Category Archives: Fake News

Fake news is already hitting New Zealand's election campaign, with a weekly research group pointing to NZ Public Party and the New Conservatives as the main offenders so far.

Photo: RNZ Pacific/ Koroi Hawkins

Victoria University researchers Dr Mona Krewel and Professor Jack Vowles have joined a project monitoring social media during election campaigning, identifying fake news.

Part of the challenge is to assess if techniques such as data mining or misinformation has intruded onto the campaign trail here as has been identified in some overseas elections and referenda.

Dr Krewel told RNZ Morning Report's Corin Dann that, backed by an army of coders, they would be publishing findings on a weekly basis starting this week.

"We have our coders and they have a huge thing which we call a codebook and they go through all the Facebook posts and have a definition of what fake news is.

"We also ask the coders to fact check, so if they are not fully sure that something could be fake news we ask them to actually kind of Google this, go to traditional media, to reliable sources like your radio station for example, and look if this has already been called out as fake news."

She said they had defined fake news as "stories that are completely or for the most part made up and intentionally and verifiably false to mislead voters".

"On the fake news half-truth side, I would say it's mostly the New Zealand Public Party and New Conservatives that engage in a little bit of that."

Many other metrics would also be examined, including looking at misinformation, negative versus positive campaigning, inclusion of Mori, and many more things, presented in interactive graphs.

"If it's flying below the radar of fake news ... If it's not entirely or for the most part made up, does it still contain some half truths or somewhat questionable regarding its factual accuracy," Dr Krewel said.

She says the coders are already training and have some initial results.

"My current impression is that they are campaigning very fair ... a little bit of negative campaigning we are starting to see."

She said New Zealand was a very different landscape than the US, and was more likely to see New Zealand-made fake news than high volumes of Russian bots and articles created by state actors.

"It's definitely the other end ... I would imagine that for the US and particularly the upcoming presidential election we would see a very high bar for fake news and negative campaigning, this is also due to the electoral system, it's a two-party system so you have a clear antagonist who you attack, which is different from the multi-party system.

"We still see high-quality democratic campaigning in New Zealand overall."

Dr Krewel said this New Zealand project was based on the Campsource group that had followed other elections overseas, but would be different in that results would be published weekly during the election campaign, instead of afterwards.

See more here:

Election fake news weekly report to monitor New Zealand campaigning - RNZ

Pakistans unease at the Indian acquisition and the formal induction of the Rafale jets on July 29 has resulted in a viral hoax about one of the jets crashing during training, leaving two pilots dead.

Not only were fake Twitter profiles of journalists used to spread the news, a fake profile of the Indian Air Force was also created, with a tweet that read: Very shocked news! During exercise, Rafale has crashed near Ambala Airforce Station due to technical fault and a pilot martyred.

This false tweet was put out on 11.33 pm at September 4. It became the start of a string of hoax tweets and posts which floated around till at least September 11. The Twitter handles remained the same but the names of the handles kept changing from one journalist to another. Hundreds of retweets of these fake tweets were made by Pakistanis. The same news was also shared hundreds of time over other social media.

A reverse image search done by SM Hoax Slayer found that the three photos used to illustrate news of the current crash were from the Mirage 2000 crash in Benguluru in February 2019. Two pilots had lost their lives in the aforementioned clash.

The acquisition of the jets by India has not been received well by Pakistan.

In July this year, when Pakistan had first received news of the acquisition, Pakistan Foreign Office Spokesperson Aisha Farooqui had said, It is disturbing to note that India continues to amass military capabilities beyond its genuine security requirement. Transfer of advanced systems, where there is an open intention of conversion into nuclear delivery platforms, calls into question the commitment of international suppliers to non-proliferation commitments.

She had further said that India had nuclearised the Indian Ocean. Pakistan has been consistently highlighting the risks of massive Indian arms build-up as well as their offensive security doctrine and force postures, she said.

