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Fake news is false or misleading information presented as
news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...
. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person or entity, or making money through advertising revenue.Schlesinger, Robert (April 14, 2017)
"Fake news in reality"
'' U.S. News & World Report''.
Although false news has always been spread throughout history, the term "fake news" was first used in the 1890s when sensational reports in newspapers were common."The real story of 'fake news': The term seems to have emerged around the end of the 19th century"
Merriam-Webster Merriam-Webster, Inc. is an American company that publishes reference books and is especially known for its dictionaries. It is the oldest dictionary publisher in the United States. In 1831, George and Charles Merriam founded the company as ...
. Retrieved October 13, 2017.
Nevertheless, the term does not have a fixed definition and has been applied broadly to any type of false information. It's also been used by high-profile people to apply to any news unfavourable to them. Further, disinformation involves spreading false information with harmful intent and is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. In some definitions, fake news includes
satirical Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...
articles misinterpreted as genuine, and articles that employ sensationalist or clickbait headlines that are not supported in the text. Because of this diversity of types of false news, researchers are beginning to favour information disorder as a more neutral and informative term. The prevalence of fake news has increased with the recent rise of social media, especially the Facebook News Feed, and this misinformation is gradually seeping into the mainstream media. Several factors have been implicated in the spread of fake news, such as political polarization, post-truth politics,
motivated reasoning Motivated reasoning is the phenomenon in cognitive science and social psychology in which emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. It is the "tendency to ...
,
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
, and social media algorithms. Fake news can reduce the impact of real news by competing with it. For example, a
BuzzFeed News ''BuzzFeed News'' is an American news website published by BuzzFeed. It has published a number of high-profile scoops, including the Steele dossier, for which it was heavily criticized, and the FinCEN Files. Since its establishment in 2011, it ...
analysis found that the top fake news stories about the
2016 U.S. presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial United States presidential election, presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican Party (United States), Republican ticket of businessman Donald ...
received more engagement on Facebook than top stories from major media outlets. It also particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage. The term has at times been used to cast doubt upon credible news, and former U.S. president Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing the term by using it to describe any negative press coverage of himself. 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". Multiple strategies for fighting fake news are currently being actively researched, for various types of fake news. Politicians in certain autocratic and democratic countries have demanded effective self-regulation and legally-enforced regulation in varying forms, of social media and web search engines. On an individual scale, the ability to actively confront false narratives, as well as taking care when sharing information can reduce the prevalence of falsified information. However, it has been noted that this is vulnerable to the effects of
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
,
motivated reasoning Motivated reasoning is the phenomenon in cognitive science and social psychology in which emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. It is the "tendency to ...
and other cognitive biases that can seriously distort reasoning, particularly in dysfunctional and polarised societies.
Inoculation theory Inoculation theory is a social psychological/communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be protected against persuasion or influence in much the same way a body can be protected against disease–for example, through pre-exp ...
has been proposed as a method to render individuals resistant to undesirable narratives. Because new misinformation pops up all the time, it is much better timewise to inoculate the population against accepting fake news in general (a process termed "prebunking"), instead of continually debunking the same repeated lies.


Defining fake news

Fake news is false or misleading information presented as
news News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different Media (communication), media: word of mouth, printing, Mail, postal systems, broadcasting, Telecommunications, electronic communication, or through the tes ...
. The term is a neologism (a new or re-purposed expression that is entering the language, driven by culture or technology changes). Fake news, or fake news websites, have no basis in fact, but are presented as being factually accurate. Fake news has also been called junk news, pseudo-news, alternative facts, false news, hoax news and bullshit. National Endowment for Democracy defined fake news as: " sleading content found on the internet, especially on social media ..Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages gaming the platform for advertising revenue." And distinguished it from disinformation: " ke news does not meet the definition of disinformation or propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a larger agenda." Media scholar Nolan Higdon has defined fake news as "false or misleading content presented as news and communicated in formats spanning spoken, written, printed, electronic, and digital communication. Higdon has argued that the definition of fake news has been applied too narrowly to select mediums and political ideologies. While most definitions focus strictly on content accuracy and format, current research indicates that the rhetorical structure of the content might play a significant role in the perception of fake news. Michael Radutzky, a producer of CBS ''
60 Minutes ''60 Minutes'' is an American television news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Debuting in 1968, the program was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard, who chose to set it apart from other news programs by using a unique styl ...
'', said his show considers fake news to be "stories that are probably false, have enormous traction opular appealin the culture, and are consumed by millions of people." These stories are not only found in politics, but also in areas like vaccination, stock values and nutrition. He did not include news that is "invoked by politicians against the media for stories that they don't like or for comments that they don't like" as fake news. Guy Campanile, also a ''60 Minutes'' producer said, "What we are talking about are stories that are fabricated out of thin air. By most measures, deliberately, and by any definition, that's a lie." The intent and purpose of fake news is important. In some cases, what appears to be fake news may be news satire, which uses exaggeration and introduces non-factual elements that are intended to amuse or make a point, rather than to deceive.
Propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
can also be fake news. 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. It particularly has the potential to undermine trust in serious media coverage generally. The term has also been used to cast doubt upon credible mainstream media. In January 2017, the United Kingdom House of Commons commenced a parliamentary inquiry into the "growing phenomenon of fake news". In 2016,
Politifact PolitiFact.com is an American nonprofit project operated by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, with offices there and in Washington, D.C. It began in 2007 as a project of the ''Tampa Bay Times'' (then the ''St. Petersburg Times'' ...
selected fake news as their Lie of the Year. There was so much of this in this United States election year, won by President Donald Trump, that no single lie stood out, so the generic term was chosen. Also in 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected
post-truth Post-truth is a term that refers to the 21st century widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that explain the historically specific cause ...
as its word of the year and defined it as the state of affairs when "objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief." Fake news is the boldest sign of a post-truth society. When we can't agree on basic facts—or even that there are such things as facts—how do we talk to each other?


Roots

The term "fake news" gained importance with the electoral context in Western Europe and North America. It is determined by
fraud In law, fraud is intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid the fraud or recover monetary compens ...
ulent content in news format and its velocity. According to Bounegru, Gray, Venturini and Mauri, a lie ''becomes'' fake news when it "is picked up by dozens of other blogs, retransmitted by hundreds of websites, cross-posted over thousands of social media accounts and read by hundreds of thousands". The evolving nature of online business models encourages the production of information that is "click-worthy" and independent of its accuracy. The nature of trust depends on the assumptions that non-institutional forms of communication are freer from power and more able to report information that
mainstream media In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.Chomsky, Noam, ''"What makes mai ...
are perceived as unable or unwilling to reveal. Declines in confidence in much traditional media and expert knowledge have created fertile grounds for alternative, and often obscure sources of information to appear as authoritative and credible. This ultimately leaves users confused about basic facts.


Popularity and viral spread

Fake news has become popular with various media outlets and platforms. Researchers at
Pew Research Center The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank (referring to itself as a "fact tank") based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the w ...
discovered that over 60% of Americans access news through social media compared to traditional newspaper and magazines. With the popularity of social media, individuals can easily access fake news or similar content. One study looks at the number of fake news articles being accessed by viewers in 2016 and found that each individual was exposed to at least one or more fake news articles daily. As a result, fake news is omnipresent among the viewer population and results in its ability to spread across the internet. Fake news has the tendency to become viral among the public. With the presence of social media platforms like Twitter, it becomes easier for false information to diffuse quickly. Research has found that false political information tends to spread "three times" faster than other false news. On Twitter, false tweets have a much higher chance of being retweeted than truthful tweets. More so, it is humans who are responsible in disseminating false news and information as opposed to bots and click-farms. The tendency for humans to spread false information has to do with human behavior; according to research, humans are attracted to events and information that are surprising and new, and, as a result, causes high-arousal in the brain. Besides, motivated reasoning was found to play a role in the spread of fake news. This ultimately leads humans to retweet or share false information, which are usually characterized with clickbait and eye-catching titles. This prevents people from stopping to verify the information. As a result, massive online communities form around a piece of false news without any prior fact checking or verification of the veracity of the information. Of particular concern regarding viral spread of fake news is the role of super-spreaders. Brian Stelter, the anchor of Reliable Sources at CNN, has documented the systematic long-term two-way feedback that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News presenters. The resultant conditioning of outrage in their large audience against government and the mainstream media, has proved a highly successful money-spinner for the TV network.


Its damaging effects

In 2017, the inventor of the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...
claimed that fake news was one of the three most significant new disturbing Internet trends that must first be resolved, if the Internet is to be capable of truly "serving humanity." The other two new disturbing trends that Berners-Lee described as threatening the Internet were the recent surge in the use of the Internet by governments for both citizen-surveillance purposes, and for cyber-warfare purposes. Author Terry Pratchett, previously a journalist and press officer, was among the first to be concerned about the spread of fake news on the Internet. 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. There's a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net. It's all there: there's no way of finding out whether this stuff has any bottom to it or whether someone has just made it up". Gates was optimistic and disagreed, saying that authorities on the Net would index and check facts and reputations in a much more sophisticated way than in print. But it was Pratchett who more accurately predicted how the internet would propagate and legitimize fake news. When the internet first became accessible for public use in the 1990s, its main purpose was for the seeking and accessing of information. As fake news was introduced to the Internet, this made it difficult for some people to find truthful information. The impact of fake news has become a worldwide phenomenon. Fake news is often spread through the use of fake news websites, which, in order to gain credibility, specialize in creating attention-grabbing news, which often
impersonate An impersonator is someone who imitates or copies the behavior or actions of another. There are many reasons for impersonating someone: *Entertainment: An entertainer impersonates a celebrity, generally for entertainment, and makes fun of ...
well-known news sources. Jestin Coler, who said he does it for "fun", has indicated that he earned US$10,000 per month from advertising on his fake news websites. Research has shown that fake news hurts social media and online based outlets far worse than traditional print and TV outlets. After a survey was conducted, it was found that 58% of people had less trust in social media news stories as opposed to 24% of people in mainstream media after learning about fake news.


Types of fake news

Claire Wardle of '' First Draft News'', in preliminary findings, identifies seven types of fake news: # satire or parody ("no intention to cause harm but has potential to fool") # false connection ("when headlines, visuals or captions don't support the content") # misleading content ("misleading use of information to frame an issue or an individual") # false context ("when genuine content is shared with false contextual information") # impostor content ("when genuine sources are impersonated" with false, made-up sources) # manipulated content ("when genuine information or imagery is manipulated to deceive", as with a "doctored" photo) # fabricated content ("new content is 100% false, designed to deceive and do harm") Scientific denialism is another potential explanatory type of fake news, defined as the act of producing false or misleading facts to unconsciously support strong pre-existing beliefs.


Criticism of the term

In 2017, Wardle announced she has now rejected the phrase "fake news" and "censors it in conversation", finding it "woefully inadequate" to describe the issues. She now speaks of "information disorder" and "information pollution", and distinguishes between three overarching types of information content problems: # Mis-information (misinformation): false information disseminated without harmful intent. # Dis-information (disinformation): false information created and shared by people with harmful intent. # Mal-information (malinformation): the sharing of "genuine" information with the intent to cause harm. Disinformation is the most insidious type because of the harmful intent. For example, it is sometimes generated and propagated by hostile foreign actors, particularly during elections. Because of the manner in which former president Donald Trump has co-opted the term, '' The Washington Post'' media columnist Margaret Sullivan has warned fellow journalists that "It's time to retire the tainted term 'fake news'. Though the term hasn't been around long, its meaning already is lost." By late 2018, the term "fake news" had become ''verboten'' and U.S. journalists, including the Poynter Institute were asking for apologies and for product retirements from companies using the term. In October 2018, the British government decided that the term "fake news" will no longer be used in official documents because it is "a poorly-defined and misleading term that conflates a variety of false information, from genuine error through to foreign interference in democratic processes." This followed a recommendation by the House of Commons' Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee to avoid the term. However, recent reviews of fake news still regard it as a useful broad construct, equivalent in meaning to fabricated news, as separate from related types of problematic news content, such as hyperpartisan news, this latter being a particular source of political polarization. Therefore, researchers are beginning to favour "information disorder" as a more neutral and informative term. For example, the Commission of Inquiry by the Aspen Institute (2021) has adopted the term Information Disorder in its investgative report.


Identification

According to an academic library guide, a number of specific aspects of fake news may help to identify it and thus avoid being unduly influenced. These include: clickbait,
propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
, satire/ parody, sloppy journalism, misleading headings,
manipulation Manipulation may refer to: * Manipulation (psychology) - the action of manipulating someone in a clever or unscrupulous way * Crowd manipulation - use of crowd psychology to direct the behavior of a crowd toward a specific action ::*Internet mani ...
,
rumor A rumor (American English), or rumour (British English; see spelling differences; derived from Latin:rumorem - noise), is "a tall tale of explanations of events circulating from person to person and pertaining to an object, event, or issue in p ...
mill, misinformation, media bias,
audience bias An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or ...
, and content farms. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) published a summary in diagram form ''(pictured at right)'' to assist people in recognizing fake news. Its main points are: # Consider the source (to understand its mission and purpose) # Read beyond the headline (to understand the whole story) # Check the authors (to see if they are real and credible) # Assess the supporting sources (to ensure they support the claims) # Check the date of publication (to see if the story is relevant and up to date) # Ask if it is a joke (to determine if it is meant to be satire) # Review your own biases (to see if they are affecting your judgment) # Ask experts (to get confirmation from independent people with knowledge). The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), launched in 2015, supports international collaborative efforts in fact-checking, provides training, and has published a code of principles. In 2017 it introduced an application and vetting process for journalistic organisations. One of IFCN's verified signatories, the independent, not-for-profit media journal ''The Conversation'', created a short animation explaining its fact checking process, which involves "extra checks and balances, including
blind peer review Peer review is the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competencies as the producers of the work (peers). It functions as a form of self-regulation by qualified members of a profession within the relevant field. Peer review ...
by a second academic expert, additional scrutiny and editorial oversight". Beginning in the 2017 school year, children in Taiwan study a new curriculum designed to teach critical reading of propaganda and the evaluation of sources. Called "media literacy", the course provides training in journalism in the new information society.


