DEFINITION

The term ‘conspiracy theory’ describes a historical or political explanation that assumes the existence of a ‘hidden truth’. Conspiracist fake news has 6 main characteristics:

1. It involves a secretive, highly powerful group working in the shadows (lizard people, Illuminati, Trilateral Commission, NASA, Freemasons, etc.);

2. This group uses a very large number of (strategically placed) people in all parts of society – such as government, media, police, and universities – in order to keep the ‘secret’…a secret;

3. Conspiracist fake news contradicts the official version, that is, the version supported by scientific consensus or accepted by the majority of the media or government;

4. It traces an event back to a single cause. For example, the war in Iraq happened because …it advanced the lizard people’s agenda!

5. It is impossible to refute. Regardless of how robust your criticism of it may be, believers will always allege that the critics are in on the conspiracy…or they are just clueless.

6. Conflation is rampant. For example: We know that the American government lied to start a war in Iraq, so it must have lied about the moon landings. Believers in these theories may eventually develop an encyclopaedic knowledge of arguments they favour, even if none of them can prove the theories’ validity.

CASE IN POINT: A CONSPIRACY THEORY WEBSITE IN NORTH MACEDONIA

Natural News is a far-right website based in North Macedonia that is known for spreading false information that feeds various conspiracy theories.

Notably, Natural News was one of the most prolific spreaders of a conspiracy theory video that falsely claimed that a shadowy cabal of elites was using the virus and a potential vaccine to gain money and power. The 26-minute video, entitled Plandemic showed a discredited scientist, Judy Mikovits, who attested that her research on the damage caused by vaccines had been buried. Plandemic was put online on 4 May 2020 when its creator, Mikki Willis, posted it to social media. According to the New York Times, ‘For three days, it gathered steam on Facebook pages dedicated to conspiracy theories and the anti-vaccine movement. Then it tipped into the mainstream and exploded. Just over a week after Plandemic was released, it had been viewed more than eight million times on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram’ (source : link).

DEFINITION

Political fake news refers to ‘misleading allegations affecting the honesty of an election that are deliberately, artificially, or automatically spread en masse via an online communication service’. The term disinformation campaign is used when fake news spreads on such a large scale that it translates into wilful attacks on an election’s integrity so as to destabilise the ruling regime by tapping into fears, nationalism, and authoritarianism.

The emergence of these disruption methods in closely tied to the rising power of digital platforms, which make it possible for fake news on a given candidate to go viral and have a non-negligible impact on public opinion.

Political fake news may be all virtual, but its impact is real. For one thing, they have destabilised elections in multiple countries over the past few years.

This is why digital platforms, governments, and the international community are enacting increasingly serious measures to try and prevent disinformation campaigns, including by regulating social media and stocking up the legislative arsenal.

CASE IN POINT: FAKE NEWS MACHINES IN MACEDONIA

During the 2016 US presidential campaign, the city of Veles, Macedonia, became the ‘fake news capital of the world’. Influenced by powerful state forces, some one hundred young Macedonians joined veritable ‘fake news machines’, whose goal was to use the internet to inundate American public opinion with an uninterrupted barrage of fake news in order to make candidate Donald Trump win.

These young people were earning around 10,000 euros per month to create fake accounts and make up fake articles. One of the most common fake news pieces sought to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s credibility by spreading rumours to tarnish her image. The mendacious allegation that ‘Barack Obama was funding Hillary Clinton’s campaign with money stolen from veterans’ came from Veles and gained significant traction in the US.

The website ‘The fake news machine: inside a town gearing up for 2020’ documents and analyses hundreds of web pages created in Veles whose primary goal is to manipulate information to help the Republican candidate win.

According to Xhelal Neziri of the Center for Investigative Journalism Macedonia (SCOOP), the fake news machines in Veles were led remotely by the country’s nationalist party, which was in power at the time. As Neziri explains, ‘our investigation shows that this operation was coordinated by the previous government. A platform of young people who were already publishing misleading health care articles was used to swing political opinions during the Macedonian parliamentary elections and then the American presidential election’ (source (in French): ‘Veles, capitale mondiale des fake news, RFI’ – link).

