The objective is double: to make clicks when they are purely commercial sites and for the activist sites as in the United States, one of the sites of the alt right the American fachosphere.
The objective is propaganda and manipulation by sharing false information like the news that the pope had given support to Donald trump.
On the french side the fake news that has gone around the web is the one shared by the fachosphere which claimed that Alain Juppé renaming Ali for the occasion would be guilty of compromise with fundamentalist islam, as Donald trump would say.
Fake?
No it’s not over. Fake news has even taken on a new meaning. Trump or Florian Philippot. The Vice President of the FN designates under the name of fake News all the information which does not correspond to their vision of the world.
The fake News phenomenon, if we can call it that, actually shows the attempt by trump by the FN in France to discredit the traditional media and to equate them with sites that are engaged in a political fight
as explained by Nicolas Katia, media sociologist at sciences po Lille
But political manipulation is not that new. Even Pericles the leader of ancient Athens had to face it.
But what has changed is the technological context in particular. For 20 years we have witnessed a multiplication of sources and producers of information, with the web blogs and especially social networks, everyone can be their own media but also anyone else.
Thus journalists have lost their monopoly as producers of information to which in addition, the fact that social networks via retweets and sharing accelerate the circulation of information and amplify its spread.
Acting as a sounding board in the face of this avalanche of false information, solutions are being developed.
The French media including the world(le monde), AFP, bfmtv or even liberation have decided to collaborate with Facebook to reduce the endemic presence of false information on the social network. Fact checking teams from these media have been verifying the validity of links reported by Facebook users since February 2017.
If the link is indeed fake news, it is mentioned on the social network through an alert phrase. But the work also rests on the shoulders of citizens whether they are passionate about information or ordinary readers. There are some basic reflexes to acquire to avoid falling into the trap of fake news.
First of all, always check the reliability of the source of the information, read the entire article and not be satisfied with the title, try to determine if you are dealing with a recognized media or an activist body, in short always keep a critical mind and eyes wide open.
Read also: Guidelines on Information Fact-Checking