Online identification

Fake news has become increasingly prevalent over the last few years, with over 100 misleading articles and rumors spread regarding the
2016 United States presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket ...
alone. These fake news articles tend to come from satirical news websites or individual websites with an incentive to propagate false information, either as clickbait or to serve a purpose. Since they typically hope to intentionally promote incorrect information, such articles are quite difficult to detect. Media scholar Nolan Higdon has argued that a critical media literacy education focused on teaching students how to detect fake news is the most effective way for mitigating the pernicious influence of propaganda. In his book "The Anatomy of Fake News: A Critical News Education," Higdon offers a ten-step guide for detecting fake news. When identifying a source of information, one must look at many attributes, including but not limited to the content of the email and social media engagements. Specifically, the language is typically more inflammatory in fake news than real articles, in part because the purpose is to confuse and generate clicks. Furthermore, modeling techniques such as
n-gram In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an ''n''-gram (sometimes also called Q-gram) is a contiguous sequence of ''n'' items from a given sample of text or speech. The items can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or b ...
encodings and
bag of words The bag-of-words model is a simplifying representation used in natural language processing and information retrieval (IR). In this model, a text (such as a sentence or a document) is represented as the bag (multiset) of its words, disregarding g ...
have served as other linguistic techniques to determine the legitimacy of a news source. On top of that, researchers have determined that visual-based cues also play a factor in categorizing an article, specifically some features can be designed to assess if a picture was legitimate and provides more clarity on the news. There is also many social context features that can play a role, as well as the model of spreading the news. Websites such as " Snopes" try to detect this information manually, while certain universities are trying to build mathematical models to do this themselves.


Tackling and suppression strategies

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. Multiple strategies need to be tailored to individual types of fake news, depending for example on whether the fake news is deliberately produced, or rather unintentionally or unconsciously produced. Considerable resources are available to combat fake news. Regular summaries of current events and research are available on the websites and email newsletters of a number of support organisations. Particularly notable are First Draft (in transition to the Information Futures Lab, School of Public Health, Brown University) and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism (Harvard University). Journalist Bernard Keane, in his book on misinformation in Australia, classifies strategies for dealing with fake news into three categories: (1) the liar (the perpetrator of fake news), (2) the conduit (the method of carriage of the fake news), and (3) the lied-to (the recipient of the fake news).


Strategies regarding the perpetrator


Promotion of facts over emotions

American philosopher of science Lee McIntyre, who has researched the scientific attitude and
post-truth Post-truth is a term that refers to the 21st century widespread documentation of and concern about disputes over public truth claims. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that explain the historically specific cause ...
, has explained the importance of factual basis of society, in preference to one in which emotions replace facts. A disturbing modern example of this is the symbiotic relationship that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News, in which the conspiracy beliefs of Fox hosts were repeated shortly after by Trump (and vice versa) in a continuous feedback loop. This served to promote outrage, and thus to condition and radicalise conservative Republican Fox listeners into cult-like Trump supporters, and to demonise and gaslight Democrat opponents, the mainstream media, and elites generally. A key strategy to counter fake news based on emotions rather than facts is to flood the information space, particularly social media and web browser search results with factual news, thus drowning out misinformation. A key factor in establishing facts is the role of
critical thinking Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement. The subject is complex; several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis ...
, the principles of which should be imbedded more comprehensively within all school and university education courses.
Critical thinking Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement. The subject is complex; several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis ...
is a style of thinking in which citizens, prior to subsequent problem solving and decision-making, have learned to pay attention to the content of written words, and to judge their accuracy and fairness, among other worthy attributes.


Individual counteraction

Individuals should confront misinformation when spotted in online blogs, even if briefly, otherwise they fester and proliferate. The person being responded to is probably resistant to change, but many other bloggers may read and learn from an evidence-based reply. A brutal example was learned by John Kerry during the US 2004 Presidential election campaign against George W. Bush. The right-wing
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Swift Vets and POWs for Truth, formerly known as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT), was a political group (527 group) of United States Swift boat veterans and former prisoners of war of the Vietnam War, formed during the 2004 presiden ...
falsely claimed that Kerry showed cowardice during the Vietnam War. Kerry refused to dignify the claims with a response for two weeks, despite being pummeled in the media, and this action contributed to his marginal loss to Bush. We should never assume any claim is too outrageous to be believed. However, caution applies regarding over-zealous debunking of fake news. It is often unwise to draw attention to fake news published on a low-impact website or blog (one that has few followers). If this fake news is debunked by a journalist in a high-profile place such as '' The New York Times'' , knowledge of the false claim spreads widely, and more people overall will end up believing it, ignoring or denying the debunk. Research is needed to establish the prevalence of this effect, as well as its potential relationship to similar constructs such as the backfire effect, the
Streisand effect Attempts to hide, remove, or censor information often have the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information via the Internet. This is called the Streisand effect. It is named after American singer and actress Barbra Streis ...
and - more broadly -
psychological reactance In psychology, reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit one's ...
.


Strategies regarding carriers


Regulation of social media

Internet companies with threatened credibility have developed new responses to limit fake news and reduce financial incentives for its proliferation. A valid criticism of social media companies is that users are presented with content that they will like, based on previous viewing preferences. An undesirable side-effect is that
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
is enhanced in users, which in turn enhances the acceptance of fake news. To reduce this bias, effective self-regulation and legally-enforced regulation of social media (notably Facebook and Twitter) and web search engines (notably Google) need to become more effective and innovative. Media scholar Nolan Higdon argues that relying on tech companies to solve issues with false information will exacerbate the problem. Tech companies lack an incentive for solving the problem because they benefit financially from the proliferation of fake news. Their utilization of data collected is one of the strongest forces empowering fake news producers. Rather than government regulation or industry censorship, Higdon argues for the introduction of critical news literacy education to American education. Financial disincentives to tackle fake news also apply to some mainstream media. Brian Stelter, the anchor of Reliable Sources at CNN, has provided a substantial critique of the symbiotic but damaging relationship that developed between President Donald Trump and Fox News, which has proved an extraordinarily successful money-spinner for the Murdoch-owned TV network, despite this being a super-spreader of fake news.


General strategy

The general approach by these tech companies is the detection of problematic news via human fact-checking and automated artificial intelligence (machine learning, natural language processing and network analysis). Tech companies have utilized two basic counter-strategies: down-ranking fake news and warning messages. In the first approach, problematic content is down-ranked by the search algorithm, for example, to the second or later pages on a Google search, so that users are less likely to see it (most users just scan the first page of search results). However, two problems arise. One is that truth is not black-and-white, and fact-checkers often disagree on how to classify the content included in computer training sets, running the risk of false positives and unjustified censorship. Also, fake news often evolves rapidly, and therefore identifiers of misinformation may be ineffective in the future. The second approach involves attaching warnings to content that professional fact-checkers have found to be false. Much evidence indicates that corrections and warnings do produce reduced misperceptions and sharing. Despite some early evidence that fact-checking could backfire, recent research has shown that these backfire effects are extremely uncommon. But an important problem is that professional fact-checking is not scalable – it can take substantial time and effort to investigate each particular claim. Thus, many (if not most) false claims never get fact-checked. Also, the process is slow, and a warning may miss the period of peak viral spreading. Further, warnings are typically only attached to blatantly false news, rather than to biased coverage of events that actually occurred. A third approach is to place more emphasis on reliable sources such as Wikipedia, as well as mainstream media (for example, '' The New York Times'' and '' The Wall Street Journal''), and science communication publications (for example, Scientific American and The Conversation). However, this approach has led to mixed results, as hyperpartisan commentary and
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
is found even in these sources (the media has both news and opinion pages). In addition, some sections of the community completely reject scientific commentary. A fourth approach is to ban or specifically target so-called super-spreaders of fake news from social media.


Fact-checking

During the 2016 United States presidential election, the creation and coverage of fake news increased substantially. This resulted in a widespread
response Response may refer to: *Call and response (music), musical structure *Reaction (disambiguation) *Request–response **Output (computing), Output or response, the result of telecommunications input *Response (liturgy), a line answering a versicle ...
to combat the spread of fake news. The volume and reluctance of fake news websites to respond to fact-checking organizations has posed a problem to inhibiting the spread of fake news through fact checking alone. In an effort to reduce the effects of fake news, fact-checking websites, including
Snopes.com ''Snopes'' , formerly known as the ''Urban Legends Reference Pages'', is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source ...
and
FactCheck.org FactCheck.org is a nonprofit website that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in Politics of the United States, U.S. politics by providing original research on misinformation and hoaxes. It is a project of the Annenberg Public Po ...
, have posted guides to spotting and avoiding fake news websites. Social media sites and search engines, such as Facebook and Google, received criticism for facilitating the spread of fake news. Both of these corporations have taken measures to explicitly prevent the spread of fake news; critics, however, believe more action is needed.


Facebook

After the 2016 American election and the run-up to the German election, Facebook began labeling and warning of inaccurate news and partnered with independent
fact-checkers Fact-checking is the process of verifying factual information, in order to promote the veracity and correctness of reporting. Fact-checking can be conducted before (''ante hoc'') or after (''post hoc'') the text is published or otherwise dissem ...
to label inaccurate news, warning readers before sharing it. After a story is flagged as disputed, it will be reviewed by the third-party fact-checkers. Then, if it has been proven to be a fake news story, the post cannot be turned into an ad or promoted. Artificial intelligence is one of the more recent technologies being developed in the United States and Europe to recognize and eliminate fake news through algorithms. In 2017, Facebook targeted 30,000 accounts related to the spread of misinformation regarding the
French presidential election Presidential elections in France determine who will serve as President of France and Co-Prince of Andorra for the French side for the next five years. Until 2002, the elections were held every seven years. They are always held on a Sunday. Si ...
. In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Facebook found that troll farms from North Macedonia and the Philippines pushed coronavirus disinformation. The publisher that used contents from these farms were banned from the platform.


Google

In March 2018, Google launched Google News Initiative (GNI) to fight the spread of fake news. It launched GNI under the belief that quality journalism and identifying truth online is crucial. GNI has three goals: "to elevate and strengthen quality journalism, evolve business models to drive sustainable growth and empower news organizations through technological innovation". To achieve the first goal, Google created the Disinfo Lab, which combats the spread of fake news during crucial times such as elections or breaking news. The company is also working to adjust its systems to display more trustworthy content during times of breaking news. To make it easier for users to subscribe to media publishers, Google created Subscribe with Google. Additionally, they have created a dashboard, News Consumer Insights that allows news organizations to better understand their audiences using data and analytics. Google will spend $300 million through 2021 on these efforts, among others, to combat fake news. In November 2020, YouTube (owned by Google) suspended news outlet One America News Network (OANN) for a week for spreading misinformation on coronavirus. The outlet has violated YouTube's policy multiple times. A video that falsely promoted a guaranteed cure to the virus has been deleted from the channel.


Legal and criminal sanctions in general

The use of anonymously hosted fake news websites has made it difficult to prosecute sources of fake news for
libel Defamation is the act of communicating to a third party false statements about a person, place or thing that results in damage to its reputation. It can be spoken (slander) or written (libel). It constitutes a tort or a crime. The legal defini ...
. Numerous countries have created laws in an attempt to regulate or prosecute harmful misinformation more generally than just with a focus on tech companies. In numerous countries, people have been arrested for allegedly spreading fake news about the COVID-19 pandemic. Algerian lawmakers passed a law criminalising "fake news" deemed harmful to "public order and state security". The
Turkish Interior Ministry The Ministry of Interior or Ministry of the Interior or Interior Ministry ( tr, İçişleri Bakanlığı lit. Ministry of Internal Affairs) is a government ministry of the Republic of Turkey, responsible for interior security affairs in Turkey. ...
has been arresting social media users whose posts were "targeting officials and spreading panic and fear by suggesting the virus had spread widely in Turkey and that officials had taken insufficient measures". Iran's military said 3600 people have been arrested for "spreading rumors" about COVID-19 in the country. In Cambodia, some individuals who expressed concerns about the spread of COVID-19 have been arrested on fake news charges. The United Arab Emirates have introduced criminal penalties for the spread of misinformation and rumours related to the outbreak.


Strategies regarding the recipient


Cognitive biases of recipient

The vast proliferation of online information, such as in blogs and tweets, has inundated the online marketplace. Because of the resulting information overload, humans cannot process all these information units (called memes), so we let our
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
and other cognitive biases decide which ones to pay attention to, thus enhancing the spread of fake news. Moreover, these cognitive vulnerabilities are easily exploited by both computer algorithms that present information we may like (based on our previous social media use) and by individual manipulators who create social media bots to deliberately spread disinformation. A recent study by Randy Stein and colleagures shows that conservatives value personal stories (non-scientific, intuitive or experiential evidence) more than do liberals (progressives), and therefore perhaps may be less swayed by scientific evidence. This study however only tested responses to apolitical messages.


Nudges as reflection prompts

Evidence suggests that people tend to react hastily and share fake news without thinking carefully about what they have read or heard, and without checking or verifying the information. "Nudging" people to consider the accuracy of incoming information has been shown to prompt people to think about it, to improve the accuracy of their judgement, and to reduce the likelihood that incorrect information is unreflectively shared. An example of a technology-based nudge is Twitter's "read before you retweet" prompt, which prompts readers to read an article and consider its contents before retweeting it.


Mental immune health, inoculation and prebunking

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, by enhancing our capacity for critical thinking. However, he asserts, reason, the scientific method, fact-checking and critical thinking skills alone are insufficient to counter the broad scope of false information. Overlooked is the power of
confirmation bias Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring ...
,
motivated reasoning Motivated reasoning is the phenomenon in cognitive science and social psychology in which emotional biases lead to justifications or decisions based on their desirability rather than an accurate reflection of the evidence. It is the "tendency to ...
and other cognitive biases that can seriously distort the many facets of mental 'immunity' (public resilience to fake news), particularly in dysfunctional societies. The problem is that new misinformation – and its darker cousin, intentional disinformation – keep popping up all the time. Therefore, it is much better timewise to inoculate the population against misinformation, rather than to continually having to debunk each new claim later. Inoculation builds public resilience and creates the conditions for psychological 'herd immunity'. The general term for this process is "prebunking", defined as the process of debunking lies, tactics or sources before they strike. New research shows that free online games can provide tools to fight fake news, leading to healthy skepticism when we consume the news. A practical example is
inoculation theory Inoculation theory is a social psychological/communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be protected against persuasion or influence in much the same way a body can be protected against disease–for example, through pre-exp ...
, a social psychological and communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be protected against persuasion or influence in much the same way a body can be protected against disease–for example, through pre-exposure to weakened versions of a stronger, future threat. The theory uses inoculation as its explanatory analogy—applied to attitudes (or beliefs) rather than a vaccine applied to an infectious disease. 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.Compton, J. (2013). Inoculation theory. In J. P. Dillard & L. Shen (Eds.), The Sage handbook of persuasion: Developments in theory and practice (2nd ed.) (pp. 220 - 236). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. For example, John Cook and colleagues have shown that inoculation theory shows promise in countering
climate change denialism Climate change denial, or global warming denial, is denial, dismissal, or doubt that contradicts the scientific consensus on climate change, including the extent to which it is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, or th ...
. This involves a two-step process. Firstly, list and deconstruct the surprising 50 or so most common myths about climate change, by identifying the reasoning errors and logical fallacies of each one. Secondly, use the concept of parallel argumentation to explain the flaw in the argument by transplanting the same logic into a parallel situation, often an extreme or absurd one. Adding appropriate humour can be particularly effective.


