Category Archives: Fake News

Keith Hernandez, Ron Darling, and Gary Cohen are welcomed into the homes of New York Mets fans daily from the start of the baseball season and until the very end. On the radio side of things, if youre a multi-tasker like me who moves around a lot, you might be more likely to tune in for Wayne Randazzo and Howie Rose.

Rose has been gone for several games now following surgery. This hasnt stopped him from following the Mets. Like many, he is being tortured by the national broadcasts. Rose took some action against it, mocking just how bad these broadcasts are at times with some of the simplest things including this piece of fake news that dropped during Saturdays game:

Howie went soft on them. An angrier person with more time on their hands might start a list to show how bad these national broadcasts can be.

The occasional national broadcast is necessary. Last weekend, on September 11th, I think it was absolutely necessary to put the game on for people everywhere to see. That night was bigger than just baseball. The bigger the audience, the better.

But theres a cumulative effect building up. The Mets played the next night on ESPN only to follow it up with another FOX broadcast yesterday and you guessed ita second straight Sunday Night Baseball appearance.

It doesnt really matter which fan base youre from. Fans want to hear games called by the crews they are familiar with. More importantly, they want announcers who are familiar with their team.

This was the main issue in the Saturday Mets game where Jeff McNeil and Dominic Smith were proclaimed free agents after this season is over. A slip of the tongue or an error by the graphics department could always happen. Nobody is perfect. However, if this was a game provided by the hometown announcers, someone would have caught the mistake. Maybe it ends up with a great line by Keith.

Its at the guys and gals at FOX or ESPNs responsibility to know every detail about the teams they cover that one night. They need help and support. Somewhere along the lines, a couple of checks and balances blew this one.

The bigger complaint: baseball is over for the Mets in two weeks. Every moment of GKR matters before they go into hibernation in their hyperbaric chamber for the winter. These were two of the final weekends fans got to spend with them. Its a shame we had so many stolen.

With the way games are now available to people everywhere, the national broadcast has become useless. It absolutely sucks that we still have to suffer through them with no option to hear our preferred announcers.

On the plus side, the last two weekends have reintroduced everyone to the mute button on their remotes. Hello, old friend.

Continued here:

NY Mets: Howie Rose calls out the national broadcast for their fake news - Rising Apple

A war of words has erupted on Twitter between activist Ankur Singh and ABP journalist Abhinav Pandey after the latter called one of its own news channels report fake, in order to attack the central governments PM CARES Fund. The controversy erupted after the ABP journalist took to the microblogging site to cast aspersions on PM Modis PM Cares Fund.

In response to the journalists tweet criticising the BJP government for establishing the PM Care Fund instead of the PM National Relief Fund, activist Ankur Singh used a series of tweets to educate the journalist. Ankur shared a snippet of a video uploaded by ABP news on its YouTube channel on May 27, 2020.

The controversy worsened after Abhinav Pandey, in order to castigate the Modi government and prove his skewed perception right, shamelessly went on to call his own news channels report fake.

The May 2020 ABP report, which summarised the difference between the PM Cares Funds and the PMNRF, clearly states that the President of the Congress partyis still very much a member of the managing committeeof the Prime Ministers National Relief Fund (PMNRF), a fact that the ABP journalist was vehemently refuting in his Tweets.

OpIndia has also written a detailed report about the Prime Ministers National Relief Fund, in which it is clearly mentioned that PMNRF has the PM, deputy PM, finance minister, Congress president and a representative of the Tata Trustand industry representative chosen by FICCI, as members of the trust whereas PM Cares have up to 13 eminent experts to undertake relief or assistance of any kind relating to a public health emergency including the creation and up-gradation of healthcare facilities. Most importantly, the eminent experts will be working pro bono.

Here, rather than gracefully accepting his mistake, Abhinav Pandey defended himself and blamed Ankur Singh for sharing a bogus video. According to Pandey, no fraudulent video can be passed off as genuine by affixing the news channels logo. The ABP news logo has changed, according to the journalist, and the sample of video shared by Ankur was not posted on his channel.

