The uncontested prevalence of such news could be observed during all the major political campaigns of recent years: presidential election in the US and France, parliamentary elections in Germany, Brexit and Catalan referendums... Perhaps there is no country in this world that escaped fake news as they are being manufactured and distributed via social media on the global scale, as there are whole "troll factories" and even all sorts of government bodies that justify their existence by claiming that they're engaged in a "fight against disinformation".
The Guardian experts tasked with analyzing disinformation campaigns in the online media came to a conclusion fake news is not just a Western problem, as it can be found in the media space of pretty much every corner of the world. In Brazil, for example, since early 2016, the popularity of false news reports has exceeded the coverage enjoyed by the mainstream media. This can be explained by the corruption scandal and the subsequent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. According to the BBC, out of the five most popular (according to the number of reposts) news reports in Brazil, three were false. In India, the main distributor of false reports is the WhatsApp messenger, as The Guardian adds.
Fake news - an integral attribute of information wars, which, in turn, accompany real wars. One of their most striking manifestations in recent years has been the so-called fight against "Russian propaganda" in Europe, which has recently become an obsession in a number of European countries, reaching the European Parliament...read more>>>>...
