Fake news does not discriminate

Fake news does not discriminate

 

Fake news is not just limited to America. It can affect any nation that has an internet connection with people looking for news. In today’s post, the topic is international fake news, it’s about an election but it is not the U.S.A. presidential election this time, it is the French. During the U.S.A. election, fake news plagued candidates and it seems to be a popular trend, so far, in the French election as well. The BBC reported on this and they have 5 stories that affect the French election but are fake news. There are too many stories to cover in one post, but if you want to read the rest of the stories go to BBC.com.

 

              The first story the BBC reports on is presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s campaign is being funded by Saudi Arabia. The niece of presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, Marion Marechal-Le Pen claimed that Macron’s campaign was financed by Saudi Arabia. The site the story appeared on is a faked version of an actual French news source. It was found on LeSoir.info when the real website is LeSoir.be, the fake site was designed to look like the original website so it could spread false information to readers of LeSoir.be. The author of the fake site made it to where if you clicked on any links on the fake news report page, it would take you to the real Le Soir website. This fake site was registered to a Donald Thomas in Delaware, United States



                The next story relating to the French presidential election is a story about Maine Le Pen for criticizing the child cartoon show “Masha and the Bear” because the little girl wears a veil in the cartoon. An anti-National Front twitter account claimed that Le pen criticized this show. Now, even if this presidential candidate did criticize this show because the little girl wears a veil in the show, why would that matter? The article does not state any reason why that would matter but my best guess is to show that Marine Le Pen dislikes the Muslim faith. If that is the reason, it is a very poor attempt at doing so. If Le Pen did criticize the show, which she did not, maybe she just does not like veils. The tweet that allegedly said that she did criticize the show was in fact fake. It was a doctored image of the original tweet by Marine Le Pen. The person behind this whole stunt, who did not want to be named, told crosscheck it was designed “to demonstrate how easy it is to misinform on twitter”.  If that was indeed the authors purpose, then they did a fine job in doing so.

               The last post relevant to the French presidential election is about how the French state is replacing Christian public holidays with Muslim and Jewish holidays. French websites have claimed that two new holidays will be introduced, both of those holidays being Muslim and Jewish. Not surprisingly, those websites were in fact wrong. The French government has never announced such a proposal. However, a think tank called Terra Nova is advocating the idea. This is not the first time Muslim and Jewish holidays have tried to be introduced in France. MEP Eva Joly tried to in 2012. The holidays in question are Yom Kippur and Eid al-Adha. Maybe these websites did not mean to misinform their readers but simply misunderstood the situation, or they fully understood that they were spreading false information and wanted to bad (wanted to say something else but was not sure if that language would be appreciated in this blog).

 

This just shows that fake news will be international. It has proven to be an extremely useful tactic when dealing with elections. It would be unwise for candidates to not use it while it still has this impact. Until the public finds a way to effectively say news is fake news, there will always be a place for fake news in elections. Just as the American election was plagued with fake news, the French election will too. It seems to be the trend elections will take from now on. We can stop this though, it’s simple. Do not believe everything you read on the internet. Fact checking sources and stories can stop the spread of fake news and maybe there will have a good, clean election in the future. But as of now, elections will continue to have fake news in them.