Then, before one could even realise, ABP News made the aforementioned video posted on its YouTube channel private. The archive version of the report by ABP News can, however, be viewed here.

After the ABP News journalist deleted his Tweet which called the channels report fake, activist Ankur Singh, once again, hit out at Pandey and ABP News for not issuing an apology.

The ABP News journalist, like many other Congress loyalists and trolls, had taken to Twitter to peddle the same lie surrounding the PM Care Fund and questioning the decision to set up a new body when there was already a relief fund in the form of thePrime Ministers National Relief Fund (PMNRF).

Pandey wrote that if in all disasters including floods, storms, money is given from PMNRF, then why not for Covid?

It becomes pertinent to note here that after the Coronavirus pandemic gripped the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had set up the PM CARES Fund and invited people to contribute to the Fund. PM CARES Fund Trust wasformedon 27thMarch this year to receive public donations to fight emergencies or distresses like the current Covid-19 pandemic. Prime Minister is the Chairman of this trust, and its members include Defence Minister, Home Minister and Finance Minister.

After the PM CARES fund was set up by the government, opposition parties and a section of left-liberal intellectuals had launched a campaign against it, alleging that the fund will be misused as it will not be audited by the CAG. Congress president Sonia Gandhi haddemandedthat the entire money collected in the fund should be transferred to the PM National Relief Fund.

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ABP journalist calls news report by his own channel fake to attack PM CARES Fund and PM Modi: Here are the details - OpIndia

In France, the names Rastignac and Rubempr serve as a kind of shorthand even today two iconic characters who signify opposite sides of the same vice. Both prominent players in Honor de Balzacs expansive La Comdie Humaine, the ambitious parvenus are virtual nobodies of vaguely noble extraction who arrive agog in early-19th-century Paris, and compromise their way to the top. For Rastignac, the strategy works to his advantage; not so much for Lucien de Rubempr, whose swift ascent and humiliating fall are dramatically detailed in Balzacs masterpiece, Lost Illusions, laying the roller-coaster track for this sumptuous and surprisingly au courant cinematic retelling.

Adapting Balzac is no small feat for any filmmaker, and in whittling down the three volumes (and 700-plus pages) that comprise Lost Illusions to a robust two and a half hours, director Xavier Giannoli has a million choices to make. Casting was crucial he shrewdly taps Summer of 85 discovery Benjamin Voisin to play Lucien, surrounding the gifted newcomer with top talents (including Grard Depardieu and Xavier Dolan) but more important was the filmmakers decision to emphasize the characters shady career as a journalist.

Turns out, theres nothing new about fake news, and it may shock todays audiences to learn just how powerful and how corrupt the media was two centuries ago this year. Balzac set the tale in 1821, just as printing presses were making it possible to mass-produce misinformation, and sell-out artistes set aside their dreams of writing great literature and settled for influence instead. Money was the new royalty, and no one wanted to cut off its head, Giannolis narration-hefty screenplay informs, liberally appropriating the masters best insights the master being Balzac, of course.

At the time, the novelist risked negative press by exposing Paris pay-for-play print racket for what it was. Now, Giannoli gives Balzac the last laugh: Lost Illusions exposes his critics as the charlatans they were, detailing how any review can be twisted to serve an agenda and worse, how easily the public can be manipulated. This sweeping period drama may be up to its eyeballs in costumes and carriages, but it plays with all the brio and jeopardy of a modern-day gangster movie, featuring hack journalists as its antiheroes.

Plus a change, plus cest la mme chose, as they say, or The more things change, the more they stay the same. As the film opens in Angoulme, the idealistic Lucien fancies himself a poet, his efforts encouraged by a wealthy patron, the lovely, lonely Louise de Bargeton (a corseted Ccile de France, looking badly in need of some illicit attention). Louise believes in the arts, and sponsors a small collection of Luciens sonnets, dedicated somewhat indiscreetly to her with everyone in the salon able to infer whom he means.