CASE IN POINT: FAKE NEWS DESTABILISING ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE

The March 2019 presidential campaign in Ukraine, which bestowed victory on comedian Volodymyr Zelensky – considered to be pro-Western – was marked by disinformation campaigns seeking to discredit him.

According to the international news agency DW (link), ‘Russian-language fake news… consumed the country’s media landscape’ during the election’. DW estimates that ‘the most popular fake news articles appeared on Facebook, shared by accounts with up to 2 million followers’.

On 5 January, shortly after comedian Volodymyr Zelensky announced his presidential candidacy, a Facebook page managed by bbccn.co published a fake news article to tarnish his reputation. The article claimed that the public prosecutor of Ukraine, Yuriy Lutsenko, had launched criminal proceedings against Zelensky for planning to overthrow the constitutional order. This article got more than 20,000 reactions online, but it is obvious that the rumour comes from manipulated information: no charges had ever been pressed against the comedian.

In the same vein, a fake website falsely purporting to be Zelensky’s own was identified by fact checkers. One post on the site was a fictional declaration in which Zelensky stated his desire to make Russian the official language of Ukraine, a proposal that is nowhere to be found in the candidate’s campaign platform.

DW’s article ‘Is Ukraine’s presidential election threatened by fake news’ gives more detail about the disinformation campaigns aimed at preventing the civil-society candidate from winning.

DEFINITION

Propaganda is a term for the persuasive techniques used to disseminate an ideology or doctrine and to encourage the target audience to adopt a set of behaviours. Throughout the 20^th century, certain ruling regimes institutionalised propaganda to manipulate the masses.

Nowadays, propaganda is primarily used by governments to stymie the freedom of the press. In a 2017 report (link), UNESCO expressed its concern about the rise in attacks on the media in the form of propaganda and fake news. Some governments use these disinformation techniques to ‘denigrate, intimidate, and threaten the media, including by stating that the media is “the opposition” or is “lying”’.

Anti-media propaganda from governments has also been observed in the Balkan region. The Courrier des Balkans has noted that in many countries, “the distortion of facts is used as a weapon against independent journalists, civil society, and political opponents to discredit them”.

CASE IN POINT: FAKE NEWS USED AGAINST JOURNALISTS IN MOLDOVA

During the 2019 legislative elections in Moldova, high-ranking officials contributed to propaganda and disinformation campaigns targeting independent media. According to the Courrier des Balkans, this state-supported fake news reached 54,000 users via fake Facebook and Instagram accounts.

One target of this fake news was Cornelia Cozonac, who heads up the Center for Investigative Journalism of Moldova (CIJM), which covers corruption scandals. A group of ‘trolls’ cloned her account and posted a number of messages under her name to attempt to discredit her reporting. In the same way, cyberattacks were launched against the CIJM website, which publishes investigations into Moldovan electoral candidates.

The propaganda campaign even garnered a reaction from Facebook. The company published a press release stating that ‘although the people behind this activity attempted to conceal their identities, our manual review found that some of this activity was linked to employees of the Moldovan government’.

DEFINITION

So much fake news has come out about the Covid-19 pandemic that a new term has emerged to refer to the mass disinformation: ‘infodemic’.

The word ‘infodemic’ refers to the wave of misleading information on coronavirus that has recently been unleashed on social media and search engines. Speaking in the context of the health crisis, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) stated that ‘fake news [linked to Covid-19] spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous’.

With the pandemic has come malicious false information derived from conspiracy theories. The following pieces of fake news were particularly widespread around the world: ‘The virus that causes Covid-19 is a man-made biological weapon’; ‘The Italian government is keeping migrants from getting tested for Covid-19’; ‘The Covid-19 pandemic was predicted in a simulation’.

In this context, the media, governments, and the international community have developed fact-checking bodies to fight disinformation about the virus and re-establish scientific truths about the disease. Some of these fact-checkers include: The World Health Organisation’s Mythbusters; Newsguard; and EU vs Disinfo.

CASE IN POINT: THE BALKANS IN AGE OF CORONAVIRUS

The Western Balkans have been heavily affected by false information relating to Covid-19. One fact-checking platform has focused in particular on debunking fake news about the pandemic circulating through the region: RASKRIKAVANJE.RS.