History


Ancient

In the 13th century BC,
Rameses the Great Ramesses II ( egy, rꜥ-ms-sw ''Rīʿa-məsī-sū'', , meaning "Ra is the one who bore him"; ), commonly known as Ramesses the Great, was the third pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty of Egypt. Along with Thutmose III he is often regarded as t ...
spread lies and propaganda portraying the Battle of Kadesh as a stunning victory for the Egyptians; he depicted scenes of himself smiting his foes during the battle on the walls of nearly all his temples. The treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites, however, reveals that the battle was actually a
stalemate Stalemate is a situation in the game of chess where the player whose turn it is to move is not in check and has no legal move. Stalemate results in a draw. During the endgame, stalemate is a resource that can enable the player with the inferior ...
. During the first century BC, Octavian ran a campaign of misinformation against his rival Mark Antony, portraying him as a drunkard, a womanizer, and a mere puppet of the Egyptian queen
Cleopatra VII Cleopatra VII Philopator ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ}, "Cleopatra the father-beloved"; 69 BC10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler.She was also a ...
. He published a document purporting to be Mark Antony's will, which claimed that Mark Antony, upon his death, wished to be entombed in the mausoleum of the Ptolemaic pharaohs. Although the document may have been forged, it invoked outrage from the Roman populace. Mark Antony ultimately killed himself after his defeat in the Battle of Actium upon hearing false rumors propagated by Cleopatra herself claiming that she had committed suicide. During the second and third centuries AD, false rumors were spread about Christians claiming that they engaged in ritual
cannibalism Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food. Cannibalism is a common ecological interaction in the animal kingdom and has been recorded in more than 1,500 species. Human cannibalism is well documented, b ...
and incest. In the late third century AD, the Christian apologist
Lactantius Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius (c. 250 – c. 325) was an early Christian author who became an advisor to Roman emperor, Constantine I, guiding his Christian religious policy in its initial stages of emergence, and a tutor to his son Cr ...
invented and exaggerated stories about pagans engaging in acts of immorality and cruelty, while the anti-Christian writer Porphyry invented similar stories about Christians.


Medieval

In 1475, a fake news story in
Trent Trent may refer to: Places Italy * Trento in northern Italy, site of the Council of Trent United Kingdom * Trent, Dorset, England, United Kingdom Germany * Trent, Germany, a municipality on the island of Rügen United States * Trent, California, ...
claimed that the Jewish community had murdered a two-and-a-half-year-old Christian infant named
Simonino Simon of Trent (german: Simon von Trient, also known as Simon Unverdorben (meaning Simon Immaculate in German); it, Simonino di Trento), also known as Simeon (1472–1475), was a boy from the city of Trent (now Trento in northern Italy), in the ...
. The story resulted in all the Jews in the city being arrested and tortured; 15 of them were burned at the stake.
Pope Sixtus IV Pope Sixtus IV ( it, Sisto IV: 21 July 1414 – 12 August 1484), born Francesco della Rovere, was head of the Catholic Church and ruler of the Papal States from 9 August 1471 to his death in August 1484. His accomplishments as pope include ...
himself attempted to stamp out the story; however, by that point, it had already spread beyond anyone's control. Stories of this kind were known as "
blood libel Blood libel or ritual murder libel (also blood accusation) is an antisemitic canardTurvey, Brent E. ''Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis'', Academic Press, 2008, p. 3. "Blood libel: An accusation of ritual mur ...
"; they claimed that Jews purposely killed Christians, especially Christian children, and used their blood for religious or ritual purposes.


Early modern

After the invention of the printing press in 1439, publications became widespread but there was no standard of journalistic ethics to follow. By the 17th century, historians began the practice of citing their sources in footnotes. In 1610 when
Galileo Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was ...
went on trial, the demand for verifiable news increased. During the 18th century publishers of fake news were fined and banned in the Netherlands; one man, Gerard Lodewijk van der Macht, was banned four times by Dutch authorities—and four times he moved and restarted his press. In the American colonies, Benjamin Franklin wrote fake news about murderous "scalping" Indians working with King George III in an effort to sway public opinion in favor of the American Revolution. Canards, the successors of the 16th century pasquinade, were sold in Paris on the street for two centuries, starting in the 17th century. In 1793,
Marie Antoinette Marie Antoinette Josèphe Jeanne (; ; née Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna; 2 November 1755 – 16 October 1793) was the last queen of France before the French Revolution. She was born an archduchess of Austria, and was the penultimate child a ...
was executed in part because of popular hatred engendered by a canard on which her face had been printed. During the era of slave-owning in the United States, supporters of slavery propagated fake news stories about African Americans, whom white people considered to have lower status. Violence occurred in reaction to the spread of some fake news events. In one instance, stories of African Americans spontaneously turning white spread through the south and struck fear into the hearts of many people. Rumors and anxieties about slave rebellions were common in Virginia from the beginning of the colonial period, despite the only major uprising occurring in the 19th century. One particular instance of fake news regarding revolts occurred in 1730. The serving governor of Virginia at the time, Governor William Gooch, reported that a slave rebellion had occurred but was effectively put down—although this never happened. After Gooch discovered the falsehood, he ordered slaves found off plantations to be punished, tortured and made prisoners.


19th century

One instance of fake news was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. '' The Sun'' newspaper of New York published articles about a real-life astronomer and a made-up colleague who, according to the hoax, had observed bizarre life on the moon. The fictionalized articles successfully attracted new subscribers, and the penny paper suffered very little backlash after it admitted the next month that the series had been a hoax. Such stories were intended to entertain readers and not to mislead them. From 1800 to 1810, James Cheetham made use of fictional stories to advocate politically against Aaron Burr. His stories were often defamatory and he was frequently sued for libel. Yellow journalism peaked in the mid-1890s characterizing the sensationalist journalism that arose in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal. Pulitzer and other yellow journalism publishers goaded the United States into the Spanish–American War, which was precipitated when the exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. The term "fake news" itself was apparently first used in the 1890s during this era of sensationalist news reporting.


20th century

Fake news became popular and spread quickly in the 1900s. Media like newspapers, articles, and magazines were in high demand because of technology. Author Sarah Churchwell shows that when ''The New York Times'' reprinted the 1915 speech by Woodrow Wilson that popularized the phrase "America First," they also used the subheading "Fake News Condemned" to describe a section of his speech warning against propaganda and misinformation, although Wilson himself had not used the phrase "fake news". In his speech, Wilson warned of a growing problem with news that "turn out to be falsehood," warning the country it "could not afford 'to let the rumors of irresponsible persons and origins get into the United States'" as that would undermine democracy and the principle of a free and accurate press. Following a claim by CNN that "Trump was... the first US President to deploy he term "fake news"against his opponents", Sarah Churchwell's work was cited to claim that "it was Woodrow Wilson who popularized the phrase 'fake news' in 1915" without reference, forcing her to counter this claim, saying that "the phrase 'fake news' was very much NOT popularized (or even used) by Wilson. The NY Times used it in passing but it didn't catch on. Trump was the first to popularize it." During the First World War, an example of fake news was the anti-German atrocity propaganda regarding an alleged "
German Corpse Factory The German Corpse Factory or ' (literally "Carcass-Utilization Factory"), also sometimes called the "German Corpse-Rendering Works" or "Tallow Factory" was one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories circulated in World War ...
" in which the German battlefield dead were supposedly rendered down for fats used to make nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, human soap and boot dubbing. Unfounded rumors regarding such a factory circulated in the
Allied An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...
press starting in 1915, and by 1917 the English-language publication ''
North China Daily News The ''North China Daily News'' (in Chinese: ''Zilin Xibao''), was an English-language newspaper in Shanghai, China, called the most influential foreign newspaper of its time. History The paper was founded as the weekly ''North-China Herald'' ( ...
'' presented these allegations as true at a time when Britain was trying to convince China to join the Allied war effort; this was based on new, allegedly true stories from '' The Times'' and the ''
Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news websitePeter Wilb"Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain", ''New Statesman'', 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014) publish ...
'' that turned out to be forgeries. These false allegations became known as such after the war, and in the Second World War
Joseph Goebbels Paul Joseph Goebbels (; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician who was the ''Gauleiter'' (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 19 ...
used the story in order to deny the ongoing massacre of Jews as British propaganda. According to
Joachim Neander Joachim Neander (165031 May 1680) was a German Reformed (Calvinist) Church teacher, theologian and hymnwriter whose most famous hymn, '' Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation'' (german: Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König d ...
and Randal Marlin, the story also "encouraged later disbelief" when reports about the Holocaust surfaced after the liberation of
Auschwitz Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
and
Dachau concentration camp , , commandant = List of commandants , known for = , location = Upper Bavaria, Southern Germany , built by = Germany , operated by = ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) , original use = Political prison , construction ...
s. After Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany in 1933, they established the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda under the control of Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels Paul Joseph Goebbels (; 29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945) was a German Nazi politician who was the ''Gauleiter'' (district leader) of Berlin, chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 19 ...
. The Nazis used both print and broadcast journalism to promote their agendas, either by obtaining ownership of those media or exerting political influence. The expression Big lie (in German: große Lüge) was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his 1925 book Mein Kampf. Throughout World War II, both the Axis and the
Allies An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...
employed fake news in the form of propaganda to persuade the public at home and in enemy countries. The British Political Warfare Executive used radio broadcasts and distributed leaflets to discourage German troops. The
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C. with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States. Founded in ...
has published that '' The New York Times'' printed fake news "depicting Russia as a socialist paradise." During 1932–1933, ''The New York Times'' published numerous articles by its Moscow bureau chief,
Walter Duranty Walter Duranty (25 May 1884 – 3 October 1957) was an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of ''The New York Times'' for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1 ...
, who won a
Pulitzer prize The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made h ...
for a series of reports about the Soviet Union.


21st century

In the 21st century, both the impact of fake news and the use of the term became widespread. The increasing openness, access and prevalence of the Internet resulted in its growth. New information and stories are published constantly and at a faster rate than ever, often lacking in verification, which may be consumed by anyone with an Internet connection. Fake news has grown from being sent via emails to attacking social media. Besides referring to made-up stories designed to deceive readers into clicking on links, maximizing traffic and profit, the term has also referred to satirical news, whose purpose is not to mislead but rather to inform viewers and share humorous commentary about real news and the
mainstream media In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.Chomsky, Noam, ''"What makes mai ...
. United States examples of satire include the newspaper '' The Onion'', '' Saturday Night Live''s '' Weekend Update'', and the television shows '' The Daily Show'', '' The Colbert Report'', '' The Late Show with Stephen Colbert''. 21st-century fake news is often intended to increase the financial profits of the news outlet. In an interview with NPR, Jestin Coler, former CEO of the fake media conglomerate Disinfomedia, told who writes fake news articles, who funds these articles, and why fake news creators create and distribute false information. Coler, who has since left his role as a fake news creator, said that his company employed 20 to 25 writers at a time and made $10,000 to $30,000 monthly from advertisements. Coler began his career in journalism as a magazine salesman before working as a freelance writer. He said he entered the fake news industry to prove to himself and others just how rapidly fake news can spread. Disinfomedia is not the only outlet responsible for the distribution of fake news; Facebook users play a major role in feeding into fake news stories by making sensationalized stories "trend", according to
BuzzFeed BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Ken ...
media editor Craig Silverman, and the individuals behind Google AdSense basically fund fake news websites and their content.
Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...
, CEO of Facebook, said, "I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea" and then a few days later he blogged that Facebook was looking for ways to flag fake news stories. Many online pro- Trump fake news stories are being sourced out of a city of Veles in
Macedonia Macedonia most commonly refers to: * North Macedonia, a country in southeastern Europe, known until 2019 as the Republic of Macedonia * Macedonia (ancient kingdom), a kingdom in Greek antiquity * Macedonia (Greece), a traditional geographic reg ...
, where approximately seven different fake news organizations are employing hundreds of teenagers to rapidly produce and plagiarize sensationalist stories for different U.S. based companies and parties. Kim LaCapria of the fact checking website
Snopes.com ''Snopes'' , formerly known as the ''Urban Legends Reference Pages'', is a fact-checking website. It has been described as a "well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors" on the Internet. The site has also been seen as a source ...
has stated that, in America, fake news is a bipartisan phenomenon, saying that " ere has always been a sincerely held yet erroneous belief misinformation is more red than blue in America, and that has never been true." Jeff Green of
Trade Desk The Trade Desk (stylized as theTradeDesk) is an American multinational technology company that specializes in real-time programmatic marketing automation technologies, products, and services, designed to personalize digital content delivery to u ...
agrees the phenomenon affects both sides. Green's company found that affluent and well-educated persons in their 40s and 50s are the primary consumers of fake news. He told Scott Pelley of ''
60 Minutes ''60 Minutes'' is an American television news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Debuting in 1968, the program was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard, who chose to set it apart from other news programs by using a unique styl ...
'' that this audience tends to live in an "echo chamber" and that these are the people who vote. In 2014, the
Russian Government The Government of Russia exercises executive power in the Russian Federation. The members of the government are the prime minister, the deputy prime ministers, and the federal ministers. It has its legal basis in the Constitution of the Russia ...
used disinformation via networks such as RT to create a counter-narrative after Russian-backed Ukrainian rebels shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. In 2016, NATO claimed it had seen a significant rise in Russian propaganda and fake news stories since the invasion of Crimea in 2014. Fake news stories originating from Russian government officials were also circulated internationally by Reuters news agency and published in the most popular news websites in the United States. A 2018 study at Oxford University found that Trump's supporters consumed the "largest volume of 'junk news' on Facebook and Twitter": In 2018, researchers from Princeton University, Dartmouth College and the University of Exeter examined the consumption of fake news during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. Their findings showed that Trump supporters and older Americans (over 60) were far more likely to consume fake news than Clinton supporters. Those most likely to visit fake news websites were the 10% of Americans who consumed the most conservative information. There was a very large difference (800%) in the consumption of fake news stories as related to total news consumption between Trump supporters (6%) and Clinton supporters (1%). The study also showed that fake pro-Trump and fake pro-Clinton news stories were read by their supporters, but with a significant difference: Trump supporters consumed far more (40%) than Clinton supporters (15%). Facebook was by far the key "gateway" website where these fake stories were spread and which led people to then go to the fake news websites. Fact checks of fake news were rarely seen by consumers, with none of those who saw a fake news story being reached by a related fact check. Brendan Nyhan, one of the researchers, emphatically stated in an interview on NBC News: "People got vastly more misinformation from Donald Trump than they did from fake news websites—full stop." A 2019 study by researchers at Princeton and New York University found that a person's likelihood of sharing fake-news articles correlated more strongly with age than it did education, sex, or political views. 11% of users older than 65 shared an article consistent with the study's definition of fake news. Just 3% of users ages 18 to 29 did the same. Another issue in mainstream media is the usage of the filter bubble, a "bubble" that has been created that gives the viewer, on social media platforms, a specific piece of the information knowing they will like it. Thus creating fake news and biased news because only half the story is being shared, the portion the viewer liked. "In 1996, Nicolas Negroponte predicted a world where information technologies become increasingly customizable."


