“In the absence of information, any version is acceptable.”
Vasily Golovachev
Ever since the term "fake news" came into daily use around 2016, humanity has witnessed an increasing spread of false information and methods of its dissemination. Along with reputational risk and misinformation, fake news can strongly promote a particular person, organization, or company. However, when we talk about fake news, we mean this term in a negative sense. The positive and negative effects of fake news were studied in the work of Berdyugina, Vladimirova & Chernyaeva (2019), as shown on figure 7:
. Figure 7: Consequences of fake news (Berdyugina et al, 2019)
USA
Fake news has become a serious problem after the 2016 US presidential election when Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fought for the presidency (Hunt & Gentzkow, 2017). Various news sites and blogs were filled with false news related to candidates and elections. Users shared such news many times more often than news from serious sources, generating about 8.7 million
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likes and comments to posts. One of the main sources of fake news was Facebook, where the most popular fake news garnered a larger audience than the New York Times, Washington Post, or BBC News in the same period. Until the last three months of the campaign, mainstream election content from major media easily outpaced fake election news on Facebook. Then, as the election approached, engagement in fake Facebook content skyrocketed and outnumbered posts from mainstream news outlets. (Silverman, 2016).
The figure below shows the number of reactions, posts, and likes of users to fake news and news from trusted sources in the 3 months before the start of the US presidential elections in 2016:
Figure 8: Comparison of the number of fake news and mainstream news (Buzzfeed, 2016)
Most of the fake news was aimed at discrediting Hillary Clinton and supporting Donald Trump (Silverman, 2016). Such news claimed that Clinton was selling weapons to ISIS (Roberts, 2016) or, for example, that the Pope supported Trump in his fight for the presidency (Evon, 2016). The picture below illustrates the top 5 most popular fake posts during the 2016 US elections shared by users on Facebook:
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Figure 9: Top 5 Fake Elections Stories (Buzzfeed, 2016)
A poll conducted in 2017 showed that 33% of the respondents have definitely encountered fake news during the 2016 presidential election. Another 34% noted that they most likely faced such news, and only 3% of respondents said that they had not witnessed fake news (Statista, 2018).
Figure 10: Share of adults who saw any fake news stories (Statista, 2018)
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In November 2016, many American news sites began to publish false information about
“Pizzagate”. The articles stated that the owners of the restaurant Comet Ping Pong and supporters of Hillary Clinton from the Democratic Party are members of an influential pedophile organization. The story went viral on fake news sites with lightning speed. A SubjectPolitics post claimed that the New York Police Department had raided Hillary Clinton's home, and a news headline on the Conservative Daily Post said the FBI had "confirmed" the story (Emery, 2016). Comet Ping Pong pizzeria received hundreds of threatening messages and phone calls from people who believed in fake news. The restaurant's owners and staff were harassed and threatened on social media. The Pizzagate theory has been criticized and labeled fake news by many major media outlets.
Ukraine
Today, Ukraine is in the midst of an information war, one of the tools of which is fakes (dissemination of false information). They are distributed through the media and social networks. There are many fakes not only on the Internet but also in traditional media. The main bridgehead for creating fake news can be called a hybrid war between Ukraine and Russia. It is characterized by a combination of fundamentally different types and methods of warfare, which are used in a coordinated manner to achieve certain goals. And although the concept of
"fake news" became widely used in the media and on the Internet precisely after the presidential elections in the United States in 2016 (Hunt & Gentzkow, 2017), Ukraine faced "fake news" 2 years earlier, more precisely at the end of 2013 - beginning of 2014. As a result of the overthrow of the government in Ukraine after the events of the "Euromaidan", which began in November 2013, and the arrival of pro-European forces in the government, relations between Russia and Ukraine sharply deteriorated. The Russian government, in addition, made a decision "to begin preparations for the return of Crimea to Russia," which they soon began to implement. In connection with the activities of Russia in the Crimean direction, crowned with the actual loss of the Crimean Peninsula by Ukraine, in March 2014, the Ukrainian ambassador to the Russian Federation was recalled to Kyiv, and in April 2014 the Ukrainian parliament adopted a law recognizing the territory of Crimea as the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine. A further escalation of relations between states occurred due to Russia's support for militias in eastern Ukraine, and in the new military doctrine of Ukraine approved in September 2015, the Russian Federation was declared a military enemy of Ukraine.
As we know, war is a springboard for lies and disinformation. Of course, fake news began to spread rapidly in the media regarding the conflict in the East and the annexation of Crimea. In
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Ukraine, researchers began to deal with the problems of information warfare and the fight against propaganda only after the events of 2013. As for specifically false information and fake news in the media, the scientific work on this topic is virtually absent (Kitsa, 2016).
If all is fair in war, then in information war it is even more so. Since the beginning of the hybrid war between Russia and Ukraine, a huge amount of fake news has been created. Most of this misinformation is trying to portray the Ukrainian army as a bunch of fascists and Nazis killing the Russian-speaking population and supporting Hitler's ideas. On July 12, 2014, the entire world community was stirred up by a story shown on the Russian Pervyy Kanal (Channel One).
