesion in targeted communities.
American philosopher Andy Norman, in his book Mental Immunity, argues for a new science of cognitive immunology as a practical guide to resisting bad ideas (such as conspiracy theories), as well as transcending petty tribalism.
It has great potential for building public resilience ('immunity') against misinformation and fake news, for example, in tackling science denialism, risky health behaviours, and emotionally manipulative marketing and political messaging.
[209] Deepfakes have garnered widespread attention for their uses in creating fake news (notably political), but also child sexual abuse material, celebrity pornographic videos, revenge porn, hoaxes, bullying, and financial fraud.
Will Oremus of Slate wrote that because supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump had redefined the word fake news to refer to mainstream media opposed to them, "it makes sense for Facebook—and others—to cede the term to the right-wing trolls who have claimed it as their own.
[232] In the 2016 American election, Russia paid over 1,000 Internet trolls to circulate fake news and disinformation about Hillary Clinton; they also created social media accounts that resembled voters in important swing states, spreading influential political standpoints.
[235][236] In February 2019, Glenn Greenwald wrote that cybersecurity company New Knowledge "was caught just six weeks ago engaging in a massive scam to create fictitious Russian troll accounts on Facebook and Twitter in order to claim that the Kremlin was working to defeat Democratic Senate nominee Doug Jones in Alabama.
[282] During the ten-year period preceding 2016, France was witness to an increase in popularity of far-right alternative news sources called the fachosphere (facho referring to fascist); known as the extreme right on the Internet [fr].
[283] According to sociologist Antoine Bevort, citing data from Alexa Internet rankings, the most consulted political websites in France in 2016 included Égalité et Réconciliation, François Desouche [fr], and Les Moutons Enragés.
[296] In early April 2020, Berlin politician Andreas Geisel alleged that a shipment of 200,000 N95 masks that it had ordered from American producer 3M's China facility were intercepted in Bangkok and diverted to the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"[300] Hungary's illiberal and populist prime minister Viktor Orbán has cast George Soros, financier and philanthropist, a Hungarian-born Holocaust survivor, as the mastermind of a plot to undermine the country's sovereignty, replace native Hungarians with immigrants and destroy traditional values.
On March 16, 2020, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis signed an emergency decree, giving authorities the power to remove, report or close websites spreading "fake news" about the COVID-19 pandemic, with no opportunity to appeal.
[369] During the 2014 presidential election, the eventual winning candidate Joko Widodo became a target of a smear campaign by Prabowo Subianto's supporters that falsely claimed he was the child of Indonesian Communist Party members, of Chinese descent, and a Christian.
[378] Inflaming ethnic and political tensions is potentially deadly in Indonesia, with its recent incidences of domestic terrorism, and its long and bloody history of anti-communist, anti-Christian and anti-Chinese pogroms cultivated by Suharto's U.S.-backed right-wing dictatorship.
[398] According to media scholar Jonathan Corpus Ong, Duterte's presidential campaign is regarded as the patient zero in the current era of disinformation, having preceded widespread global coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian trolls.
[408] In 2017, the Ministry of Communications and Information set up Factually, a website intended to debunk false rumors regarding issues of public interest such as the environment, housing and transport,[409] while in 2018, the Parliament of Singapore formed a Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods to consider new legislation to tackle fake news.
Commencing on October 2, 2019, the law is designed specifically to allow authorities to respond to fake news or false information through a graduated process of enforcing links to fact-checking statements, censorship of website or assets on social media platforms, and criminal charges.
[419] On November 27, 2018, prosecutors raided the house of Gyeonggi Province governor Lee Jae-myung amid suspicions that his wife used a pseudonymous Twitter handle to spread fake news about President Moon Jae-in and other political rivals of her husband.
[420][421] Taiwan's leaders, including President Tsai Ing-wen and Premier William Lai, accused China's troll army of spreading "fake news" via social media to support candidates more sympathetic to Beijing ahead of the 2018 Taiwanese local elections.
According to the news updated paper from the Time World in regards the global threat to free speech, the Taiwanese government has reformed its policy on education and it will include "media literacy" as one part of school curriculum for the students.
In 2015, reporter Tai Nalon resigned from her position at Brazilian newspaper Folha de S Paulo in order to start the first fact-checking website in Brazil, called Aos Fatos ('To The Facts').
[446] Between 2017 and 2019, the hashtag #SalarioRosa 'Pink Salary for Vulnerability' was associated with political figure Alfredo del Mazo Maza and pushed to the top of Twitter's trending list through astroturfing, creating an appearance of grassroots support.
The website is led by Gevorg Grigoryan, a doctor who has been critical of the Armenian government's health ministry and its vaccine programmes, and has a history of anti-LGBT statements, including remarks posted on Facebook in which he called for gay people to be burned.
[476][477][478][479][480] The United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been funding non-profit organizations, think tanks and contributors of journalism, including Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Middle East Forum (MEF), which further paid journalists spreading fake information to defame countries like Qatar.
In 2020, a researcher at FDD, Benjamin Weinthal, and fellow at MEF, Jonathan Spyer, contributed an article on Fox News to promote a negative image of Qatar, in an attempt to stain its diplomatic relations with the United States.
The inquiry looked at several major areas in Australia to find audiences most vulnerable to fake news, by considering the impact on traditional journalism, and by evaluating the liability of online advertisers and by regulating the spreading the hoaxes.
