So, on Russian state TV, we were told by the Deputy Chairman of the State Duma that Russia respects international law, that it is friendly towards its neighbours, and that it is those neighbours who are the aggressive ones, not Russia, like reported by  euvsdisinfo.eu. To be fair, it was said in the same show that Russia might have to strike Europe pre-emptively if NATO keep putting troops into the Baltic countries. But no mention was made of Russia violating international law through its illegal actions in Ukraine, annexing Crimea among other things.

In the same show, it was stated that Donbass is part of Russia and that it is being bombed by European troops on a daily basis. Of course, no evidence was presented for these European troops – there are none.

A whole show on Russian state TV was devoted to the situation in Donbass. It was claimed that the current Ukrainian government aims to drown the country in blood – repeating the reoccurring myth that Ukraine is waging a war on its own population, rather than defending itself. On another TV show, there was speculation that the EU will eventually ask Russia to restore order in Donbass and subsequently in Kiev. It was also claimed that the European observers who observed the elections in Ukraine after the fall of Yanukovic took substantial bribes in order to recognize the results of the election. As usual, no evidence was presented. It was the OSCE that observed the elections in Ukraine. Russia is a member.

In another pro-Kremlin outlet, we learnt that Moscow’s peace efforts have been continuously sabotaged, with both Ukraine and Syria named as places where Russia has been hindered from achieving peace. No mention of Russia’s involvement in the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, nor of the fact that Russia has vetoed several Security Council resolutions on the issue of Syria.

The Baltic states took some beating as well, as they were accused of endangering global peace through reproducing a conflict with Russia. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine were all again described as being part of ‘the Russian world’.

Poor Swedes

Sweden was again singled out and presented as a particularly unsafe place to live in, despite plenty of evidence showing the opposite. In a Czech outlet, the recent influx of migrants was blamed for an alleged massive increase in crime in the country. However, crime statistics analysed over the period in question (October 2015-January 2016) show that refugees account for 1% of crimes during that period. And the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention’s Swedish Crime Survey concludes that there has in fact been a 2% decrease in crime over the last 10 years.

In a Hungarian pro-Kremlin outlet, Swedish statistics concerning rape were used to portray the country as especially unsafe for women, while not mentioning that the legal definition in Sweden is  broadened to include offences that in other countries would not count as rape. In the same outlet, a recent riot in a suburb of Stockholm was blamed on ‘unknown migrants’. While the riot did indeed happen, no one has been arrested and the police do not know who was involved. It goes without saying then, that the culprits’ ethnicity and citizenship is also unknown. 

Turkey is the only country that is truly fighting against the Daesh terrorist organization, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said on Friday.

Here the COMPLETELY FAKE NEWS that don’t need to be commented http://aa.com.tr/en/politics/only-turkey-truly-fights-against-daesh-turkish-pm/758430

Fact checking is the act of checking factual assertions in non-fictional text in order to determine the veracity and correctness of the factual statements in the text. This may be done either before (ante hoc) or after (post hoc) the text has been published or otherwise disseminated.

Fact checking before dissemination (ante hoc checking) aims to remove errors and allow text to proceed to dissemination (or to rejection if it fails confirmations or other criteria). Post hoc checking most often is followed by a written report of inaccuracies, sometimes with a visual metric from the checking organization.

The aim for ante hoc analyzed text is often external publication, as in journalistic endeavors. Several organizations are devoted to post hoc fact-checking, including FactCheck and PolitiFact.

Africa

https://africacheck.org/

Europe

https://fullfact.org/

http://www.lemonde.fr/les-decodeurs/

https://pagellapolitica.it/

United States

http://www.factcheck.org/

http://www.politifact.com/

http://www.snopes.com/

https://www.truthorfiction.com/

Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu contended that the PKK’s Syrian offshoot the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed wing the Peoples’ Protection Units (YPG) and Daesh cooperate in Syria.

Here the fake news https://www.dailysabah.com/war-on-terror/2017/02/21/fm-cavusoglu-ypg-daesh-cooperate-in-syria

The news is so fake that does not need to be commented…

http://www.pwc.com/la/en/publications/assets/world_2050_brics.pdf

Russia and Turkey – according to fake news agency sputniknews.com – are currently negotiating a deal concerning purchases of S-400 Triumf missile systems, Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov said Monday.

“European consumers face shortage of vegetables in supermarkets”, Russian state-controlled TV Pervy Kanal told its audience earlier this month, and continued: “Stores in the UK, Norway and Denmark are unusually empty. Those supplies that are left in stock are sold only under strict rationing”. Images of empty shelves accompanied the story about the food shortage crisis. The message in the Russian context was clear: The audience should feel reminded of the famous empty stores during Soviet times, like reported by euvsdisinfo.eu.

The Russian TV report was based on a news piece by the British tabloid Daily Mail, which tells almost the same sensationalist story under the headline “Supermarkets RATION salads and veg after storms in Spain devastate crops with shortages due to last until APRIL”. So what’s the story? Indeed, The Guardian has also reported about a “courgette crisis” and has documented cases of rationing of iceberg lettuce in some UK stores.