Special topics


Deepfakes

Deepfakes (a portmanteau of "
deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...
" and "fake") are synthetic media (AI-generated media) in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. Because a picture often has a greater impact than the corresponding words, deepfakes - which leverage powerful techniques from machine learning and artificial intelligence to manipulate or generate visual and audio content - have a particularly high potential to deceive. The main machine learning methods used to create deepfakes are based on deep learning and involve training generative
neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
architectures, such as autoencoders or generative adversarial networks (GANs). 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,
hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
es, bullying, and
financial fraud In law, fraud is intent (law), intentional deception to secure unfair or unlawful gain, or to deprive a victim of a legal right. Fraud can violate Civil law (common law), civil law (e.g., a fraud victim may sue the fraud perpetrator to avoid t ...
. This has elicited responses from both industry and government to detect and limit their use.


Bots on social media

In the mid-1990s, Nicolas Negroponte anticipated a world where news through technology become progressively personalized. In his 1996 book ''Being Digital'' he predicted a digital life where news consumption becomes an extremely personalized experience and newspapers adapted content to reader preferences. This prediction has since been reflected in news and social media feeds of modern day. Bots have the potential to increase the spread of fake news, as they use algorithms to decide what articles and information specific users like, without taking into account the authenticity of an article. Bots mass-produce and spread articles, regardless of the credibility of the sources, allowing them to play an essential role in the mass spread of fake news, as bots are capable of creating fake accounts and personalities on the web that are then gaining followers, recognition, and authority. Additionally, almost 30% of the spam and content spread on the Internet originates from these software bots. In the 21st century, the capacity to mislead was enhanced by the widespread use of social media. For example, one 21st century website that enabled fake news' proliferation was the
Facebook newsfeed Facebook's Feed, formerly known as the News Feed, is a web feed feature for the social network. The feed is the primary system through which users are exposed to content posted on the network. Feed highlights information that includes profile ch ...
. In late 2016 fake news gained notoriety following the uptick in news content by this means, and its prevalence on the
micro-blogging Microblogging is a form of social network that permits only short posts. They "allow users to exchange small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links",. Retrieved June 5, 2014 which may be the major reason for ...
site Twitter. In the United States, 62% of Americans use social media to receive news. Many people use their Facebook News Feed to get news, despite Facebook not being considered a news site. According to Craig McClain, over 66% of Facebook users obtain news from the site. This, in combination with increased political polarization and filter bubbles, led to a tendency for readers to mainly read headlines. Numerous individuals and news outlets have stated that fake news may have influenced the outcome of the
2016 American Presidential Election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican ticket of businessman Donald Trump and Indiana governor Mike Pence defeated the Democratic ticket o ...
. Fake news saw higher sharing on Facebook than legitimate news stories, which analysts explained was because fake news often panders to expectations or is otherwise more exciting than legitimate news. Facebook itself initially denied this characterization. A
Pew Research The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan American think tank (referring to itself as a "fact tank") based in Washington, D.C. It provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the wor ...
poll conducted in December 2016 found that 64% of U.S. adults believed completely made-up news had caused "a great deal of confusion" about the basic facts of current events, while 24% claimed it had caused "some confusion" and 11% said it had caused "not much or no confusion". Additionally, 23% of those polled admitted they had personally shared fake news, whether knowingly or not. Researchers from
Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is considere ...
assessed that only 8% of readers of fake news recalled and believed in the content they were reading, though the same share of readers also recalled and believed in "placebos"—stories they did not actually read, but that were produced by the authors of the study. In comparison, over 50% of the participants recalled reading and believed in true news stories. By August 2017 Facebook stopped using the term "fake news" and used "false news" in its place instead. Will Oremus of ''
Slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...
'' wrote that because supporters of
U.S. President The president of the United States (POTUS) is the head of state and head of government of the United States of America. The president directs the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States ...
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." Research from Northwestern University concluded that 30% of all fake news traffic, as opposed to only 8% of real news traffic, could be linked back to Facebook. The research concluded fake news consumers do not exist in a filter bubble; many of them also consume real news from established news sources. The fake news audience is only 10 percent of the real news audience, and most fake news consumers spent a relatively similar amount of time on fake news compared with real news consumers—with the exception of Drudge Report readers, who spent more than 11 times longer reading the website than other users. In the wake of western events, China's Ren Xianling of the Cyberspace Administration of China suggested a "reward and punish" system be implemented to avoid fake news.


Internet trolls

In
Internet slang Internet slang (also called Internet shorthand, cyber-slang, netspeak, digispeak or chatspeak) is a non-standard or unofficial form of language used by people on the Internet to communicate to one another. An example of Internet slang is "LOL" m ...
, a troll is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting arguments or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory, extraneous, or
off-topic In the context of mailing lists, discussion groups, discussion forums, bulletin boards, newsgroups, and wikis a contribution is off-topic if it is not within the bounds of the current discussion, and on-topic if it is. Even on very specialized fo ...
messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response or off-topic discussion, often for the troll's amusement. Internet trolls also feed on attention. The idea of internet trolls gained popularity in the 1990s, though its meaning shifted in 2011. Whereas it once denoted provocation, it is a term now widely used to signify the abuse and misuse of the Internet. Trolling comes in various forms, and can be dissected into abuse trolling, entertainment trolling, classical trolling, flame trolling, anonymous trolling, and kudos trolling. It is closely linked to fake news, as internet trolls are now largely interpreted as perpetrators of false information, information that can often be passed along unwittingly by reporters and the public alike. When interacting with each other, trolls often share misleading information that contributes to the fake news circulated on sites like Twitter and Facebook. 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. In February 2019, Glenn Greenwald wrote that a 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."


Fake news hoaxes

Paul Horner Paul Horner (November 5, 1978 – September 18, 2017) was an American writer, comedian and contributor to fake news websites. The Associated Press, ''The Chicago Tribune'', PolitiFact and ''The Washington Post'' all called Horner a "hoax artis ...
is perhaps the best known example of a person who deliberately creates fake news for a purpose. He has been referred to as a "hoax artist" by the Associated Press and the '' Chicago Tribune''. '' The Huffington Post'' called Horner a "performance artist". Horner was behind several widespread hoaxes such as: (1) that the graffiti artist Banksy had been arrested; and (2) that he had an "enormous impact" on the
2016 U.S. presidential election The 2016 United States presidential election was the 58th quadrennial United States presidential election, presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 8, 2016. The Republican Party (United States), Republican ticket of businessman Donald ...
, according to
CBS News CBS News is the news division of the American television and radio service CBS. CBS News television programs include the ''CBS Evening News'', ''CBS Mornings'', news magazine programs '' CBS News Sunday Morning'', '' 60 Minutes'', and '' 48 H ...
. These stories consistently appeared in Google's top news search results, were shared widely on Facebook, were taken seriously and shared by third parties such as Trump presidential campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, Eric Trump, ABC News and the
Fox News Channel The Fox News Channel, abbreviated FNC, commonly known as Fox News, and stylized in all caps, is an American multinational conservative cable news television channel based in New York City. It is owned by Fox News Media, which itself is owne ...
. Horner later claimed that his work during this period was intended "to make Trump's supporters look like idiots for sharing my stories". In a November 2016 interview with '' The Washington Post'', Horner expressed regret for the role his fake news stories played in the election and surprise at how gullible people were in treating his stories as news. In February 2017 Horner said, "I truly regret my comment that I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me. I know all I did was attack him and his supporters and got people not to vote for him. When I said that comment it was because I was confused how this evil man got elected President and I thought maybe instead of hurting his campaign, maybe I had helped it. My intention was to get his supporters NOT to vote for him and I know for a fact that I accomplished that goal. The far right, a lot of the Bible thumpers and
alt-right The alt-right, an abbreviation of alternative right, is a far-right, white nationalist movement. A largely online phenomenon, the alt-right originated in the United States during the late 2000s before increasing in popularity during the mid-2 ...
were going to vote him regardless, but I know I swayed so many that were on the fence." In 2017, Horner stated that a fake story of his about a rape festival in India helped generate over $250,000 in donations to GiveIndia, a site that helps rape victims in India. Horner said he dislikes being grouped with people who write fake news solely to be misleading. "They just write it just to write fake news, like there's no purpose, there's no satire, there's nothing clever.


Donald Trump's misuse of term

The term "fake news" has at times been used to cast doubt upon credible news, and former U.S. president Donald Trump has been credited with popularizing and misusing the term to refer to any negative press coverage of himself he dislikes, regardless of veracity. Trump has claimed that the mainstream American media regularly reports "fake news" or "hoax news", despite the fact that he generated considerable false and inaccurate or misleading statements himself. According to ''The Washington Posts Fact Checker's database, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four years in office, though the number of ''unique'' false claims is much lower because many of his major false claims were repeated hundreds of times each. A searchable online database is available for each documented false claim, and a datafile is available for download for use in academic studies of misinformation and lying. An analysis of the first 16,000 false claims is available as a book. Trump has often attacked mainstream news reporting publications, deeming them "fake news" and the "enemy of the people". Every few days, Trump would issue a threat against the press due to his claims of "fake news". There have been many instances in which norms that protect press freedom have been pushed or even upended during the Trump-era. According to Jeff Hemsley, a
Syracuse University Syracuse University (informally 'Cuse or SU) is a Private university, private research university in Syracuse, New York. Established in 1870 with roots in the Methodist Episcopal Church, the university has been nonsectarian since 1920. Locate ...
professor who studies social media, Trump uses this term for any news that is not favorable to him or which he simply dislikes. Trump provided a widely cited example of this interpretation in a tweet on May 9, 2018:
Chris Cillizza Christopher Michael Cillizza (; born February 20, 1976) is an American political commentator, who worked for the television news channel CNN from 2017-2022. Prior to joining CNN, he wrote for ''The Fix'', the daily political blog of ''The Washing ...
described the tweet on CNN as an "accidental" revelation about Trump's "'fake news' attacks", and wrote: "The point can be summed up in these two words from Trump: 'negative (Fake).' To Trump, those words mean the same thing. Negative news coverage is fake news. Fake news is negative news coverage." Other writers made similar comments about the tweet. Dara Lind wrote in Vox: "It's nice of Trump to admit, explicitly, what many skeptics have suspected all along: When he complains about 'fake news,' he doesn't actually mean 'news that is untrue'; he means news that is personally inconvenient to Donald Trump." Jonathan Chait wrote in ''
New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...
'' magazine: "Trump admits he calls all negative news 'fake'.": "In a tweet this morning, Trump casually opened a window into the source code for his method of identifying liberal media bias. Anything that's negative is, by definition, fake." Philip Bump wrote in '' The Washington Post'': "The important thing in that tweet... is that he makes explicit his view of what constitutes fake news. It's negative news. Negative. (Fake.)" In an interview with
Lesley Stahl Lesley Rene Stahl (born December 16, 1941) is an American television journalist. She has spent most of her career with CBS News, where she began as a producer in 1971. Since 1991, she has reported for CBS's ''60 Minutes''. She is known for her ne ...
, before the cameras were turned on, Trump explained why he attacks the press: "You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you." Author and literary critic Michiko Kakutani has described developments in the right-wing media and websites: In September 2018, National Public Radio noted that Trump has expanded his use of the terms "fake" and "phony" to "an increasingly wide variety of things he doesn't like": "The range of things Trump is declaring fake is growing too. Last month he tweeted about "fake books," "the fake dossier," "fake CNN," and he added a new claim—that Google search results are "RIGGED" to mostly show only negative stories about him." They graphed his expanding use in columns labeled: "Fake news", "Fake (other) and "Phony". Trump's use of the term "fake news" is equivalent to the meaning of the term
lying press Lying press (german: Lügenpresse, lit=press of lies) is a pejorative political term used largely for the printed press and the mass media at large. History The term ''Lügenpresse'' has been used intermittently since the 19th century in pol ...
.


By country


Europe


Austria

Politicians in Austria dealt with the impact of fake news and its spread on social media after the 2016 presidential campaign in the country. In December 2016, a court in Austria issued an injunction on Facebook Europe, mandating it block negative postings related to Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek,
Austrian Green Party Austrian may refer to: * Austrians, someone from Austria or of Austrian descent ** Someone who is considered an Austrian citizen, see Austrian nationality law * Austrian German dialect * Something associated with the country Austria, for example: ...
Chairwoman. According to ''The Washington Post'' the postings to Facebook about her "appeared to have been spread via a fake profile" and directed derogatory epithets towards the Austrian politician.Kirchner, Stephanie (December 14, 2016)
"Menace of fake news is rattling politicians in Austria and Germany"
'' The Washington Post'', retrieved December 14, 2016.
The derogatory postings were likely created by the identical fake profile that had previously been utilized to attack Alexander van der Bellen, who won the election for
President of Austria The president of Austria (german: Bundespräsident der Republik Österreich) is the head of state of the Republic of Austria. Though theoretically entrusted with great power by the Constitution, in practice the president is largely a ceremonial ...
.


Belgium

In 2006, French-speaking broadcaster
RTBF The ''Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française'' (RTBF, ''Belgian Radio-television of the French Community'', branded as rtbf.be) is a public service broadcaster delivering radio and television services to the French-speaking Commu ...
showed a fictional breaking special news report that Belgium's Flemish Region had proclaimed independence. Staged footage of the
royal family A royal family is the immediate family of kings/queens, emirs/emiras, sultans/ sultanas, or raja/ rani and sometimes their extended family. The term imperial family appropriately describes the family of an emperor or empress, and the term ...
evacuating and the Belgian flag being lowered from a pole were made to add credence to the report. It wasn't until 30 minutes into the report that a sign stating "Fiction" appeared on screen. The RTBF journalist that created the hoax said the purpose was to demonstrate the magnitude of the country's situation and if a partition of Belgium was to really happen.