There are myriad examples to show how the infodemic has spread in the Balkans. In Bosnia, hate speech has been seen online, as was the case for a 51-year-old Bosniak woman. After returning home from a trip to Italy and testing positive for coronavirus, she was harassed by social media vigilantes after erroneous information were published by a number of media outlets that stated that she had been to a concert and taken public transport (none of which was true).

Marija Vučić, of the investigative site Raskrikavanje, says ‘these irresponsible publications are very dangerous in the current context, especially for people living in small communities. They are even afraid to go out onto the street because the locals hold them responsible for spreading the disease. This can really put some people in danger.’

As the Courrier des Balkans explains, ‘the region’s tabloids have followed in the footsteps of social media by spreading unverified information on the pandemic’.

For example, the Serbian tabloid Alo! (https://www.alo.rs/) falsely claimed that the worldwide number of infected people was decreasing. This is wrong: the downward trend has only been observed in a small number of countries. This type of mendacious content drives Sandra Bašić Hrvatin, a professor at the Faculty of Humanities of Slovenia, to say that ‘the avalanche of false information on social media has created a climate of mistrust of science, experts, and institutions. The media must not give in to sensationalism, rather, their role must be to explain the nature of the virus and indicate preventive measures using official and professional information.’

PSYCHOLOGICAL AND SOCIAL MECHANISMS OF THE INFODEMIC

As the Covid-19 pandemic developed, the world saw a rise in conspiracy theories, fake news, and challenges to the official version of the origin and spread of the disease, as well as its severity. A large portion of the populations of severely affected countries, as well as those of countries less affected, were taken in by a variety of conspiracy theories and hoaxes. This comes as no surprise given that the disease is not just associated with medical expertise, but also triggers a social and psychological dynamic that is associated with conspiracies.

These theories arise when people try to give meaning to an event that otherwise seems to have none. What they are trying to do is use conspiracy theories to explain the events.

This tendency is especially strong when there is major cognitive dissonance between cause and effect. For example, a pandemic that triggered by multiple people becoming randomly infected by animals that then leads to millions of cases and almost half a million deaths around the world by mid-June 2020.

Conspiracy theories always focus on a malicious plot, often led by a small group of people against one nation or the world. The effect is that individuals are both disarmed and relieved of any responsibility.

Conspiracies are especially rife when the events affect people personally, as with the pandemic, and when trust in established knowledge and those who provide that knowledge, such as the government, science and the media, is weak.

DEFINITION

The environment is a favourite target of fake news, most of which is completely fabricated by the ‘climate sceptic’ movement. This movement of denialists rejects the reality of climate change, even though it was proven by the international scientific community over 20 years ago.

As a result, ecological scientific facts remain submerged in a ceaseless swell of fake news and conjecture. The viral spread of environmental fake news is considerable: it is estimated that half of the information on this topic shared online is wrong, misleading, or completely devoid of evidence (source: Stéphane Foucart, L’avenir du climat: enquête sur les climato-sceptiques, 2015).

The forces behind these environmental disinformation campaigns tend to be industry lobbies or the governments that defend them. The most powerful companies (oil and gas, automotive, agribusiness, etc.) resent the environmental movement because they see at is a damper on growth. These industrial forces therefore influence public debate by dressing up their climate-sceptic discourse to make it sound scientific. From their positions in influential circles, they supply the media and institutions with reports, comments, and graphics that call the scale of the ecological crisis and its human origin into question. These theories are spread with the intent to manipulate, and take hold in the minds of the public, who do not tend to be highly scientifically literate.

Climate scepticism has advocates in some of the world’s most powerful leaders. Russian president Vladimir Putin has stated that ‘nothing can prove that human activity is the cause of climate change’. His American counterpart, Donald Trump, has gone even further, saying climate change is nothing but a ‘hoax’.

This manipulation of information has drawn a ruthless response from Swedish activist Greta Thunberg: ‘The endless conspiracy theories and denial of facts. The lies, hate, and bullying of children who communicate and act on science. All because some adults – terrified of change – so desperately don’t want to talk about the climate crisis.’

