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.

DEFINITION

Fact checking is a technique that involves verifying in real time whether the facts politicians and experts present to the media are true and their numbers are accurate. Fact checking is also a way of assessing the level of objectivity in the media’s treatment of information.

Fact checking has become a ubiquitous practice in recent years as it has come to be seen as a means of fighting the spread of fake news. Verifying facts has proven to be indispensable given the exponential growth of digital technologies and social networks; with the tidal wave of posts generated by users (350,000 tweets are posted every minute on Twitter), fact checking is a way of distinguishing truth from fiction.

The practice of fact checking has become democratised nowadays thanks to software that helps private individuals to do it. It even became automated in 2013 with the release of an algorithm designed to perform the checks with no human intervention. Since most fake news, ‘troll farms’, and hoaxes are spread on social media, tech giants such as Facebook have been employing fact checking since 2016.

One of the top global fact-checking platforms is the NGO Science Feedback, known for being a member of the International Fact-Checking Network as well of the World Health Organisation’s ‘Vaccine Safety Net’. The platform’s aim is to put scientists on the front line in the fight against disinformation. The organisation’s mission is to strive towards an internet where users have easy access to reliable scientific information, especially in the areas of health and the climate, two urgent societal issues that attract an endless influx of fake news. To fulfil this mission, the NGO runs a community of 400 scientists that use a rigorous verification method to check the most popular articles. Science Feedback’s two websites, Climate feedback & Health Feedback, totalled 1.8 million views from 2018–2020.

CASE IN POINT: FACT CHECKING IN THE BALKANS

A report by the Council of Europe on the media landscape of the Balkans shows that the region is mired in masses of “fake news, hate speech, and clickbait, which has resulted in a dramatic decrease in people’s trust in the media”.

The Center for Democratic Transition (CDT) confirms the pervasiveness of fake news: after analysing more than 500 articles from 200 regional media outlets, the organisation concluded that nearly every online media outlet had published at least one fake news item in the past six months.

The Balkans have 4 main fact-checking bodies, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia:

1. Raskrinkavanje.ba

2. Raskrinkavanje.me

3. Metamorphosis Foundation

4. Istinomer

These four bodies have redoubled their efforts and cooperation after a wave of fake news was unleashed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Together, they now form part of Facebook’s programme for fact checking and fighting disinformation. In the programme, which includes 70 certified fact-checking bodies worldwide, articles identified as fake are demoted to the bottom of the newsfeed. Once demoted, the average number of views for these fake news items decreases by over 80%.