Czech Republic

Fake news outlets in the Czech Republic redistribute news in Czech and English originally produced by Russian sources. Czech president Miloš Zeman has been supporting media outlets accused of spreading fake news. The ''Centre Against Terrorism and Hybrid Threats'' (CTHH) is unit of the
Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic The Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic () is a government ministry tasked with responsibilities in public and internal security, citizenship, identity cards and social security numbers, as well as travel, border, immigration control a ...
primarily aimed at countering disinformation, fake news,
hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
es and foreign
propaganda Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
. The CTHH started operations on January 1, 2017. The CTHH has been criticized by Czech President Miloš Zeman, who said: "We don't need censorship. We don't need thought police. We don't need a new agency for press and information as long as we want to live in a free and democratic society." In 2017 media activists started a website Konspiratori.cz maintaining a list of conspiracy and fake news outlets in Czech.


European Union

In 2018 European Commission introduced a first voluntary code of practice on disinformation. In 2022 this will become a strengthen co-regulation scheme, with responsibility shared between the regulators and companies signatories to the code. It will complement earlier Digital Services Act agreed by the 27-country European Union which already includes a section on combating disinformation.


Finland

Officials from 11 countries met in Helsinki in November 2016 and planned the formation of a center to combat disinformation cyber-warfare, which includes the spread of fake news on social media. The center is planned to be located in Helsinki and combine efforts from 10 countries, including Sweden, Germany, Finland and the U.S. Prime Minister of Finland from 2015 to 2019 Juha Sipilä planned to address the topic of the center in Spring 2017 with a motion before Parliament. Deputy Secretary of State for EU Affairs Jori Arvonen said cyber-warfare, such as hybrid cyber-warfare intrusions into Finland from Russia and the Islamic State, became an increasing problem in 2016. Arvonen cited examples including online fake news, disinformation, and the "
little green men Little green men is the stereotypical portrayal of extraterrestrials as little humanoid creatures with green skin and sometimes with antennae on their heads. The term is also sometimes used to describe gremlins, mythical creatures known for cau ...
" of the Russo-Ukrainian War.


France

During the ten-year period preceding 2016, France was witness to an increase in popularity of
far-right Far-right politics, also referred to as the extreme right or right-wing extremism, are political beliefs and actions further to the right of the left–right political spectrum than the standard political right, particularly in terms of being ...
alternative news sources called the ''fachosphere'' ("facho" referring to
fascist Fascism is a far-right, Authoritarianism, authoritarian, ultranationalism, ultra-nationalist political Political ideology, ideology and Political movement, movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and pol ...
); known as the . According to sociologist Antoine Bevort, citing data from
Alexa Internet Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon. Alexa was founded as an independent company in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999 for $250 million in stock. ...
rankings, the most consulted political websites in France in 2016 included ''
Égalité et Réconciliation Equality and Reconciliation (French: Égalité et Réconciliation) (E&R) is a political association created in June 2007 by Alain Soral, former militant of the French Communist Party, and also a former member of the central committee of the Na ...
'', ', and ''Les Moutons Enragés''. These sites increased skepticism towards
mainstream media In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a term and abbreviation used to refer collectively to the various large mass news media that influence many people and both reflect and shape prevailing currents of thought.Chomsky, Noam, ''"What makes mai ...
from both left and right perspectives. In September 2016, the country faced controversy regarding fake websites providing false information about abortion. The National Assembly moved forward with intentions to ban such fake sites.
Laurence Rossignol Laurence Rossignol (born 22 December 1957) is a French politician of the Socialist Party (PS) who has served as a member of the French Senate from 2011 to 2014 and again since 2017, representing Oise. From 2014 to 2017, she served as Secretary of ...
, women's minister for France, informed parliament though the fake sites look neutral, in actuality their intentions were specifically targeted to give women fake information. 2017 presidential election. France saw an uptick in amounts of disinformation and propaganda, primarily in the midst of election cycles. A study looking at the diffusion of political news during the 2017 presidential election cycle suggests that one in four links shared in social media comes from sources that actively contest traditional media narratives. Facebook corporate deleted 30,000 Facebook accounts in France associated with fake political information. In April 2017,
Emmanuel Macron Emmanuel Macron (; born 21 December 1977) is a French politician who has served as President of France since 2017. ''Ex officio'', he is also one of the two Co-Princes of Andorra. Prior to his presidency, Macron served as Minister of Econ ...
's presidential campaign was attacked by the fake news articles more than the campaigns of conservative candidate Marine Le Pen and socialist candidate Benoît Hamon. One of the fake articles even announced that Marine Le Pen won the presidency before the people of France had even voted. Macron's professional and private emails, as well as memos, contracts and accounting documents were posted on a file sharing website. The leaked documents were mixed with fake ones in social media in an attempt to sway the upcoming presidential election. Macron said he would combat fake news of the sort that had been spread during his election campaign. Initially, the leak was attributed to
APT28 Fancy Bear (also known as APT28 (by Mandiant), Pawn Storm, Sofacy Group (by Kaspersky), Sednit, Tsar Team (by FireEye) and STRONTIUM (by Microsoft)) is a Russian cyber espionage group. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike has said with a medium level ...
, a group tied to Russia's GRU military intelligence directorate. However, the head of the French cyber-security agency,
ANSSI Anssi is a given name. Notable people with the name include: *Anssi Jaakkola (born 1987), Finnish footballer *Anssi Joutsenlahti, pensioned vicar and a member of the parliament of Finland *Anssi Juutilainen (born 1956), Finnish ski-orienteering co ...
, later said that there was no evidence that the hack leading to the leaks had anything to do with Russia, saying that the attack was so simple, that "we can imagine that it was a person who did this alone. They could be in any country."


Germany

German Chancellor Angela Merkel lamented the problem of fraudulent news reports in a November 2016 speech, days after announcing her campaign for a fourth term as leader of her country. In a speech to the German parliament, Merkel was critical of such fake sites, saying they harmed political discussion. Merkel called attention to the need of government to deal with
Internet troll In slang, a troll is a person who posts or makes inflammatory, insincere, digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages online (such as in social media, a newsgroup, a forum, a chat room, a online video game), or in real life, with the int ...
s, bots, and fake news websites. She warned that such fraudulent news websites were a force increasing the power of populist extremism. Merkel called fraudulent news a growing phenomenon that might need to be regulated in the future. Germany's foreign intelligence agency Federal Intelligence Service Chief, Bruno Kahl, warned of the potential for
cyberattacks A cyberattack is any offensive maneuver that targets computer information systems, computer networks, infrastructures, or personal computer devices. An attacker is a person or process that attempts to access data, functions, or other restricted ...
by Russia in the 2017 German election. He said the cyberattacks would take the form of the intentional spread of disinformation. Kahl said the goal is to increase chaos in political debates. Germany's domestic intelligence agency Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution Chief,
Hans-Georg Maassen Hans-Georg is a given name. Notable people with the name include: *Hans-Georg Anscheidt (born 1935), Grand Prix motorcycle road racing World Champion *Hans Georg von Arnim-Boitzenburg (1583–1641), Field Marshal of Holy Roman Empire and the Electo ...
, said sabotage by Russian intelligence was a present threat to German information security. German government officials and security experts later said there was no Russian interference during the 2017 German federal election. The German term ''Lügenpresse'', or
lying press Lying press (german: Lügenpresse, lit=press of lies) is a pejorative political term used largely for the printed press and the mass media at large. History The term ''Lügenpresse'' has been used intermittently since the 19th century in pol ...
, has been used since the 19th century and specifically during World War One as a strategy to attack news spread by political opponents from the 19th and 20th century. The award-winning German journalist Claas Relotius resigned from ''
Der Spiegel ''Der Spiegel'' (, lit. ''"The Mirror"'') is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. With a weekly circulation of 695,100 copies, it was the largest such publication in Europe in 2011. It was founded in 1947 by John Seymour Chaloner ...
'' in 2018 after admitting numerous instances of
journalistic fraud Journalism scandals are high-profile incidents or acts, whether intentional or accidental, that run contrary to the generally accepted ethics and standards of journalism, or otherwise violate the 'ideal' mission of journalism: to report news eve ...
. In early April 2020, Berlin politician
Andreas Geisel Andreas Geisel (born 1 March 1966) is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who is serving as Senator for Urban Development, Construction and Housing in the Berlin state government since December 2021. Prior, he was Senator fo ...
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. Berlin police president Barbara Slowik stated that she believed "this is related to the US government's export ban." However, Berlin police confirmed that the shipment was not seized by U.S. authorities, but was said to have simply been bought at a better price, widely believed to be from a German dealer or China. This revelation outraged the Berlin opposition, whose CDU parliamentary group leader Burkard Dregger accused Geisel of "deliberately misleading Berliners" in order "to cover up its own inability to obtain protective equipment". FDP interior expert Marcel Luthe said "Big names in international politics like Berlin's senator Geisel are blaming others and telling US piracy to serve anti-American clichés." '' Politico Europe'' reported that "the Berliners are taking a page straight out of the Trump playbook and not letting facts get in the way of a good story."


Hungary

Hungary's illiberal and populist prime minister Viktor Orbán has been casting 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. This propaganda technique, together with anti-Semitism still present in the country, seems to appeal to his right wing voters, as it mobilizes them by seeding fear in society, creating an enemy image and enabling Orbán to present himself as the protector of the nation from the illusion of this enemy.


Italy

Journalists must be registered with the ''Ordine Dei Giornalisti'' (ODG) (transl.: Order of Journalists) and respect its disciplinary and training obligations, to guarantee "correct and truthful information, intended as right of individuals and of the community". Under certain circumstances, spreading fake news may constitute a criminal offence for the Italian penal code. Since 2018 it is possible to report fake news directly on the Polizia di Stato website. The phenomenon is monitored by the
DIS Dis, DIS or variants may refer to: Arts and entertainment Music * ''Dis'' (album), by Jan Garbarek, 1976 * ''Dís'', a soundtrack album by Jóhann Jóhannsson, 2004 * "Dis", a song by The Gazette from the 2003 album ''Hankou Seimeibun'' * "dis ...
, supported by AISE and AISI.


Netherlands

In March 2018, the European Union's
East StratCom Task Force The East StratCom Task Force (ESCTF) is a part of the European External Action Service, focused on "effective communication" and promotion of European Union activities in Eastern Europe (including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, ...
compiled a list dubbed a "hall of shame" of articles with suspected
Kremlin The Kremlin ( rus, Московский Кремль, r=Moskovskiy Kreml', p=ˈmɐˈskofskʲɪj krʲemlʲ, t=Moscow Kremlin) is a fortified complex in the center of Moscow founded by the Rurik dynasty, Rurik dynasty. It is the best known of th ...
attempts to influence political decisions. However, controversy arose when three Dutch media outlets claimed they had been wrongfully singled out because of quotes attributed to people with non-mainstream views. The news outlets included ThePostOnline, '' GeenStijl'', and ''
De Gelderlander ''De Gelderlander'' (founded 1848) is a Dutch daily newspaper focused on Gelderland and immediate surroundings. It is published in Nijmegen by the Belgian Belgian may refer to: * Something of, or related to, Belgium * Belgians, people from Belg ...
''. All three were flagged for publishing articles critical of
Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...
policies, and none received any forewarning or opportunity to appeal beforehand. This incident has contributed to the growing issue of what defines news as fake, and how freedoms of press and speech can be protected during attempts to curb the spread of false news.


Poland

Polish historian Jerzy Targalski noted fake news websites had infiltrated Poland through anti-establishment and
right-wing Right-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that view certain social orders and hierarchies as inevitable, natural, normal, or desirable, typically supporting this position on the basis of natural law, economics, authorit ...
sources that copied content from '' Russia Today''. Targalski observed there existed about 20 specific fake news websites in Poland that spread Russian disinformation in the form of fake news. One example cited was fake news that Ukraine announced the Polish city of
Przemyśl Przemyśl (; yi, פשעמישל, Pshemishl; uk, Перемишль, Peremyshl; german: Premissel) is a city in southeastern Poland with 58,721 inhabitants, as of December 2021. In 1999, it became part of the Subcarpathian Voivodeship; it was pr ...
as occupied Polish land. Poland's anti-EU
Law and Justice Law and Justice ( pl, Prawo i Sprawiedliwość , PiS) is a right-wing populist and national-conservative political party in Poland. Its chairman is Jarosław Kaczyński. It was founded in 2001 by Jarosław and Lech Kaczyński as a direct su ...
(PiS) government has been accused of spreading "illiberal disinformation" to undermine public confidence in the European Union.The Real Russian Threat to Central Eastern Europe
. ''
Foreign Policy A State (polity), state's foreign policy or external policy (as opposed to internal or domestic policy) is its objectives and activities in relation to its interactions with other states, unions, and other political entities, whether bilaterall ...
''. March 30, 2017.
Maria Snegovaya of Columbia University said: "The true origins of this phenomenon are local. The policies of Fidesz and Law and Justice have a lot in common with Putin's own policies." Some mainstream outlets were long accused of fabricating half-true or outright false information. One of popular TV stations, TVN, in 2010 attributed to Jarosław Kaczyński (then an opposition leader) words that "there will be times, when true Poles will come to the power".Komentarze PiS: Niech TVN nas przeprosi
However, Kaczyński has never uttered those words in the commented speech.


Romania

On March 16, 2020, Romanian President
Klaus Iohannis Klaus Werner Iohannis (; ; also spelled Johannis; born 13 June 1959) is a Romanian politician, physicist and former teacher who has been serving as the president of Romania since 2014. He became leader of the National Liberal Party (Romania), Na ...
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.


Russia

In March 2019, Russia passed a new bill to ban websites from spreading false information. In addition to tackling fake news, the new legislation specifically punishes any sources or websites for publishing materials that insult the state, the symbol of the government or other political figures. For repeated offenders, they would receive a 15-day jail sentence. During the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine On 24 February 2022, in a major escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian War, which began in 2014. The invasion has resulted in tens of thousands of deaths on both sides. It has caused Europe's largest refugee crisis since World War II. An ...
, the Russian government passed a law prohibiting "fake news" regarding the Russian military, which was broadly defined as any information that is deemed by the Russian government to be false, including the use of the terms ''invasion'' and ''war'' to refer to the invasion. Violations of the law are punishable with up to 15 years of imprisonment. International news organizations in multiple countries ceased operating in Russia and journalists emigrated from Russia en masse after the law was passed, while some domestic non-state news organizations were blocked by the Russian government.