For a young writer, it is an enormous validation to see ones work in print, whether or not the words themselves merit the paper. Lucien certainly doesnt lack for confidence after Louise makes the gesture of underwriting the publication of the poets Marguerites. But their special relationship or its erotic dimension, at least proves short-lived when Louises humiliated husband discovers her pet project, and Lucien is obliged to move to Paris to seek his fortune there.

Brandishing his mothers maiden name, Lucien de Rubempr (n Chardon) arrives an idealist determined to write a novel, and leaves a cynic, the subject of someone elses. The space in between provides this shameless social climber a whirlwind tour of all the fame, fortune and romance a modern city can offer. For starters, Lucien receives his first invitation to the opera, then makes every wrong move imaginable at his closely watched debut: He invests in a silly-looking makeover, knows nothing of opera etiquette, and through his gauche behavior, proceeds to embarrass Louise and her even more dignified cousin, the deliciously viperlike Marquise dEspard (Jeanne Balibar), who conceals her venom behind a condescendingly courteous exterior.

The opera sequence should make you squirm as it shows the still-sincere Lucien humiliated in the snake pit of Parisian aristocracy. Americans love a rags-to-riches story, but class barriers are far less permeable in France, and the film depicts Lucien and later punishes him for taking a shortcut to the top. There are aspects of Citizen Kane in his story, especially in its skeptical view of the press, though the outcome is not so dire. Balzac believes in reinvention, treating Luciens Parisian experience as a moral education.

When writing fiction gets Lucien nowhere, he resorts to waiting tables, befriending a regular newspaper editor Etienne Lousteau (a terrific Vincent Lacoste) whos figured out how to make a living with his pen. Recognizing a more naive version of himself in the kid, Etienne takes him in and shows him the ropes. His job, Etienne explains, is to make newspaper shareholders rich and rake it in, and rake it in they do, accepting donations in exchange for articles and favors for rave reviews.

Both men are condescending toward the prostitutes they see in Paris streets, ignoring the irony that theyre even more compromised themselves, peddling their prose to the highest bidder. At this precise moment in French history, their influence is invaluable, and Etienne uses his to boost the prospects of his ingnue girlfriend an example Lucien soon follows, trying to bury his feelings for Louise in the comforts of Coralie (Salom Dewaels), a boulevard actor making her debut on the legit stage. As a try-out piece, Etienne invites Lucien to review her show, and his conflict-of-interest assignment sets both of their careers on an upward trajectory.

An aficionado of all things theater, director Giannoli (whose version of the Florence Foster Jenkins story, Marguerite, is better than Meryl Streeps) illuminates for audiences how shows fortunes were made or broken through paid applause and bribes. Two hundred years later, the practice hasnt disappeared, only gotten more sophisticated. Fascinating though Coralies world may be, she feels like a distraction to Luciens sidelined literary ambitions and his love for Louise.

Through Etienne, he meets a publisher (Depardieu) and comes to admire a rival writer, Nathan (Dolan), who serves as his conscience. Lucien finds himself in the position to destroy his rivals latest novel, but rather than whack it for hes no better than a junior mobster at this point he recognizes its merit and spares the book. For his other sins, Balzac doesnt let Lucien off so easily, but that one act of mercy may well be the thing that redeems him in our eyes.

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Lost Illusions Review: Blistering Balzac Adaptation Reminds That Fake News Is Nothing New - Variety

HOUSTON, TX This past weekend saw the NFL wrap up its preseason, the first since 2019. The teams of the league now embark on the longest regular season in the Super Bowl era, preparing for a 17-game regular season with the potential for teams to play up to 20 total games (3 post-season games). There is much to look forward to with the dawning of the 2021 NFL regular season.