In Norway, the story is very different. Norwegian daily Aftenposten picked up the Russian TV report and wrote a story headlined “Russia’s largest TV channel claims that there is rationing of vegetables in Norwegian stores”. Aftenposten went to check the facts in Norwegian supermarkets. “It is true that unstable weather, rain and frost have led to shortages of some goods. It can have a small impact on price of lettuce and other kinds of those vegetables we import and don’t keep in [winter] storage. However, we cannot recognize the figures [presented by Russian TV]”, a representative of Norway’s largest importer of fruits and vegetables told Aftenposten.

In Denmark, media have also been reporting about shortage of some vegetables that are traditionally imported from the south of Europe. However, according to a representative from Denmark’s market leading Dansk Supermarked Group “prices of a few goods could rise by up to 10%”, as Business.dk reports.

As is often the case, disinformation has a grain of truth to it, which is then inflated and distorted with disregard to the larger context. Here it is the image that changes the impact of the story when it is transplanted to the Russian context where media feature an ongoing narrative about overall decay and despair in European societies.

Drawing comparisons between the more sedate German election campaign and Trump’s rise to power in the US, the Financial Times reports that there are fears that

the German election debate will be hijacked by news peddlers, conspiracy theorists, racist ideologues, trolls and cyber-bullies

And Deutsche Welle reported recently that “Angela Merkel is being attacked in fake news spread by right-wing extremists”, like reported by sophos.com.

But Germany isn’t the only European country where elections are being held this year – ballots are also imminent in France and the Netherlands. French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s party chief has claimed, <a href=”http://www.dw.com/en/french-presidential-candidate-macron-target-of-russian-fake-news-his-party-chief-claims/a-37531519&#8243; rel=”nofollow”according to Deutsche Welle, that the French democratic process is also a target:

Two big media outlets belonging to the Russian state, Russia Today and Sputnik, spread fake news on a daily basis, and then they are picked up, quoted and influence the democratic [process]

Who’s doing what?

With the problem real and threatening to influence democracies around the world, what is being done to combat not only the spread of fake news but also the release of hacked emails?

The Telegraph reports that officials in France, Germany and the Netherlands have agreed to share information in the run-up to their respective elections this year.

It’s a start, but is it enough? Across Europe:

• The European Commission, according to Media File, is committing more staff resources to its anti-disinformation task force under an initiative known as the East Stratcom Task Force.
• Germany, Deutsche Welle reports, is looking to setting up a centre to fight disinformation – and had urged political parties to not use social bots and fake news during campaigning.
• In France, 17 newsrooms are teaming up with Facebook and Google to fact-checking service called the CrossCheck project to tackle the rise of fake news, according to the BBC earlier this month. It’s not live yet, but should be up and running by February 27, The Disinformation Review reports.
• As far as the Netherlands is concerned, there’s no clear news on any initiatives to combat fake news specifically, but there are reports – this one in The Guardian – that votes are going to be counted manually to counteract any threat from hackers.

What you can do

So, that’s a brief summary of what the powers that be, political parties and the media are doing. But is there anything you can do personally?

Talking to Deutsche Welle, defense analyst and professional fake news hunter Ben Nimmo explains that part of the problem lies in the money that there is to be made from advertising:

… countless fake news stories are going around because money can be earned from advertising on the websites that publish the false stories.

He suggests you only need time and a familiarity with social media outlets and how they work together, rather than an understanding of technology, to hunt them out – and that’s something we all can do.

And the complex ones? While he does acknowledge that experts are needed so solve some cases, he also suggests that citizens must be taught how to uncover fake news. I agree. After all, the more of us that get involved, the better the detection rate and lower the effect.

If there’s one thing you take away from reading this, it should be his advice to us all. Noting that “The key is emotion”, he urges:

If a story appeals to your feelings, be they anger or rejection, and not your thoughts, then you have to check it.

An online clickbait “poll” asked readers if they supported President Trump’s non-existent ban on “full face” veils

CLAIM

President Trump announced intent to ban “full face” veils in public places, an act presumably targeting Muslim women.

FALSE

One common technique employed by clickbait web sites is to social post content that consists of nothing other than a solicitation to readers to indicate whether they “support” a particular controversial political issue or decision. And as often as not, the political subjects addressed in such posts are non-existent ones fabricated for the purpose of driving click-throughs.

Sites such as USA Daily Info have employed this technique in February 2017 by falsely suggesting that President Trump had “just declare to ban [‘full face’] veils in public places, posting links to a page that consisting of nothing but an image of a veiled woman and a poll posing the Yes/No question “Trump Agrees To Ban Full-Face Veils In Public Places. Do You Support This?” Beneath that content was a comment section in which readers expressed support for the non-existent ban.

No legitimate news outlet reported that President Trump had announced, or even opined about, an outright ban on veils. And any contemplation of such a ban would have raised a host of constitutional issues that would have been widely debated in the public sphere and the news media.