Serbia

In 2018,
International Research & Exchanges Board The International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX) is an international, nonprofit organization that specializes in global education and development. IREX works with partners in more than 100 countries. History IREX was established in 1968 by ...
described the situation in the media in Serbia as the worst in recent history, and that Media Sustainability Index dropped because the most polarized media in almost 20 years, an increase in fake news and editorial pressure on media. According to Serbian investigative journalism portal ''Crime and Corruption Reporting Network'', more than 700 fake news were published on the front pages of pro-government tabloids during 2018. Many of them were about alleged attacks on the president Aleksandar Vučić and attempts of coups, as well as messages of support to him by Vladimir Putin. The best-selling newspaper in Serbia is the pro-government tabloid ''
Informer An informant (also called an informer or, as a slang term, a “snitch”) is a person who provides privileged information about a person or organization to an agency. The term is usually used within the law-enforcement world, where informan ...
'', which most often presents Vučić as a powerful person under constant attack, and also has anti-European content and
pro-war rhetoric Pro-war rhetoric is rhetoric or propaganda designed to convince its audience that war is necessary. The two main analytical approaches to pro-war rhetoric were founded by Ronald Reid, a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Massa ...
. Since Vučić's party came to power, Serbia has seen a surge of internet trolls and pages on social networks praising the government and attacking its critics, free media and the opposition in general. That includes a handful of dedicated employees run fake accounts, but also the Facebook page associated with a Serbian franchise of the far-right Breitbart News website, which has a disputed accuracy.


Spain

Fake news in Spain has become much more prevalent in the 2010s, but has been prominent throughout Spain's history. The United States government published a fake article in regards to the purchase of the Philippines from Spain, which they had already purchased. Despite this, the topic of fake news has traditionally not been given much attention to in Spain, until the newspaper ''
El País ''El País'' (; ) is a Spanish-language daily newspaper in Spain. ''El País'' is based in the capital city of Madrid and it is owned by the Spanish media conglomerate PRISA. It is the second most circulated daily newspaper in Spain . ''El Pa ...
'' launched the new blog dedicated strictly to truthful news entitled "Hechos"; which literally translates to "facts" in Spanish. David Alandete, the managing editor of ''El País'', stated how many people misinterpret fake news as real because the sites "have similar names, typography, layouts and are deliberately confusing". Alandete made it the new mission of ''El País'' "to respond to fake news". María Ramírez of
Univision Communications TelevisaUnivision (formerly known as Univision Communications) is a Mexican-American media company headquartered in New York and Mexico City, which owns the American Spanish language broadcast network Univision. 45% of the company is held by the ...
has stated that much of the political fake news circulating in Spain is due to the lack of investigative journalism on the topics. Most recently ''El País'' has created a fact-checking position for five employees, to try and debunk the fake news released.


Sweden

The Swedish Security Service issued a report in 2015 identifying propaganda from Russia infiltrating Sweden with the objective to amplify pro-Russian propaganda and inflame societal conflicts. The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency (MSB), part of the Ministry of Defence of Sweden, identified fake news reports targeting
Sweden Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
in 2016 that originated from Russia. Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency official Mikael Tofvesson stated a pattern emerged where views critical of Sweden were constantly repeated. '' The Local'' identified these tactics as a form of psychological warfare. The newspaper reported the MSB identified '' Russia Today'' and ''
Sputnik News Sputnik (; formerly Voice of Russia and RIA Novosti, naming derived from Russian ) is a Russian state-owned news agency and radio broadcast service. It was established by the Russian government-owned news agency Rossiya Segodnya on 10 Novemb ...
'' as significant fake news purveyors. As a result of growth in this propaganda in Sweden, the MSB planned to hire six additional security officials to fight back against the campaign of fraudulent information. According to the
Oxford Internet Institute The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multi-disciplinary department of social and computer science dedicated to the study of information, communication, and technology, and is part of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford ...
, eight of the top 10 "junk news" sources during the
2018 Swedish general election General elections were held in Sweden on 9 September 2018 to elect the 349 members of the Riksdag. Regional and municipal elections were also held on the same day. The incumbent minority government, consisting of the Social Democrats and the Gre ...
campaign were Swedish, and "Russian sources comprised less than 1% of the total number of URLs shared in the data sample."


Ukraine

Since the
Euromaidan Euromaidan (; uk, Євромайдан, translit=Yevromaidan, lit=Euro Square, ), or the Maidan Uprising, was a wave of Political demonstration, demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on 21 November 2013 with large protes ...
and the beginning of the Ukrainian crisis in 2014, the Ukrainian media circulated several fake news stories and misleading images, including a dead rebel photograph with a Photoshop-painted tattoo which allegedly indicated that he belonged to Russian Special Forces and the threat of a Russian nuclear attack against the Ukrainian troops. The recurring theme of these fake news was that Russia was solely to blame for the crisis and the war in Donbass. In 2015 the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe published a report criticizing Russian disinformation campaigns to disrupt relations between Europe and Ukraine after ouster of Viktor Yanukovych. According to ''
Deutsche Welle Deutsche Welle (; "German Wave" in English), abbreviated to DW, is a German public, state-owned international broadcaster funded by the German federal tax budget. The service is available in 32 languages. DW's satellite television service con ...
'', similar tactics were used by fake news websites during the U.S. elections. A website
StopFake
was created by Ukrainian activists in 2014 to debunk fake news in Ukraine, including media portrayal of the Ukrainian crisis. On May 29, 2018, the Ukrainian media and state officials announced that the Russian journalist
Arkady Babchenko Arkady Arkadyevich Babchenko (russian: Аркадий Аркадьевич Бабченко; born 18 March 1977) is a Russian print and television journalist. From 1995, Babchenko served in the communication corps in the North Caucasus while par ...
was assassinated in his apartment in Kyiv. Later, Babchenko appeared to be alive, and the Security Service of Ukraine claimed that the staged assassination was needed to arrest a person who allegedly was planning a real assassination.
Alexander Baunov Alexander Germanovich Baunov (russian: link=no, Александр Германович Баунов, born December 4, 1969) is a Russian international policy expert, journalist, publicist, and former diplomat. Since 2015, he has been a senior a ...
, writing for Carnegie.ru, mentioned that the staged assassination of Babchenko was the first instance of fake news delivered directly by the highest officials of a state.


United Kingdom

Under King Edward I of England () "'a statute was passed which made it a grave offence to devise or tell any false news of prelates, dukes, earls, barons, or nobles of the realm.'" In 1702
Queen Anne of England Queen Anne of England may refer to: *Anne of Bohemia (1366–1394), queen consort of England 1382–1394 *Anne Neville (1456–1485), queen consort of England 1483–1485 *Anne Boleyn (c.1501–1536), queen consort of England 1533–1536 *Anne of C ...
issued a proclamation "for restraining the spreading false news, and printing and publishing of irreligious and seditious papers and libels". On December 8, 2016, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6)
Alex Younger Sir Alexander William Younger (born 4 July 1963) is a former career British intelligence officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) who served as the Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, succeeding Sir John Sawers on his retirement. ...
delivered a speech to journalists at the MI6 headquarters where he called fake news and propaganda damaging to democracy. Younger said the mission of MI6 was to combat propaganda and fake news in order to deliver to his government a strategic advantage in the information-warfare arena, and to assist other nations including Europe. He called such methods of fake-news propaganda online a "fundamental threat to our sovereignty". Younger said all nations that hold democratic values should feel the same worry over fake news. However, definitions of "fake news" have been controversial in the UK. Dr Claire Wardle advised some UK Members of Parliament against using the term in certain circumstances "when describing the complexity of information disorder", as the term "fake news" is "woefully inadequate":
Neither the words 'fake' nor 'news' effectively capture this polluted information ecosystem. Much of the content used as examples in debates on this topic are not fake, they are genuine but used out of context or manipulated. Similarly, to understand the entire ecosystem of polluted information, we need to consider far more than content that mimics 'news'.
In October 2020, a hoax claim made by a spoof Twitter account, about the supposed reopening of
Woolworths Woolworth, Woolworth's, or Woolworths may refer to: Businesses * F. W. Woolworth Company, the original US-based chain of "five and dime" (5¢ and 10¢) stores * Woolworths Group (United Kingdom), former operator of the Woolworths chain of shops ...
stores, was repeated without verification by news sites including the
Daily Mail The ''Daily Mail'' is a British daily middle-market tabloid newspaper and news websitePeter Wilb"Paul Dacre of the Daily Mail: The man who hates liberal Britain", ''New Statesman'', 19 December 2013 (online version: 2 January 2014) publish ...
and Daily Mirror (and the latter's regional sister titles).


Asia


China

Fake news during the 2016 U.S. election spread to China. Articles popularized within the United States were translated into Chinese and spread within China. The government of China used the growing problem of fake news as a rationale for increasing
Internet censorship in China Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China (PRC) affects both publishing and viewing online material. Many controversial events are censored from news coverage, preventing many Chinese citizens from knowing about the actions of th ...
in November 2016. China then published an editorial in its Communist Party newspaper '' The Global Times'' called: "Western media's crusade against Facebook", and criticized "unpredictable" political problems posed by freedoms enjoyed by users of Twitter, Google, and Facebook. China government leaders meeting in Wuzhen at the third World Internet Conference in November 2016 said fake news in the U.S. election justified adding more curbs to free and open use of the Internet. China Deputy Minister Ren Xianliang, official at the Cyberspace Administration of China, said increasing online participation led to "harmful information" and fraud. Kam Chow Wong, a former Hong Kong law enforcement official and criminal justice professor at Xavier University, praised attempts in the U.S. to patrol social media. '' The Wall Street Journal'' noted China's themes of Internet censorship became more relevant at the World Internet Conference due to the outgrowth of fake news. The issue of fake news in the 2016 United States election gave the Chinese Government a reason to further criticize Western democracy and press freedom. The Chinese government accused Western media organisations of bias, in a move apparently inspired by President Trump. In March 2017, the ''
People's Daily The ''People's Daily'' () is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The newspaper provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the CCP. In addition to its main Chinese-language ...
'', a newspaper run by the ruling Chinese Communist Party, denounced news coverage of the torture of Chinese lawyer and human rights advocate Xie Yang, claiming it to be fake news. The newspaper published a Twitter post declaring that "Foreign media reports that police tortured a detained lawyer is FAKE NEWS, fabricated to tarnish China's image". The state-owned Xinhua News Agency claimed that "the stories were essentially fake news". The Chinese government often accused Western news organizations of being biased and dishonest. The Chinese government also claimed that there were people who posed as journalists who spread negative information on social media in order to extort payment from their victims to stop doing so. David Bandurski of University of Hong Kong's China Media Project said that this issue continued to worsen.


Hong Kong, China

During the 2019–20 Hong Kong protests, the Chinese government has been accused for using fake news to spread misinformation regarding the protests. It includes describing protests as "riots", and "radicals" seeking independence for the city. Due to the online censorship in China, citizens inside mainland China could not read news reports from some media outlets. It was also found by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that misinformation was spread with fake accounts and advertisements by state-backed media. Large amount of accounts were suspended.
Dot Dot News ''Dot Dot News'' ( zh, 點新聞) is a pro-Beijing online media outlet located in Hong Kong, established in 2016. It has a close relationship with pro-Beijing newspaper ''Wen Wei Po'', sharing the same office in Hing Wai Industrial Centre in Tin W ...
, a pro-Beijing online media located in Hong Kong, has been banned by Facebook given it has been distributing fake news and hate speech.


India

Fake news in India has led to violent incidents between
caste Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...
s and religions, interfering with public policies. It often spreads through the smartphone instant messenger WhatsApp, which had 200 million
monthly active users Active users is a measurement metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from visitors within a relevant range of time (daily, weekly and m ...
in the country .


Indonesia

Recently, Indonesia has seen an increase in the amount of fake news circulating social media. The problem first arose during their 2014 presidential election, where the eventual-winning candidate
Joko Widodo Joko Widodo (; born 21 June 1961), popularly known as Jokowi, is an Indonesian politician and businessman who is the 7th and current president of Indonesia. Elected in July 2014, he was the first Indonesian president not to come from an elite ...
became a target of a smear campaign by Prabowo Subianto's supporters which falsely claimed he was the child of
Indonesian Communist Party The Communist Party of Indonesia (Indonesian: ''Partai Komunis Indonesia'', PKI) was a communist party in Indonesia during the mid-20th century. It was the largest non-ruling communist party in the world before its violent disbandment in 1965. ...
members, of
Chinese descent Overseas Chinese () refers to people of Chinese birth or ethnicity who reside outside Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. Terminology () or ''Hoan-kheh'' () in Hokkien, refe ...
, and a
Christian Christians () are people who follow or adhere to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. The words ''Christ'' and ''Christian'' derive from the Koine Greek title ''Christós'' (Χρι ...
. Unlike the 2016 U.S. presidential election, where the sharing of fake news resulted in increased social-media engagement than real news, inflaming ethnic and political tensions could be potentially deadly in Indonesia, with its recent incidences of domestic terrorism, and its long and bloody history of
anti-communist Anti-communism is Political movement, political and Ideology, ideological opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in the Russian Empire, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, w ...
, anti-Christian and
anti-Chinese Anti-Chinese sentiment, also known as Sinophobia, is a fear or dislike of China, Chinese people or Chinese culture. It often targets Chinese minorities living outside of China and involves immigration, development of national identity in ...
pogroms cultivated by
Suharto Suharto (; ; 8 June 1921 – 27 January 2008) was an Indonesian army officer and politician, who served as the second and the longest serving president of Indonesia. Widely regarded as a military dictator by international observers, Suharto ...
's U.S.-backed right-wing dictatorship which ran the country for thirty-some years. Suharto was also Prabowo's father in-law for the last 15 years of the regime. The government, watchdog groups, and even religious organizations have taken steps to prevent its spreading, such as blocking certain websites and creating fact-check apps. The largest Islamic mass organization in Indonesia,
Nahdlatul Ulama Nahdlatul Ulama (, , NU) is an Islam in Indonesia, Islamic organization in Indonesia. Its membership estimates range from 40 million (2013) to over 95 million (2021), making it the largest Islamic organization in the world. NU also is a charitab ...
, has created an anti-fake news campaign called #TurnBackHoax, while other Islamic groups have defined such propagation as tantamount to a sin. While the government currently views criminal punishment as its last resort, officials are working hard to guarantee law enforcement will respect the freedom of expression. The fake news campaign rose again in the 2019 presidential election, which involved the same sides competing last time out. For years, most fake news circulated in Indonesia are related to alleged
Chinese imperialism Chinese imperialism refers to the expansion of China's political, economic, cultural influence beyond the boundaries of China. Depending on the commentors, this word could refers to one or more of the Chinese expansionism, wolf warrior diplomacy, c ...
(including Sinicization), communization, and Christianization.