Yet, for the Houston Texans, there is not so much a sense of anticipation, but rather, a sense of regret and lost opportunities. The team completed its final preseason game in a matchup with the defending Super Bowl Champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The first home game of the new league season, the squad fought valiantly, but it wasnt enough, falling 23-16 for its first L of the preseason. The reactions post-game were quite gloomy.

We blew it, man! lamented one unnamed player. We had a chance to clinch the preseason championship of the NFL. Our first one under the Divine vision of The Easterby. We had it!!! We so [Easterby] had it!!! It was all part of the master plan from the most Reverend Brain-trust. It was out path to glory!!!!

There was a master plan for the preseason? our reporter queried.

Yes. It was all ordained by the Most Revered, revealed on the mountaintop of the top offices at NRG Stadium, and extolled by the prophets Caserio and Culley. We had it down to one tablet, 4 ordained goals.

When asked what it looked like, the player demurred Hey, there is a line you dont cross. Only the Most Revered and pure can enter into the part of NRG where the Divine plan is held. Only the cleansed and ordained dare enter into the most Holy of Holies, the vault where the Divine Tablet resides. Only they can see and study the Divine plan.

Some of our reporters took this to mean a challenge accepted by the Texans. They found out where in NRG said Divine Tablet Plan resided. They had the camera crews ready to reveal this master planit did not go well.

In the midst of filing a flurry of new job advertisements to replace this rather unexpected loss of our staff, we did pick up some aspects of the Most Divine 4 Point Plan for the Texans:

1) Win the State

2) Win the Preseason

4) Profit

After intensive study, calling upon some of the most prestigious Christian seminaries, Talmud Scholars and Islamic Imams, all of whom either hung up on us, told us to get out and/or concussed our remaining field reporters with giant religious tomes, we didnt quite a clear answer about the true divine message of the Most Divine 4 Point Plan. Then, in a stroke of luck, we turned to that bastion of truth and unbiased opinion: the comments section of Twitter. The consensus:

You guys suck.

You are a combination of libratards/dumb-as-[Easterby] Conser-duh-tives

You can only steal from South Park in your analysis.

Ah, thats what the unclean heathens would have you believe noted an acolyte of the Divine Easterby when we followed up. We are aware of the vile, unholy South Park, and they had a 3-step plan. Ours is the true, correct 4-step plan.

But what is the 3rd step? we inquired.

There is but 4 steps to the Divine plan:

This circular argument lasted for hours, until our employee gave up.

Yet, while others debate the religious implications of the Most Divine 4 Point Plan, there were more immediate ramifications for the roster.

Oh man, Nick didnt take too kindly to the failure to clinch the Pre-season championship. All of those moves, made with the championship goal in mindoh, was he ever irate!! noted another unnamed team staffer.

His answer was manifested quickly with the immediate purge of the off-seasons biggest trade acquisition: Shaq Lawson. Brought in as part of the McKinney trade, he expected to be the centerpiece of the Texans pass rush for the coming season. Yet, after not registering any pressure on any of his pre-season snaps, Caserio quickly shipped him out for yet another 6th round pick. Miami, deciding that they havent trolled the Texans enough, cut McKinney 24 hours later.

Continued said staffer Yeah, everyone talks about the 1st rounders/etc. But we all know the true GOATs are found in the lower rounds, with the GOAT of the GOATs found in the 6th. That most revered and perfect QB, Tom Br(STOP THAT!!! STOP THAT!!).

Oh, that right, you have a hang up about the man, the myth, the New England legend Tom Brad (STOP THAT!!! STOP THAT NOW!!!).

Anyway, there is great opportunity in the 6th round. However, we have to be careful of the numbers. So long as we have less or more than 3, but not exactly 3 6th round picks, our Divine aura for glory will be safe.

As for those still on the team, there was the double gloom of missing out on some championship swag and the potential fear about the loss of a roster spot, as the team needed to purge folks before Tuesday.