See the article here:

Fake news of Rafale crash circulated in Pakistan using bogus handles - THE WEEK

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The migration of a large number of migrant workers during the COVID-19 lockdown was triggered by panic created by fake news about its duration, the center told the Lok Sabha on Tuesday.

Minister of State for Home Affairs Nityanand Rai stated this in the parliament while replying to an unstarred question from Trinamool Congress (TMC) MP Mala Roy, who sought the reason why thousands of laborers started walking home from big cities soon after the lockdown was imposed.

In response, Rai stated, "The migration of a large number of migrant workers was triggered by panic created by fake news regarding the duration of lockdown. And people, especially migrant laborers, were worried about an adequate supply of basic necessities like food, drinking water, health services, and shelter."

The minister, however, said that the center took all necessary measures to ensure that during the period of the inevitable lockdown, no citizen should be deprived of basic amenities of food, drinking water, medical facilities, etc.

Roy also sought to know the number of migrant laborers who died on the way home but the minister said that the center does not have the data as details are not centrally maintained.

During the unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic, there were several deaths reported causing a countrywide outcry, forcing even the Human Rights Commission to sit up and take notice, demanding action by the Centre. On Monday, Union Minister of Labour and Employment Santosh Kumar Gangwar had said in the Parliament that the exodus saw over one crore migrant workers return to their native states.

Regarding Roy's question about steps taken to protect migrant laborers before the lockdown was announced, Rai said, in order "to contain the spread of Covid-19" in the country, the center took various measures, considered essential for the safety of people including migrant workers.

"From March 21, 2020, onwards, control room operations in the Ministry of Home Affairs were expanded by making their functioning 24X7 under the supervision of senior officers of the level of joint secretaries along with the representatives of key central ministries. These control rooms, inter alia, attended to the grievances of stranded persons, including migrant workers and promptly resolved these grievances relating to food, transport, shelter, etc. States and Union territories were also advised to set up control rooms with helplines and to appoint nodal officers," the minister said.

Rai further said that the center allowed states to use the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) on 28 March to make provisions for temporary accommodation, food, clothing, medical care, etc for homeless people as well as migrant laborers.

In response to another question on invoking the Disaster Management Act, the government justified imposing the lockdown and said India successfully blunted the aggressive spread of Covid-19 through the lockdown.

"It has been estimated that the decision of Lockdown, by slowing down the progress of pandemic in India, has prevented 14-29 lakh cases and 37-78 thousand deaths," Rai said.

Lockdown helped create additional health infrastructure, Rai said, adding that dedicated isolation beds went up by 22 times, and dedicated ICU beds increased by over 14 times from what existed in March 2020. The minister further said that the testing capacity for Covid-19 increased nearly10 times and limited indigenous manufacturing capacity for masks, PPEs, ventilators, etc at the time of lockdown, was also enhanced to attain self-reliance.

Read more from the original source:

MHA says migration during COVID-19 lockdown was triggered by fake news about its duration - The New Indian Express

Coronavirus misinformation on social media has resulted inpeople injecting themselves with bleach, a senior MP has revealed as he urged the Government to bring forward the Duty of Care Bill.

Julian Knight, the chairman of Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media andSport select committee, warned that if online fake news was not tackled it could affect the take-up of an eventual coronavirusvaccine, causing "very great harm to society".

Mr Knight said he wanted to see Ofcom named as the new online regulator and given powers to fine or even prosecute social media companies, as well as the resources to investigate the secretive algorithms tech companies use to determine what their users see.

His comments came as the culture committee released a report saying the UK's lack of online regulation had allowed coronavirus misinformation to spread "virulently" on social media.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Mr Knight said: "Healthcare professionals told us they even saw people injecting themselves with bleach or taking liquids that were harmful.

"They also said that on a more subtle level but probably even more damaging in terms of numbers many people were not presenting at hospital because they had seen misinformation and disinformation out there that was effectively saying that hospitals were completely overwhelmed and unsafe places."