Malaysia

In April 2018, Malaysia implemented the Anti-Fake News Bill 2018, a controversial law that deemed publishing and circulating misleading information as a crime punishable by up to six years in prison and/or fines of up to 500,000 ringgit. At implementation, the country's prime minister was
Najib Razak Dato' Sri Haji Mohammad Najib bin Tun Haji Abdul Razak ( ms, محمد نجيب بن عبد الرزاق, label= Jawi, script=arab, italic=unset, ; born 23 July 1953) is a Malaysian politician who served as the 6th prime minister of Malaysi ...
, whose associates were connected to the mishandling of at least $3.5 billion by a United States Department of Justice report. Of that sum of money, $731 million was deposited into bank accounts controlled by Razak. The convergence between the fake news law and Razak's connection to scandal was made clear by the Malaysian minister of communications and multimedia,
Salleh Said Keruak Datuk Seri Panglima Md Salleh bin Md Said ( Jawi: محمد صالح بن محمد سعيد; born 10 July 1958), commonly known as Salleh Said Keruak, is a Malaysian politician who was Chief Minister of the state of Sabah from 1994 to 1996. He ...
, who said that tying Razak to a specific dollar amount could be a prosecutable offense. In the
2018 Malaysian general election The 2018 Malaysian General Election, formally known as the 14th Malaysian General Election (), was held on Wednesday, 9 May 2018, for members of the 14th Parliament of Malaysia. At stake were all 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat (the legislature' ...
, Najib Razak lost his seat as prime minister to Mahatir Mohammad, who vowed to abolish the fake news law in his campaign, as the law was used to target him. After winning the election, the newly elected prime minister Mohammad has said, "Even though we support freedom of press and freedom of speech, there are limits." , Mohammad has supported amending the law, rather than a full abolition. Paul Bernal, a lecturer in information and technology, fears that the fake news epidemic is a "Trojan horse" for countries like Malaysia to "control uncomfortable stories". The vagueness of this law means that satirists, opinion writers, and journalists who make errors could face persecution. The law also makes it illegal to share fake news stories. In one instance, a Danish man and Malaysian citizen were arrested for posting false news stories online and were sentenced to serve a month in jail.


Myanmar (Burma)

In 2015, BBC News reported on fake stories, using unrelated photographs and fraudulent captions, shared online in support of the Rohingya. Fake news negatively affected individuals in
Myanmar Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...
, leading to a rise in violence against Muslims in the country. Online participation surged from one percent to 20 percent of Myanmar's total populace from 2014 to 2016. Fake stories from Facebook were reprinted in paper periodicals called ''Facebook'' and ''The Internet''. False reporting related to practitioners of Islam in the country was directly correlated with increased attacks on Muslims in Myanmar.
BuzzFeed BuzzFeed, Inc. is an American Internet media, news and entertainment company with a focus on digital media. Based in New York City, BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti and John S. Johnson III to focus on tracking viral content. Ken ...
journalist Sheera Frenkel reported fake news fictitiously stated believers in Islam acted out in violence at Buddhist locations. She documented a direct relationship between the fake news and violence against Muslim people. Frenkel noted countries that were relatively newer to Internet exposure were more vulnerable to the problems of fake news and fraud.


Pakistan

Khawaja Muhammad Asif, the Minister of Defence of Pakistan, threatened on Twitter to attack Israel with nuclear weapons after a false story claiming that Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Ministry of Defense, said "If Pakistan send ground troops into Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack."


Philippines

Fake news sites have become rampant for Philippine audiences, especially being shared on social media. Politicians have started filing laws to combat fake news and three Senate hearings have been held on the topic. The Catholic Church in the Philippines has also released a missive speaking out against it. Vera Files research at the end of 2017 and 2018 show that the most shared fake news in the Philippines appeared to benefit 2 people the most: President
Rodrigo Duterte Rodrigo Roa Duterte (, ; born March 28, 1945), also known as Digong, Rody, and by the initials DU30 and PRRD, is a Filipino lawyer and politician who served as the 16th president of the Philippines from 2016 to 2022. He is the chairperson ...
(as well as his allies) and politician
Bongbong Marcos Ferdinand "Bongbong" Romualdez Marcos Jr. ( , , ; born September 13, 1957), commonly referred to by the initials PBBM or BBM, is a Filipino politician who is the 17th and current president of the Philippines. He previously served as a senat ...
, with the most viral news driven by shares on networks of Facebook pages. Most Philippine audience Facebook pages and groups spreading online disinformation also bear "Duterte", "Marcos" or "News" in their names and are pro-Duterte. Online disinformation in the Philippines is overwhelmingly political as well, with most attacking groups or individuals critical of the Duterte administration. Many Philippine-audience fake news websites also appear to be controlled by the same operators as they share common Google AdSense and Google Analytics IDs. According to media scholar Jonathan Corpus Ong, Duterte's presidential campaign is regarded as the
patient zero The index case or patient zero is the first documented patient in a disease epidemic within a population, or the first documented patient included in an epidemiological study. It can also refer to the first case of a condition or syndrome (not n ...
in the current era of disinformation, having preceded widespread global coverage of the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Russian trolls. Fake news is so established and severe in the Philippines that Facebook's Global Politics and Government Outreach Director Katie Harbath also calls it "patient zero" in the global misinformation epidemic, having happened before Brexit, the Trump nomination and the 2016 US Elections.


Singapore

Singapore criminalizes the propagation of fake news. Under existing law, "Any person who transmits or causes to be transmitted a message which he knows to be false or fabricated shall be guilty of an offense". On March 18, 2015, a doctored screenshot of Prime Minister's Office website claiming the demise of the Lee Kuan Yew went viral, and several international news agencies such as CNN and
China Central Television China Central Television (CCTV) is a Chinese state- and political party-owned broadcaster controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Its 50 different channels broadcast a variety of programing to more than one billion viewers in six lan ...
initially reported it as news, until corrected by the Prime Minister's Office. The image was created by a student to demonstrate to his classmates how fake news could be easily created and propagated. In 2017, Singaporean news website ''Mothership.sg'' was criticized by the Ministry of Education (MOE) for propagating remarks falsely attributed to a MOE official. In addition, Minister of Law K Shanmugam also singled out online news website ''The States Times Review'' as an example of a source of fake news, as it once claimed a near-zero turnout at the state funeral of President
S. R. Nathan Sellapan Ramanathan (; 3 July 1924 – 22 August 2016),. often known as S. R. Nathan, was a Singaporean politician who served as the sixth president of Singapore between 1999 and 2011. He was also the longest-serving president in Singapore's hi ...
. Following these incidents, Shanmugam stated that the existing legalization is limited and ineffective and indicated that the government intends to introduce legislation to combat fake news in 2018. 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, while in 2018, the
Parliament of Singapore The Parliament of Singapore is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Singapore, which governs the country alongside the president of Singapore. Largely based upon the Westminster system, the Parliament is made up of Members of Parliam ...
formed a
Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods The Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods is a select committee of the Parliament of Singapore that was formed on 11 January 2018 to examine and report on the problem of deliberate online falsehoods and to recommend strategies to de ...
to consider new legislation to tackle fake news. On recommendations from the select committee, the Singapore government introduced the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Bill in April 2019, Critics had pointed out that this bill could introduce government's self censorship and increase government's control over social media. Activist platform '' The Online Citizen'' regarded legislation against fake news as an attempt by the government to curb the free flow of information so that only information approved by the government is disseminated to the public. In an online essay, activist and historian Thum Ping Tjin denied that fake news was a problem in Singapore, and accused the People's Action Party government as the only major source of fake news, claiming that detentions made without trial during Operation Coldstore and
Operation Spectrum Operation Spectrum, also known as the 1987 "Marxist Conspiracy", was the code name for a covert security operation that took place in Singapore on 21 May 1987. Sixteen people were arrested and detained without trial under Singapore's Internal ...
were based on fake news for party political gain. Facebook and Google had opposed the introduction of the law to combat fake news, claiming that existing legislation was adequate to address the problem and that an effective way of combating misinformation is through educating citizens on how to distinguish reliable from unreliable information. The Bill was passed June 3, 2019. 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. There have been 75 recorded instances of POFMA's usage since the law's introduction, with the latest occurred on May 7, 2021.


South Korea

South Korean journalists and media experts lament political hostility between South and North Korea which distorts media coverage of North Korea and North Korea has attributed erroneous reporting to South Korea and United States with being critical to media organization Chosun Ilbo while also American journalist Barbara Demick had made similar criticisms on media coverage of North. On November 27, 2018, prosecutors raided the house of Gyeonggi Province governor
Lee Jae-myung Lee Jae-myung (; born 22 December 1964) is a South Korean politician serving as a member of the National Assembly and the leader of the Democratic Party of Korea. Lee was the nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2022 South Korean presidenti ...
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.


Taiwan

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 Local elections were held on 24 November 2018 in Taiwan, to elect county magistrates (city mayors), county (city) councilors, township mayors, township councilors and chiefs of village (borough) in 6 municipalities and 16 counties (cities). Elec ...
. In a report in December 2015 by '' The China Post'', a fake video shared online showed people a light show purportedly made at the
Shihmen Reservoir Shihmen Dam (; also spelled Shimen or Shihman) is a major rock fill dam across the Dahan River in northern Taoyuan City. It forms the Shihmen Reservoir (), Taiwan's third largest reservoir or artificial lake. It provides irrigation in Taoyuan, fl ...
. The Northern Region Water Resources Office confirmed there was no light show at the reservoir and the event had been fabricated. The fraud led to an increase in tourist visits to the actual attraction. 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. It will be included to develop the
critical thinking Critical thinking is the analysis of available facts, evidence, observations, and arguments to form a judgement. The subject is complex; several different definitions exist, which generally include the rational, skeptical, and unbiased analysis ...
skills needed while using social media. Further, the work of media literacy will also include the skills needed to analyze propaganda and sources, so the student can clarify what is fake news.


Americas


Brazil

Brazil faced increasing influence from fake news after the 2014 re-election of President Dilma Rousseff and Rousseff's subsequent impeachment in August 2016. BBC Brazil reported in April 2016 that in the week surrounding one of the impeachment votes, three out of the five most-shared articles on Facebook in Brazil were fake. 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). Nalon told '' The Guardian'' there was a great deal of fake news, and hesitated to compare the problem to that experienced in the U.S.Kate Connolly; Angelique Chrisafis; Poppy McPherson; Stephanie Kirchgaessner; Benjamin Haas; Dominic Phillips; Elle Hunt (December 2, 2016)
"Fake news: an insidious trend that's fast becoming a global problem – With fake online 1news dominating discussions after the US election, Guardian correspondents explain how it is distorting politics around the world"
''The Guardian''. Retrieved December 2, 2016.
In fact, Brazil also has a problem with fake news, and according to a survey, it has a greater number of people that believe fake news influenced the outcome of their elections; (69%)more than in the United States, (47%). President of Brazil
Jair Bolsonaro Jair Messias Bolsonaro (; born 21 March 1955) is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer who has been the 38th president of Brazil since 1 January 2019. He was elected in 2018 as a member of the Social Liberal Party, which he turn ...
has claimed that he will not allow his government to use any of its 1.8 billion '' reais'' (US$487 million) media budget on purchases from fake news media (that is, media that does not support him). The '' BBC'' reported that Bolsonaro's campaign declared media associating his campaign to the "extreme right" were themselves fake news. In 2020,
Brazil's Supreme Court The Supreme Federal Court ( pt, Supremo Tribunal Federal, , abbreviated STF) is the supreme court (court of last resort) of Brazil, serving primarily as the Constitutional Court of the country. It is the highest court of law in Brazil for consti ...
began an investigation into a purported campaign of disinformation by supporters of Bolsonaro. The Brazilian President claimed that this investigation was "unconstitutional", and any restriction of fake news was an act of censorship. After an order by the Brazilian Supreme Court, Facebook had removed "dozens" of fake accounts that were directly linked to Bolsonaro's offices and his sons, and which were directed against politicians and media that opposed the President. A video of Bolsonaro falsely claiming that the anti-malarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, has been working everywhere against the coronavirus, was also taken down by Facebook and Twitter. In regards to the COVID-19 pandemic, he has accused his political opponents of exaggerating the severity of the virus. He gave a speech in 2021 in which he claimed that the virus was not as bad as the media made it out to be, and it was "fantasy" created by the media. In the wake of the uptick in Amazon fires of 2019, it became clear that many of the forest fire photos that went viral were fake news. Emmanuel Macron, president of France, tweeted picture taken by a photographer who died in 2003, for example.


Canada

Fake news online was brought to the attention of Canadian politicians in November 2016, as they debated helping assist local newspapers. Member of Parliament for
Vancouver Centre Vancouver Centre (french: Vancouver-Centre) is a federal electoral district in British Columbia, Canada, that has been represented in the House of Commons of Canada since 1917. It is the riding with the biggest Japanese community in Canada. As ...
Hedy Fry specifically discussed fake news as an example of ways in which publishers on the Internet are less accountable than print media. Discussion in parliament contrasted increase of fake news online with downsizing of Canadian newspapers and the impact for democracy in Canada. Representatives from Facebook Canada attended the meeting and told members of Parliament they felt it was their duty to assist individuals gather data online. In January 2017, the Conservative leadership campaign of Kellie Leitch admitted to spreading fake news, including false claims that Justin Trudeau was financing Hamas. The campaign manager claimed he spread the news in order to provoke negative reactions so that he could determine those who "aren't real Conservatives".


Colombia

In the fall of 2016, WhatsApp spread fake news that impacted votes critical to Colombian history. One of the lies spreading rapidly through WhatsApp was that Colombian citizens would receive less pension so former guerrilla fighters would get money. The misinformation initially began in a question to whether WhatsApp users approved of the peace accord deal between the national government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) or did not. The peace accord would end five decades of war between paramilitary groups (rebel forces) and the Colombian government that resulted in millions of deaths and displaced citizens throughout the country. A powerful influence of votes was the "no" campaign, the "no" campaign was to convince citizens of Colombia to not accept the peace accord because it would be letting the rebel group off "too easily." Uribe, former president of Colombia and of the democratico party, led the "no" campaign. Santos, president in 2016 took liberal approaches during his presidency. Santos won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2016 because of his efforts towards a peace accord with rebel forces. In addition, Uribe naturally had opposing views than of Santos. Furthermore, other news spread through WhatsApp were easily misinterpreted by the public, including that Santo's scheme was to turn Colombia under harsh rule like Cuba and chaos like Venezuela (under Hugo Chávez), though the logistics were never explained. In an interview of Juan Carlos Vélez, the "no" campaign manager, he says their strategy was that "We discovered the viral power of social networks." In addition, the yes campaign also took part in spreading fake news through WhatsApp. For instance, a photoshopped image of a democratico senator Everth Bustamante spread about of him holding a sign reading "I don't want guirrellas in congress" to show hypocrisy. This would be seen as hypocritical because he was a former left wing M-19 guerrilla. The "no" campaign strongly influenced votes throughout Colombia, Yes votes strong in areas with highest number of victims and no votes in areas influenced by Uribe. In result, there were 50.2 percent of no votes compared to 49.8 percent of yes votes. The result of the fake news throughout WhatsApp included changes within WhatsApp by Journalist, Juanita Leon, who invented the WhatsApp "lie detector" in January 2017 to fight fake news within the app. Although the accord was eventually signed, the WhatsApp incident further prolonged the accord and brought controversial views among citizens.