Im good. Even though I didnt play a snap in the preseason championship game, I know that the team cant afford to lose its best single-wing quarterback, noted Jeff Driskel. Yet, that optimism might have been misplaced, as Culley later noted when asked about him Jeff, who? Oh, the sacrificial lambeh, hardly knew him. Then again Driskel might have been on to something, as he will return to the team on the practice squad. Will the team go to the single wing? TBD.

Man, I was really hoping for that super-new championship T-Shirt they were talking about. Wouldve been so cool to wear that back home, observed Davis Mills. Alas, I will have to just wear the boring team gear that I got for just attending preseason games. I wonder what happened to the gear?

While we at Totally Not Fake News didnt have an immediate answer, we have our suspicions. The usual story is that such gear is either destroyed or shipped out to some other part of the globe. We have unconfirmed reports that one such box arrived in Nepal, where the shirts were put to immediate use, mainly to clean up the increasing amounts of debris on the mountains . Best not to confirm that for Davis, lest it upset him too much.

With that, the preseason is at an end, and the team is moving ever forward towards the future NFL season, hoping to put the disappointment of failing to achieve one of its stated goals, but still driving towards the ever-present requirement, the most important stepStep 4: Profit!!! Or, if not that, then maybe a win or two in the regular season.

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Totally Not Fake News: The End of the Beginning - Battle Red Blog

With the pandemic on a roll along with the misinformation spreaders, all the platforms are out on a mission to wipe out all misinformation present on their spaces. However when there are fifty fact checkers across fifty million misinformation spreaders, it is definitely a tough job to get it done on time. According to a new study at MIT, there can now be fifty million fact checkers to combat the equal ratio of information spreaders.

This study focused on how the wisdom of the common crowd works when it comes to fact-checking. In conclusion, the study found that the accuracy of the common people is almost the same as that of highly trained fact checkers.

Now when we refer to the common crowd, we're definitely not talking about your everyday John. Instead, we're focusing on educated and aware users who keep up with the world. Yes, they are some qualified individuals but still not compatible with trained fact checkers. It turns out this study begs to differ since both of these groups hit the mark equally this time around and while one costs some pretty heavy bucks, the other costs only $0.90 per story.

MIT took into account the views of 1,128 individuals who were hired through a platform which enables users to get people to do odd jobs and gigs. Keeping this aside, MIT then asked these individuals to take a test for their political knowledge as well as one for tendency to think analytically. It was found that the users who scored well in these tests were more likely to correlate with the fact-checkers hence proving our point that not every person is capable of this task hence why we need fact-checkers. Moving on, it was found 10 out of 15 checkers got the same results as the pros so that's a pretty good ratio.

The participants were presented with 20 headlines and lead sentences from 207 articles. All of them were picked up from where Facebook had listed them to be checked for misinformation. These pieces were to be filtered for the presence of objectivity, truth, and unbiasedness along with a list of other similar qualities. These articles weren't all flagged for misinformation but also because some were receiving too many likes or some were about sensitive health issues.

When these were presented to three fact checkers as well, it was seen that not all of them always agreed. While all of them agreed on 49% of the cases, only 42% of the cases were consented by two of them while 9% cases had different opinions by all three. The researchers then broke the public into groups ranging from 12 to 20 and were divided according to their political parties before the assignment.

MIT researchers believe that putting that much burden on a few fact-checkers is where things start to go wrong. With the amount of misinformation being spread everyday, it is no wonder even half a million fact checkers would prove to be a low number. While these researchers do not claim any fast solutions to the checking of false information online, they simply aim to provide possible ways around.

Read next:Study Shows Results On Best Ways To Compensate Digital Influencers For Brand Marketing

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Social networks can tackle fake news by leveraging the 'Crowd Wisdom' as professional grade fact checkers - Digital Information World

We the people of Colorado aren't taking it anymore You work for us!" reads the handwritten line at the bottom of the letter received at the office of Chaffee County Clerk and Recorder Lori Mitchell. Chaffee County may be next!"

