In America, President Trump tweets and
snarls regularly about “fake news.” In
Trump’s case, it’s anything that doesn’t match his agenda.
The European Union countries also are going
after fake news. News that’s really fake.
And they are finding that the far right,
Trump’s base, is guilty. Europe must have its Breitbart and Fox News slanted
news equivalents. And the left, too. So who are you to believe?
They are concerned that fake news would
affect the European Parliamentary elections. Sound familiar?
In Austria, the vice chancellor and
leader of the far-right FPO party, Heinz-Christian Strache, was fined 10,000 euros
for having accused ORF journalist Wolfgang Armin of spreading of
fake news.
John Knight’s workers have spent decades trying to be
accurate. And now Trump labels the New York Times and Washington Post as “fake
news.”
Don’t take my word for it, or anyone else’s. Read for
yourself this world-wide battle to expose fake news and protect real journalism:
FakEU roundup:
Officials are calling on journalists in the fight against fake news
By Alexander
Damiano Ricci · March 28, 2018
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The politics of fake news
Last week, the president of the German Federal Republic, Frank-Walter
Steinmeier, invited journalists
and bloggers to discuss the spread of misinformation at his Bellevue
residence in Berlin. Steinmeier called for traditional media and recognized
information sources to stand out as “islands of trustworthiness” in the public
sphere. Meanwhile, however, a new study conducted by the Stiftung Neue
Verantwortung investigated the role played by traditional
media outlets in the spread of fake news. The authors claimed that
well-established media outlets, such as Bild and Die Welt, created
fake news that were later exploited by right-wing politicians via social
networks.
In France, during the “Assise
du journalisme” — an annual event gathering French media
professionals — the Minister of Culture, Françoise Nyssen, revealed
further details about the upcoming bill aimed at tackling the diffusion of
fake news during elections. Under the law proposed by the government, news
items shall be considered a “threat” if they are “evidently false” and benefit
from “artificial” and “massive diffusion,” Nyssen said. Skeptical remarks on
the law have been expressed on Europe1,
Sud
Ouest and Public
Senat, whereas a thorough analysis of the challenges
of defining fake news from a judicial point of view was published in La
revue européenne des médias et du numérique. On March 28, two Senate
committees discuss
the contours of this legislative agenda.
The UN rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom
of opinion and expression, David Kaye, rebuked
Italy’s efforts to combat fake news through a reporting mechanism answering
to the police and set up by the Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, even
professionals of the agricultural sector are engaging in discussions about
digital misinformation. A professor in the University of Molise’s Agriculture
department warned that quality
of information is key in industrial sectors influenced by heavy economic
interests, such as the food
industry.
In its annual report,
the European data protection supervisor warned that disinformation could
critically influence the 2019 European Parliamentary electoral campaign.
The “principle of electoral transparency is not satisfied if voters do not have
the right to freely access, receive and share informations on the
electoral process and candidates,” said one of the supervisors, Carlo
Buttarelli. “The rights of the latter are threatened by online
manipulation,” he added. Shortly after, speaking to a crowd at the Foro de
Nueva Economia in Madrid, the director-general of communication of
the European Parliament, Jaume Duch, also warned that EP elections were
particularly vulnerable to the threats
of false news because European topics are less well-known. Meanwhile, Mariya
Gabriel, commissioner for the digital economy and society told Le Figaro
that, as part of its wider offensive against fake news, the EU should double
its funds allocated to the digital economy.
In Austria, two weeks ago, the vice chancellor and leader of the
far-right FPO party, Heinz-Christian Strache, was fined
10,000 euros for having accused ORF journalist Wolfgang Armin of spreading
of fake news. In a similar row, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy
accused
the French media outlet Médiapart of having spread fake news against him in
2012, in relation to the ongoing Libyan-campaign finance case. Médiapart promptly
replied to the accusations.
Producing and tackling fake news
The BBC created an
interactive game called BBC iReporter aimed at teens and tweens. The
Berlin-based Digital Game Culture Foundation will hold a
48-hour Game Jam to brainstorm on the development of news games. In France,
Franceinfo and France Culture will join forces to tackle misinformation. The
two public radio broadcasters will kick
off a special podcast series on false news about science on April 30.
Debating fake news: op-eds, commentaries
and academic debates
According to a Eurobarometer
survey, more than 80 percent of the European population perceive fake news
as a threat to democracy and as a problem in their country (IlSole24Ore).
Meanwhile, Fiorenza Gamba (University of Geneva) and Thomas Widmer (University
of Zurich) claim that the Swiss confederal system should be seen as an institutional
check on the spread of misinformation. As the Helvetic political system is
split up into districts, it becomes more difficult to target candidates with
fake news and hate speech, compared to cases of the “personalized political
systems,” such as those of the U.S., France and Italy. Meanwhile, the Swiss
newspaper Le Temps depicted the The New York Times as an
“antidote to fake news.”
On Die Welt, Jim Heintz argues Russia
was behind fake news long before Vladimir Putin’s emergence. In another
historical perspective, BBC documentarist Phil Tinline analyzed strategic disinformation
as a phenomenon spanning several decades of international politics.
Ioana Manolescu (Institut national de recherche dédié au numérique, INRIA)
and Erica Scherer, director of innovation at France Télévisions, discuss the
role of media in the diffusion of fake news. Scherer recalls that the lack
of trust traditional media are suffering from made it possible for fake news to
spread. On the other hand, Manolescu calls for media to take up the challenge
of providing thorough analysis of the social reality instead of just
fact-checking false claims.
Fact-checks from around Europe
In France, AFP
and Les
Décodeurs verified claims made by former President Nicolas Sarkozy related
to the ongoing investigation on Libyan funds and campaign financing. Sarkozy’s
declarations on the matter were deemed to be false.
In Spain, El
Objetivo checked the truthfulness of claims made by Noelia Vera, an MP of
the leftist alliance Unidos Podemos, on the numbers of “forced” Spanish
“economic migrants.” According to Vera, some 800,000 Spanish citizens left the
country due to the economic crisis that hit the country in the years following
the financial breakdown of 2007-08. However, official data contradict her
numbers.
In the UK, The Ferret
blasted promotional material shared on social media channels by the
pro-independence group Business for Scotland. The organization falsely claimed
Scotland was the “only UK nation to have exported more than it imported, every
year since records began.”