Mexico

The PRI political party has been reported to use fake news since before
Peña Nieto Peña, meaning "rocky outcrop" or "rocky summit" in the Spanish language (Aragonese: ''Penya'', Catalan: ''Penya''). It may refer to: Mountains *Peña Montañesa, a mountain in the Pre-Pyrenees, Aragon, Spain *Peña de los Enamorados, a mountain ...
. Common tactics included spreading such propaganda through open radio and television networks. These tactics were effective in Mexico, because newspaper readership is low and cable TV is largely limited to the middle classes; consequently, the country's two major television networks – Televisa and TV Azteca – exert a significant influence in national politics. Televisa owns approximately two-thirds of the programming on Mexico's TV channels, making it not only Mexico's largest television network, also the largest media network in the Spanish-speaking world.


United States


Middle East and Africa


Armenia

According to a report by openDemocracy in 2020, the Armenian website Medmedia.am was spreading disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, calling COVID-19 a "fake pandemic" and warning Armenians to refuse future vaccine programmes. 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. The Guardian newspaper said the site was launched with the unwitting help of a US State Department grant intended to promote democracy.


Egypt

According to '' The Daily Telegraph'', an Egyptian official suggested in 2010 that the Israeli spy agency
Mossad Mossad ( , ), ; ar, الموساد, al-Mōsād, ; , short for ( he, המוסד למודיעין ולתפקידים מיוחדים, links=no), meaning 'Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations'. is the national intelligence agency ...
could have been behind a fatal shark attack in Sharm el-Sheikh. It was estimated by the Egyptian Parliament's Communication and Information Technology Committee that in 2017, 53,000 false rumors had been spread primarily through social media in 60 days.


Israel and Palestinian territories

In 1996, people had been killed in the
Western Wall Tunnel riots The Western Wall Tunnel riots erupted on 24 September 1996, lasting primarily for four days, with smaller isolated outbreaks of violence occurring after this period. This conflict was the first between the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and the newly ...
in reaction to fake news accounts. In April 2018, Palestinian-Israeli football team Bnei Sakhnin threatened to sue Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for libel, after he claimed fans booed during a minute of silence for Israeli flash-flood victims. In a social media post, Netanyahu blasted various Israeli news critical of him, as fake news including Channel 2, Channel 10,
Haaretz ''Haaretz'' ( , originally ''Ḥadshot Haaretz'' – , ) is an Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel, and is now published in both Hebrew and English in the Berliner f ...
and Ynet the same day U.S. President Trump decried "fake news". The Palestinian Islamist political organization, Hamas published a political program in 2017 intended to ease its position on Israel. Among other things, this charter accepted the borders of the Palestinian state circa the Six-Day War of 1967. Although this document is an advancement from their previous 1988 charter, which called for the destruction of the State of Israel, it still does not recognize Israel as legitimate independent nation. In a May 2017 video, Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the coverage of this event by news outlets such as ''
Al Jazeera Al Jazeera ( ar, الجزيرة, translit-std=DIN, translit=al-jazīrah, , "The Island") is a state-owned Arabic-language international radio and TV broadcaster of Qatar. It is based in Doha and operated by the media conglomerate Al Jazeera ...
'', CNN, '' The New York Times'' and '' The Guardian'', labeling their reporting "fake news". He specifically disagreed with the notion that Hamas had accepted the state of Israel within their new charter, and called this "a complete distortion of the truth". Instead he said, "The new Hamas document says Israel has no right to exist." ''
Haaretz ''Haaretz'' ( , originally ''Ḥadshot Haaretz'' – , ) is an Israeli newspaper. It was founded in 1918, making it the longest running newspaper currently in print in Israel, and is now published in both Hebrew and English in the Berliner f ...
'' fact-checked the video, stating, "Netanyahu, following in the footsteps of Trump, is deliberately twisting the definition of 'fake news' to serve his own needs." In a later speech, addressed to his supporters, Netanyahu responded to allegations against him: "The fake news industry is at its peak... Look, for example, how they cover with unlimited enthusiasm, every week, the left-wing demonstration. The same demonstrations whose goal is to apply improper pressure on law enforcement authorities so they will file an indictment at any price." '' The Washington Post'' likened his use of the term ''fake news'' for describing left-wing media to Donald Trump's similar statements during the 2016 United States election cycle. In a most recent studies conducted by Yifat Media Check Ltd. and Hamashrokit ("The Whistle" fact-checking NGO), they found that over 70% of statements made by Israeli political leaders were not accurate. Some of the fake news Israel has been the victim of includes
Israel-related animal conspiracy theories Zoological Conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories involving Israel are occasionally found in the media or on the Internet, typically in Muslim-majority countries, alleging use of animals by Israel to attack civilians or to conduct espionage. These ...
which claim Israel is using various animals to spy on or attack others with.


Saudi Arabia

According to the ''Global News'', Saudi Arabia's state-owned television spread fake news about Canada. In August 2018, Canada's ''Global News'' reported that state-owned television '' Al Arabiya'', "has suggested that Canada is the worst country in the world for women, that it has the highest suicide rate and that it treats its Indigenous people the way Myanmar treats the Rohingya—a Muslim minority massacred and driven out of Myanmar en masse last year." In October 2018, Twitter has suspended a number of bot accounts that appeared to be spreading pro-Saudi rhetoric about the disappearance of Saudi opposition journalist Jamal Khashoggi. According to ''Newsweek'', Saudi Arabia's Office of Public Prosecution tweeted that "producing rumors or fake news hat Saudi Arabia's government was involved in the disappearance of Khashoggithat would affect the public order or public security or sending or resending it via social media or any technical means" is punishable "by five years and a fine of 3million riyals". Iranian-backed Twitter accounts have spread sensational fake news and rumours about Saudi Arabia. On August 1, 2019, Facebook identified hundreds of accounts that were running a covert network on behalf of government of the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the Ara ...
to spread fake news and attack regional rivals. The social media giant removed more than 350 accounts, pages and groups with nearly 1.4 million followers. Along with Facebook, these accounts were involved in "coordinated inauthentic behavior" on
Instagram Instagram is a photo and video sharing social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. The app allows users to upload media that can be edited with filters and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging. Posts can ...
as well. According to a Facebook blog post, the network was running two different political agendas, one on behalf of Saudi Arabia and the other for the United Arab Emirates and Egypt.


South Africa

A wide range of South African media sources have reported fake news as a growing problem and tool to both increase distrust in the media, discredit political opponents, and divert attention from corruption. Media outlets owned by the
Gupta family The Gupta family is a wealthy Indian-born family with business interests in South Africa, whose most notable members are brothers Ajay, Atul, and Rajesh "Tony" Gupta—as well as Atul's nephews Varun, and US-based Ashish and Amol. The family ow ...
have been noted by other South African media organisations such as The Huffington Post (South Africa), ''
Sunday Times ''The Sunday Times'' is a British newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as ''The New Observer''. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK, whi ...
,'' Radio 702, and ''
City Press A city is a human settlement of notable size.Goodall, B. (1987) ''The Penguin Dictionary of Human Geography''. London: Penguin.Kuper, A. and Kuper, J., eds (1996) ''The Social Science Encyclopedia''. 2nd edition. London: Routledge. It can be de ...
'' for targeting them. Individuals targeted include Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan who was seen as blocking Gupta attempts at
state capture State capture is a type of systemic political corruption in which private interests significantly influence a state's decision-making processes to their own advantage. The term was first used by the World Bank, around the year 2000, to describe ...
with accusations levelled against Gordhan of promoting state capture for "
white monopoly capital White Monopoly Capital is a South African phrase used in contemporary political discourse. The origin of the term, the exact meaning of the term, and even the existence of what the term is thought to mean is disputed. The term is thought to mean ...
". The African National Congress (ANC) was taken to court by Sihle Bolani for unpaid work she did during the election on the ANC's behalf. In court papers Bolani stated that the ANC used her to launch and run a covert R50 million fake news and disinformation campaign during the 2016 municipal elections with the intention of discrediting opposition parties.


Syria

In February 2017,
Amnesty International Amnesty International (also referred to as Amnesty or AI) is an international non-governmental organization focused on human rights, with its headquarters in the United Kingdom. The organization says it has more than ten million members and sup ...
reported that up to 13,000 people had been hanged in a Syrian prison as part of an "extermination" campaign. Syrian president
Bashar al-Assad Bashar Hafez al-Assad, ', Levantine pronunciation: ; (, born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the 19th president of Syria, since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the ...
questioned the credibility of Amnesty International and called the report "fake news" fabricated to undermine the government. "You can forge anything these days—we are living in a fake news era." Russia ran a disinformation campaign during the Syrian Civil War to discredit the humanitarian rescue organisation
White Helmets White Helmets may refer to: * White Helmets Commission, a body of the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Trade and Worship * White Helmets (Syrian Civil War), a volunteer organization in Syria and Turkey ** ''The White Helmets'' ...
, and to discredit reports and images of children and other civilian bombing victims. This was done to weaken criticism of Russia's involvement in the war. The United Nations and international chemical inspectors found
Bashar al-Assad Bashar Hafez al-Assad, ', Levantine pronunciation: ; (, born 11 September 1965) is a Syrian politician who is the 19th president of Syria, since 17 July 2000. In addition, he is the commander-in-chief of the Syrian Armed Forces and the ...
responsible for use of chemical weapons, which was called "fake news" by Russia. Russia promoted various contradictory claims that no chemicals were present, or attributing the chemical attacks to other countries or groups.


United Arab Emirates

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) had been funding non-profit organizations, think tanks and
contributors Contributor may refer to: * Author, the originator of any written work which is contributed to a publication ** Freelance writer, an author working as an independent contractor for a publication *** Contributor network, a freelance writing arrangem ...
of journalism, including
Foundation for Defense of Democracies The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank and registered lobbying organization based in Washington, D.C., United States. The group's political leanings have been described as hawkish and neoconservative ...
(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 Jonathan Spyer ( he, יונתן ספייר, ar, جوناثان سباير) is a British-Israeli analyst, writer, and journalist of Middle Eastern affairs. He is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the Middle East For ...
, 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.


Oceania


Australia

The Australian Parliament initiated investigation into "fake news" regarding issues surrounding fake news that occurred during the 2016 United States election. 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. This act of parliament is meant to combat the threat of social media spreading fake news. The Australian Code of Practice on Disinformation and Misinformation commenced on 22 February 2021, around 12 months after the Australian Government asked digital platforms to develop a voluntary code to address disinformation and misinformation and assist users of their services to more easily identify the reliability, trustworthiness and source of news content. The request is part of a broader Australian Government strategy to reform the technology and information dissemination landscape. The Australian Communications and Media (ACMA) oversaw the development of the code. The Government will then consider the need for further measures including mandatory regulation A well-known case of fabricated news in
Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...
happened in 2009 when a report ''Deception detection across Australian populations'' of a "Levitt Institute" was widely cited on news websites across the country, claiming that
Sydney Sydney ( ) is the capital city of the state of New South Wales, and the most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Located on Australia's east coast, the metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about towards the Blue Mountain ...
was the most naive city, despite the fact that the report itself contained a clue: amidst the mathematical gibberish, there was a statement: "These results were completely made up to be fictitious material through a process of modified truth and credibility nodes.""Deception detection deficiency"
''Media Watch'', episode 34, September 28, 2009, ABC TV


See also

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Notes


References


Sources


Further reading

* * *Malik, Shahnawaz Ahmed
Fake news: Legal analysis of false and misleading news and cyber propaganda
(February 5, 2019). AD VALOREM- Journal of Law: Volume 6: Issue II: Part-III: April–June 2019: ISSN : 2348–5485. *Arun, Chinmayi
On WhatsApp, rumours, lynchings, and the Indian Government
(January 3, 2019). Economic & Political Weekly vol. lIV no. 6. *Nagar, Itisha and Gill, Simran
Head is where the herd is: Fake news and effect of online social conformity on Islamophobia in Indians
SSHO-D-20-00611, * ''An open access guide exploring the use of digital methods to study false viral news, political memes, trolling practices and their social life online.'' * * Cortada, James W. and William Aspray. ''Fake news nation: The long history of lies and misinterpretations in America'' (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2019
online review
als
excerpt of book
* Higgins, Andrew et al

'' The New York Times'' November 25, 2016 * Horner, Paul (2017)
An online journal by satirist Paul Horner, listing all of his best hoaxes and fake news over the past 20 years. However, his satire was often spread far and wide by uncritical people believing it was true.
* * * * *


External links


Aspen Institute Commission on Information Disorder Final Report (2021).

Associated Press. AP Not Real News
A weekly roundup of the most popular, but completely untrue, headlines of the week.
First Draft Guide to Online Resources that Target Misinformation.
For example: Google Reverse Image Search (to identity the source of fake photos).
Fry, Stephen (narrator). How to spot fake news. "How do we know what is true?" (animated video; 2:52)
One video in the series That's Humanism, all narrated by Stephen Fry.
HKS Misinformation Review.
Harvard Kennedy School, Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy. A peer-reviewed, open-source scholarly publication with a fast review process and an emphasis on real-world situations. All content is targeted towards a specialized audience of researchers, journalists, fact-checkers, educators, policy makers, and other practitioners working in the information, media, and platform landscape fields.
Institute for Strategic Dialogue, London.
Powering solutions to extremism, hate and disinformation. * Scientific American (2020). Truth vs lies (Special edition), volume 29, no 4, Fall 2020. Contains 26 essays on understanding the science of misinformation and deception, and how to know what is real. Published later as an e-book.
Snopes
The largest and oldest fact-checking website, founded in 1994.
TruthorFiction
Seeking truth and exposing fiction since 1999. {{DEFAULTSORT:Fake news websites Fake news Fake news websites Anti-intellectualism Articles containing video clips Barriers to critical thinking Communication of falsehoods Confidence tricks Conspiracist media Criticism of journalism Deception Disinformation Disinformation operations Internet culture Internet fraud Internet hoaxes Internet manipulation and propaganda Internet-related controversies Journalistic hoaxes Mass media and entertainment controversies Media bias controversies News media manipulation Propaganda techniques Social engineering (computer security) 2010s neologisms