Mitchell told Newsline that the warning, in the context of the rest of the letter, might refer to a potential that her office, like the clerk's office in Mesa County, could be investigated by the secretary of state.

But it's hard to know because, after all we've been through, it's just worrisome," Mitchell said.

Earlier in the summer, in response to mounting threats directed at Mitchell, she had bulletproof infrastructure installed in her Salida offices.

In recent days, at Mitchell's request, agents with the Department of Homeland Security conducted a physical security assessment at the clerk's office, where 10 people work, and she plans to make improvements based on the agents' advice.

The typed section of the letter, which is identical in the versions viewed by Newsline, discusses Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold's investigation into an election-system security breach in the office of Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters. Mesa County election-system hard drive images were copied and released to conspiracy theorists with alleged participation by Peters. Staff from Griswold's office visited the clerk's office last month to investigate the breach, and the FBI and Mesa County district attorney are conducting a related criminal investigation.

The letter refers to the visit as raids," and it defends Peters, saying she did nothing wrong. Griswold is using a 'Gestapo Standard' of election intimidation" on behalf of a tyrannical, weaponized government," it says.

Enough. There is no more time nor reason to tolerate or negotiate with tyrants," the letter ends, adding a demand that Griswold resign.

Carly Koppes, the Republican clerk and recorder for Weld County and president of the Colorado County Clerks Association, also received a version of the letter. The handwritten portion of Koppes' letter says We the people" don't want voting machines touched or loaded with new software, and it ends, You may be next!"

Koppes said the meaning of that line is ambiguous, but taken with other threats to her office since the November election it's notable.

Some of my colleagues have received much worse than I have," Koppes said.

Koppes, who was born and raised in Weld County, began working in the clerk and recorder's office in 2004. Elections in her experience didn't used to be so confrontational. In my 17 years I have never seen anything like this," she said.

Some of the letters appear to be signed by Katherine Hawkins" and feature a similar style of cursive handwriting. Other clerks who reportedly received a version of the letter include those in Park and Baca counties. Colorado County Clerks Association spokesperson Michele Ames said that to her knowledge a majority of the clerks in the state" received a version of the letter.

Its distribution appears to be part of a strategy by election conspiracists that involves ramping up their efforts to pressure clerks," Ames said.

Since he lost the election to President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump has claimed without evidence that the election was fraudulent. Some activists in Colorado, such as those associated with U.S. Election Integrity Plan, have sought to prove that election systems in Colorado are vulnerable to tampering and fraud, though their claims amount mainly to innuendo, and the most serious actual breach is the one allegedly committed with the help of the Republican Peters. USEIP volunteers have reportedly gone door-to-door in multiple counties asking individual voters to verify their participation in the election. Election-fraud activists have pressured Colorado county clerks to conduct audits of the election.

Clerks expect such pressure to worsen as the next statewide election, on Nov. 2, approaches.

I have no doubt it will escalate," Mitchell said. Clerks are trying to stay positive, check in with each other, offer support when they can."

Mitchell has worked in the clerk's office since 2011 and has been clerk since 2014. Like Knoppes, she said she has absolutely not" seen anything like the recent attacks on elections officials before.

It just takes a toll on you, because you're worried about your staff," she said. You're just worried about them feeling safe at work and you're worried about everybody's safety for real."

A lot of her staff are longtime members of the community, she said.

We're just trying to do our jobs, our professional jobs, and help people interact with their government, and it's like we're just turned into the enemy all of a sudden," she said.

Mitchell is up for reelection next year. Asked how she feels about remaining in office after the threats she's experienced, she said, I'm going to fight like hell and I'm going to win again I have a job to do and I'm going to do it, and I'm going to run the best campaign I can, and I'm going to win."

Colorado Newsline is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and Twitter.