CASE IN POINT: RUSSIAN FAKE NEWS ABOUT GRETA THUNBERG

Russia and pro-Kremlin media are spreading false allegations aimed at discrediting one of the figureheads of the environmental movement: Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

One popular Russian tabloid, Argumenty i fakty, has publicised an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about her stating that ‘Thunberg’s activities are funded and supported by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and that the emissions-free yacht that sailed Thunberg to New York was built under the order of one of the representatives of the Rothschild clan’. The website RadioFreeEurope goes into more detail about the conspiracy theories targeting the young climate movement icon in their article ‘The Russian Bear Is Spooked by Greta the Eco-Activist’ (link).

HOW CLIMATE-SCEPTIC FAKE NEWS WORKS

Climate sceptics question the existence, causes, and consequences of global warming. Despite being accused of spreading fake news, they continue to infiltrate public debate (media, politics, education) and shape how the climate crisis is treated. They use a variety of types of environmental fake news:

1. Fake news that undermines the credibility of a pro-environment representative or medium
2. Fake news that attempts to disinform by hiding or interpreting the context of a climate event.
3. Fake news that reframes facts to reduce their impact, for example, by only using one criterion to talk about the climate crisis, such as global warming, and not mentioning biodiversity and interdependencies (oceans, atmosphere, biodiversity, climate, water, etc).

DEFINITION

The idea of ‘official history’, which undermines the very basis of historiography, is connected to the concept of manipulating facts and therefore with fake news.

Official history, in the form of ‘collective memory’ or ‘national memory’ is the historical narrative a nation uses to create its past. Official histories walk the line between facts, lies, and myth. According to Pierre Nora, two factors contribute to the emergence of an official history: education programmes and political ceremonies (commemorations, monuments, memorials, etc.)². While an official history may bring a nation together, it can also bolster warmongering nationalist movements.

For example, up until the 1980s, the official history of Israel alleged that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was the fruit of a heroic war of David (the Jewish people) versus Goliath (Arab peoples). This official version was subsequently revisited by a new group of historians who pointed out that the real history was much more nuanced and that the 1948 war led, among other things, to Arab populations being expelled from the territory.

Another way of interpreting history is to tie it to fake news: negationism. This ideological movement thinks that the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide are nothing but the results of a fallacious belief system that makes false claims about events that never happened. By denying the very existence of gas chambers, negationists are contradicting the vast majority of historians. For this reason, it can be said that negationism does not use the scientific method and is more comparable with a conspiracy theory.

Negationism was in the news once again when Holocaust survivors called on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to take down revisionist content that had been posted on the social network.

CASE IN POINT: WESTERN HEGEMONY RHETORIC ABOUT THE BALKANS

Historian Maria Todorova has analysed the West’s discovery of the Balkans and the development of ‘Balkanism’ as well as the West’s hegemony rhetoric about its eastern alter ego^[1]. She demonstrates that Westerners have developed a ‘historical myth’ that can be likened to fake news or hate speech and is entrenched in the minds and media of Western civilisation. According to this rhetoric, originated by European travellers in the late 18^th century, the Balkans are completely ‘different’ – that is, exotic – or even ‘uncivilised’ and ‘barbaric’. In this vision, the people of the Balkans are characterised by ‘cruelty, brutality, instability, unpredictability’^[2].

After the Balkan Wars and World War I, it is this stereotype that led to the creation of the word ‘Balkanisation’. Then, in the 1990s, the war in Yugoslavia gave it new life and vigour. A new wave of caricatures and fake news emerged about the Balkans, including about how Serbs ‘play football with severed heads,’ in the words of one German defence minister that were reported by the media (Le Monde diplomatique, April 2019). Serbs were also said to have incinerated their victims “in ovens such as the ones used in Auschwitz” (Daily Mirror, 7 July).

One by one, these pieces of fake news were debunked – but not until after the conflict – notably in an investigation by American journalist Daniel Pearl (The Wall Street Journal, 31 December 1991).

1. Milica Bakic-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden, ‘Orientalist Variations on the Theme “Balkans”: Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics’, Slavic Review 51 (Spring 1992), p. 1-15. ↑

2. Maria Todorova, op. cit., p. 119. ↑

DEFINITION

These days, science and its method of logical reasoning are under fire from the spread of fake news on the internet. These hoaxes undermine and create confusion around issues for which there is overwhelming scientific consensus, including in the areas of the environment, health, and nutrition.