In the report, the journalist of Pervyy Kanal interviewed a resident of Slovyansk city, previously liberated by the Ukrainian Army. A resident of the city claimed that the Ukrainian Army, having forced out the militias of the unrecognized Donetsk People's Republic, began to massacre the remaining militias in the city. Moreover, she claimed that she personally saw how the soldiers executed her husband and how the soldiers crucified her little son on a cross (Musafirova & Makarenko, 2015). Of course, this news was completely fake. The scandalous story received a significant public response. Some saw it as evidence of extreme unprofessionalism and the use of Russian state-owned media in information warfare with the aim of inciting hatred and enmity, while others saw it as evidence that "disinformation" and
"lies" "became the norm" for Russian state-owned media (Van Herpen, 2016).
There is a lot of fake news like this. However, a new wave of disinformation emerged during the tragedy with the Malaysian Boeing 777 on July 17, 2014. The crash of flight MH17 was the largest (in terms of the number of fatalities) in aviation history since September 11, 2001, entered the ten largest plane crashes in history, and became the largest plane crash in the post-Soviet space. Sometime after the plane crash, many Russian media began to post a satellite photo, which allegedly shows how a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter shot down a Boeing 777. This version was refuted in the course of an international investigation, which established that the plane was shot down from the territory controlled by the separatists with the help of a Russian-made air defense system “Buk”. The disaster became a significant reason for the adoption of new EU and US sanctions against Russia and one of the official reasons.
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Figure 11: "Sensational photo", which captures the attack of a Ukrainian military aircraft on the Malaysian Boeing MH17 (Ukrinform, 2017)
Stories like this one appear with enviable frequency both on television and on social media. As long as the "hybrid war" continues between Russia and Ukraine, fake news will be created and disseminated. Undoubtedly, the Ukrainian media have also created and are creating false and misleading news about Russia, but the severity of their stories is still much inferior to Russian scales.
Coronavirus of disinformation virus
The coronavirus epidemic could not stay away from fake news. Disinformation and distorted facts began to appear almost immediately after the outbreak of the virus in China in December 2019. Misinformation about the virus has spread through social media and classical media.
There are also known cases of xenophobia and discrimination against the Chinese people and people from regions with a high level of infection. Even before the official announcement of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic on March 11, 2020, conspiracy theories and misinformation regarding the origin, scale, and other aspects of this disease began to spread on the Internet. Among the most common versions of this kind are claimed that the virus is a biological weapon with a patented vaccine or a tool for population regulation (McDonald, 2020). On February 2, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a "massive infodemic", pointing out an abundance of misleading information about the virus that "prevents people from finding reliable sources and reliable recommendations when they need it" (UN News, 2020). On January 22, 2020, the Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws published an
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interview with little-known therapist Chris van Kerkhoven, who stated that mobile communications of the new 5G standard are dangerous to health and that the epidemic of the new coronavirus may be in some way connected with 5G; A journalist commenting on the interview noted that a network of 5G communication towers was deployed around the Chinese Wuhan city, which at that time was accounted for most of the cases of the disease. The interview was published in print only in one of the regional versions of the newspaper, and its electronic version was removed from the newspaper's website a few hours later, but this unsubstantiated publication managed to give rise to a variety of conspiracy theories: that radio emission from 5G antennas suppresses the human immune system making it more vulnerable to the virus, or somehow carries the virus, or causes symptoms of the disease itself. An anti-5G petition on Change.org garnered over 110,000 votes against the technology (Temperton, 2020). In early April, 20 cell towers were burned or otherwise damaged in the UK, mostly around Birmingham and the West Midlands. Operators noted that due to the slow deployment of 5G networks in the UK, many of the burned towers did not even contain 5G equipment, but belonged to the previous generations of 3G and 4G. Similarly, four towers were burned in the Netherlands. Undoubtedly, statements about the danger of 5G towers, and even more so about the connection of towers with the spread of the coronavirus, have no basis, which is confirmed by many studies (BBC News, 2019).
However, fake news can be spread not only by anonymous or little-known sources. During a telephone interview in August 2020, US President Donald Trump stated that children are immune from the coronavirus and therefore fears of teachers and parents about reopening schools are unfounded. A little later, this message appeared on the president's page on Facebook and Twitter. A few hours later, the message was removed from the official page of the US President on the social network. The campaign said that Facebook was forced to do so because the posted "video contains false claims that a certain group of people is immune from the coronavirus." After a while, the publication was blocked on Twitter. This statement by Trump was regarded as fake news since although the chance of contracting the coronavirus among children is low, there is no category of people completely immune to the virus (Belyaninov, 2020).
Various rumors and false reports have linked the pandemic to the name of American multibillionaire Bill Gates and his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates pointed to the danger posed by infectious diseases and spoke of them as the most likely threat to humanity - for example, in 2015 at a TED conference, he stated that a new pandemic like the Spanish flu could happen in the very near future and that the world is completely unprepared for this threat
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(Gates, 2015). According to various conspiracy theories and unverified rumors, Gates seeks to reduce the population of the Earth or to "chip" people under the pretext of vaccination - secretly implanting RFID tags or some kind of microcircuits, supposedly to control behavior. Rumors about Gates 'plans to "chip" people are connected with Gates' statement on the Internet forum Reddit about "digital certificates" for patients with coronavirus infection.
A survey conducted in August 2020 in the United Kingdom found that almost one-third of respondents are confronted with misinformation regarding the coronavirus at least several times a week.
Figure 12: Survey of residents of the United Kingdom on the frequency of fake news about the coronavirus (Statista, 2020)