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Marjorie Greene swears the increase in ivermectin poisonings is fake news but won't say if she takes it - Raw Story

Lai Mohammed: Laments increasing publication of fake news against Nigerian government officials

By Rotimi Ijikanmi

The Nigerian Government Government has raised alarm over the use of what is called deep fake news to attack it and its officials.

Nigerias Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, raised the alarm in an interview on Saturday, in Sal Island, Cape Verde.

The minister who was in Sal Island for the 64th Conference of the United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) Conference for Africa and second edition of UNWTO Global Tourism Investment Forum spoke to News Agency of Nigeria, NAN.

Mohammed said fake news had worsened by becoming a weapon for naysayers to attack government and its officials.

As a matter of fact, Nigerians should know that we have graduated from ordinary fake news to deep fake news. The danger of deep fake news is that it is difficult to differentiate the fake news from real news.

This is because purveyors of deep fake news would take a story, be it a video or a photograph and make it look real.

They will take videos of what is happening in other lands, doctor them and freely circulate them as what is really happening in Nigeria. Ditto photographs.

News stories are even worse, because they embellish such fake stories with quotes and videos and even quote government officials, as if they are real.

This becomes more difficult for unsuspecting Nigerians to know the difference between the fake news and real information, he said.

The minister noted that at the beginning, purveyors of deep fake news were largely unknown online publications, adding that it was, however, unfortunate that otherwise reputable publications and some mainstream media had joined the bandwagon.

Giving instances of deep fake news, the minister recalled the aftermath of the interview by Channels Television of Benue Governor, Samuel Ortom and a retired Navy Commodore, Kunle Olawunmi.

After the interview, online and traditional newspapers were awash with stories that the station had been shut, while some said that the anchor people had been arrested.

Some even went to demonstrate the purported arrest of the anchor people, but till today, the station is still open.

These people have no shame because they know from the beginning that they are telling deep fake news, they have no credibility and can destroy anybody at will with their weapon, he said.

The minister also recalled his recent official trip to Washington to engage with think tanks and global media outfits, during which a particular online publication twisted the purpose of the trip, claiming that he went with his aide to beg Twitter and twitter shunned them.

The minister said the fake news was made deep by the online publication by quoting the airline they travelled on, their seat number and even video clips showing them in the aircraft.

This is an example of deep fake news because any unsuspecting Nigerians will believe it is true. Of course, they knew they were telling lies because our itinerary and programmes in the US were not hidden, but reported daily by social media, radio, newspapers and television.

Even that same online newspaper carried stories of our engagements, yet it kept saying we went to the US to beg Twitter and we were shunned, he said.

Mohammed said the same online publication also went ahead to publish deep fake news about a US trip by the Chief of Staff to the President, Prof. Ibrahim Gambari.

He said with a deliberate intention to tarnish and destroy the government, the online publication claimed that Gambari and other officials were going to the US to infiltrate the ranks of agitators planning a protest against the President, who would be attending United Nations General Assembly.

When the Statistician-General of the Federation, Dr Yemi Kale retired some weeks ago, there was a story credited to him that while in office, he was coerced by government to falsify figures about economic growth of Nigeria.

Of course, Kale came out to refute the story, but the purveyors knew what they were doing.

The deep fake news was fabricated just to take the shine away from the governments success in not only retaining positive GDP growth, but surpassing all expectations crawling from 0.11 per cent two quarters ago to marginal .51 per cent in the last quarter and then 5.0 percent.

Of course, they dont wish the government and Nigeria well, but needed something to dampen the enthusiasm of government and make Nigerians sad, he said.

The minister said they foresaw the danger of fake news since 2017, when the federal government launched a campaign against it.

He reiterated the resolve of the federal government to regulate the social media, which had become a major tool for propagating fake news.

Anytime the fake news purveyors strike, they strengthen our resolve further to act on sanitising the social media. By their conduct, they are showing the world that we are ripe in our pursuit of sanitising the social media, he said.