See the original post here:

People are injecting themselves with bleach because of fake news, says senior MP - Telegraph.co.uk

Despite its widespread adoption, the word used to describe the genocide is unknown to many, which is why the ultimate goal of the campaign is to have the word "Holodomor" (derived from Ukrainian words meaning "to inflict death by hunger") added to English-language dictionaries, as it was to Ukrainian dictionaries after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

Visitors to the "Deeptruth" website (deeptruth.ca) will be invited to sign an online petition to have Holodomor included in future editions of the Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, as well as Dictionary.com.

"Canada, the United States, Ukraine and 14 other countries recognize the Holodomor as an act of genocide and honour the victims in an annual day of remembrance on the fourth Saturday in November," said Bob Onyschuk, Chair of Holodomor National Awareness Tour. "Yet, most people are still largely unaware of the basic facts of one of the greatest crimes of the 20th Century. Having Holodomor added to the dictionary is more than symbolic; it's an important recognition of this Deep Truth."

The campaign features a 75-second video produced by Toronto-based ad agency Mixtape (MXTP.ca) in collaboration with Paul "The Fakening" Shales (fakening.com), a world-leading pioneer of deepfake technology whose vignettes involving politicians, business leaders and entertainers regularly go viral.

With access to rare colour film footage of Stalin, Shales used Artificial Intelligence to map the Soviet dictator's features onto the face of a modern-day actor and bring Stalin back to life. In the video, Stalin declares himself the true originator of "fake news" for having covered up the magnitude of the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine and concealed from the world the engineered murder of millions of innocent men, women and children.

SOURCE Holodomor National Awareness Tour

For further information: Media Contacts: Graeme Harris ([emailprotected]), tel. 416.402.7050 or Brian Smith ([emailprotected]), tel. 416.822.3130

Read more:

Turning Fake News on its Head: Stalin Lives Again to Reveal Deep Truth - Canada NewsWire

Recently I stopped buying the other local paper in our area because it hadbecomeconsumed withpropaganda, losingperspective. That paper has become a full-time publication attacking one particular political party. Itsgoal is to completely destroy that party and all those who identify with itsviewpoint.

I knew that most of the major news organizations havebeen trained to destroy a certain point of view and make it look like their's was the only way and the other views are not acceptable. Their main effort is to steer public opinion their way, without the public realizing what is happening.

And now it quiteobvious to me that The Day has joined the chorus,as their writers are also playing the same tune. It is a shame that we no longer can trust our newspapers to report the news, as they now are creating the news their way. They are using fake polls thatpoll mostly people of one particular party. So,of course you do not get a true picture. Andthey also slant political cartoons.

America is now being betrayed by our news organizations and the big question is, will the American public wake up in time?

Tony Petros

Norwich

Go here to read the rest:

Wake up, America; discount the fake news - News from southeastern Connecticut - theday.com

July 29th, 2020

9:00 AM - 10:00 AM PDT

Greenberg Glusker and Farrer & Co are delighted to present a joint webinar during which reputation management and media specialists from both firms will discuss:

On both sides of the Atlantic, the role of social media and search engines has been dominating the news agenda.

The debate over the extent to which Big Tech should be policing content on its platforms is one that has been bubbling for some time, but has recently exploded into the open with Donald Trumps decision to sign an executive order aimed at removing protections for social media platforms and the UK governments plans to introduce legislation to address Online Harms.

Set alongside that is the decision of a number of multinational corporations to cease advertising on Facebook and other platforms in protest at the perceived failure to do enough to remove racist, hateful and knowingly false content.

All this takes place in the context of a global pandemic (where conspiracy theories have abounded), the Black Lives Matter movement and, of course, a forthcoming Presidential election in the United States.

Read more:

[Webinar] #FreeSpeech: Perspectives from the UK and the US on Social Media Liability for Fake News, Damaging Content and Censorship - July 29th, 9:00...