The internet has become a gold mine for producers of fake news. They profit off of the instantaneousness of the web by providing content with absolutely no basis in science. This includes content from industry lobbies, conspiracy theorists, and scammers hawking ‘miracle cures’ as well as people who manipulate information to take advantage of the public’s fears and lack of scientific literacy. This demagoguery is all the more pernicious because the fake news is often picked up – voluntarily or otherwise – by politicians and the media. We are thus entering into a post-truth era, where it will be very difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood, opinion from fact, and scientific information from the manipulation thereof.

CASE IN POINT: DID 5G DESTROY TREES IN SERBIA?

This photo, taken in the Serbian town of Aleksinac and posted to the Facebook group Udruženi građani Srbije, would have you believe that ‘trees have been cut down because of 5G’. The same photo also appeared in other groups in Serbia, such as ‘STOP 5G mreži u Srbiji’.

This ‘news item’ is, however, a lie. According to the website Raskrikavanje.rs, which debunked it, the trees were not destroyed because of 5G. In fact, the photo was taken during road repairs that were part of the town’s public work projects. To date, not a single study has shown that 5G is harmful to our health or the planet’s.

5G is the source for another conspiracy theory that links the technology to the Covid-19 pandemic. This massive, global conspiracy theory claims that the launch of 5G technology is connected to the emergence of the virus. While some Facebook posts are happy to make a connection between 5G and the disease, others assert that the technology can be used to ‘activate a laboratory-made virus from Wuhan’ or see the pandemic as ‘a pretext to develop a lethal vaccine that is activated by 5G radiation’. All of these narratives evolve; they start from the same fictional basis but have diverged as they have been shared across the world.

Scientists at Queensland University of Technology in Australia followed the spread of the theory from January until 12 April 2020. Their research enabled them to demonstrate how the rumour evolved from its origins in existing conspiracist groups with little clout to being amplified by celebrities and media and sports stars, thus spreading more widely to a more diverse audience.

The World Health Organisation, through the fact-checking website it created to fight back against Covid-19-related fake news, has sent out a warning to the public against the rumours. The site refutes and debunks the conspiracy theory, explaining that: “Viruses cannot travel on radio waves/mobile networks. COVID-19 is spreading in many countries that do not have 5G mobile networks. COVID-19 is spread through respiratory droplets when an infected person coughs, sneezes or speaks. People can also be infected by touching a contaminated surface and then their eyes, mouth or nose” (Source: Coronavirus disease advice for the public: Mythbusters).

DEFINITION

Online hate speech denigrates the ethnicity, skin colour, sex, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, or worldview of a minority group in order to stir up hostility and discrimination toward that group. The internet contributes to the massive spread of hate speech because people tend to be less inhibited when confrontation is not face-to-face. As a result, on the internet, hate-filled content gets more attention and spreads more widely.

In a press release dated 27 February 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues expressed how, in the last ten years, sectarianism and hate speech posted on digital platforms has contributed to the rise in violent extremist groups and an increase in crimes against religious and ethnic minorities, including migrants. He also asserted that the more hate speech spreads on social networks, the more mainstream it becomes, thus creating an environment that is more permissive of violence against minority groups.

CASE IN POINT: FAKE NEWS ABOUT MIGRANTS IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

‘Migrants attacked a minor near the Sarajevo railway station.’ In 2019, this rumour was picked up by nearly every media outlet in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In fact, however, an investigation by the Sarajevo police showed that the rumour stemmed from manipulated information aimed at stoking hatred against minorities in the country.

This mendacious hate speech first emerged when one of the country’s most popular websites, Klix.ba, published an item about an alleged attack by migrants on a young man of 17 in Sarajevo as the caption of a photo showing a battered person in a dark alley. After investigating, however, the police established not only that the attack had not been carried out by ‘migrants’, but also that it did not even happen where the website initially said it had, that is, near the railway station.

Using fake news in this way to denigrate migrants is common in the Balkans, both in newspapers and on social media.