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Nigerian Govt raises alarm over use of deep fake news to attack its officials - The News

On January 12, 2018, only four days after his 76th and last birthday, British tabloid Daily Mail carried a remarkable headline about renowned physicist and pop-science legend Dr Stephen Hawking. Has Stephen Hawking Been Replaced with a Puppet? it asked. As if it was not enough, it went on: Conspiracy theorists claim the REAL professor is DEAD and a puppet has taken his place and reveal the SIX clues that support the idea. The story is just as intriguing. It claimed that the said conspiracy theorists believed that Dr Hawking had actually died in 1985, three years before his rise to prominence. The geniuses who came up with the story left no attribute of the mans appearance from his teeth to his blond hair to build the case. The good doctor died in just about two months of this story. If I were a scientist whose lifes mission was to make humanity smarter and I saw such overwhelming evidence of my target audience getting dumber with every passing day perhaps I would request my medic to unplug me from life support. Please make nothing of my sentiment. I do not want to imply either that his demise was a deliberate decision or that this story had anything to do with the story. I just wanted to juxtapose the amount of crazy we witness around us with one of the finest minds known to us. No genius deserves such a dumb audience. The story is still available on the middle market newspapers website.

The idea that a celebrity was replaced with his/her lookalike is not new. People have a hard time dealing with the mortality of such icons. To some John F Kennedy Jr did not die in the 1999 plane crash and is in hiding. That his grandfather Joseph Kennedy was a known anti-Semite, a Nazi sympathiser and his father President JFK when young called Hitler stuff of legends in his diary seem to have contributed to QAnons appropriation of the lore. Now this man in hiding is a willing accomplice of Trump and will reveal himself and replace Mike Pence as the Vice President when he takes his rightful place to drain the swamp. The story about Hawking is reminiscent of another such myth. That the Beatles star Paul McCartney died in a traffic accident in 1966 and was replaced by a copy. Why this courtesy was not extended to John Lennon is anybodys guess. You can learn more about this myth by searching Paul is dead on the internet.

Fake news, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience have all darkened our memory throughout history. But in this day and age, it has taken a stranger, more bizarre turn. In 2016, Oxford dictionaries declared post-truth the international word of the year which encapsulates the passing year in language. There is debate about the origin of the word itself and it is apparently traced back to 1992 but it may owe a lot to the works of Nietzsche, particularly his 1873 essay Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, If someone hides an object behind a bush, then seeks and finds it there, that seeking and finding is not very laudable: but that is the way it is with the seeking and finding of truth within the rational sphere. If I define the mammal and then after examining a camel declare, See, a mammal, a truth is brought to light, but it is of limited value. I mean it is anthropomorphic through and through and contains not a single point that would be true and universally valid, apart from man. The investigator into such truths is basically seeking just the metamorphosis of the world into man; he is struggling to understand the world as a human-like thing and acquires at best a feeling of assimilation. In our own time, post-truth epitomises a lament about the vanishing objective standards meant to discern the truth.

How fitting that Nietzsche would figure into this debate because a recent book flags his work for its contribution to more than just the term. Dangerous Minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Return of the Far Right by Ronald Beiner does a great service to its readers by warning them about the perils of reading his and Heideggers works uncritically. Nietzsches critique of modern society, his desire to see a revival of slavery, his contempt for Christianity, longing for pre-Christian Europe all fit nicely into that which is going on in the wests alt-right and neo-Nazi circles. I think I have tried to tackle this issue whenever I have discussed the works of Savitri Devi and her efforts to blend Nazism with Hinduism. It is all a desire to go back to the pre-Christian paganism of Europe by reviving the Aryan myth. This should worry you because it cements my thesis that the source of all Islamophobia, all anti-Christian sentiment and all antisemitism are the same. If truth be told all of it qualifies as antisemitism. Why? Because neo-Nazis have a problem with Jesus, who despite being Jewish in their eyes is common to Christianity and Islam. All Abrahamic faiths are the enemy here and they can be taken out one by one.

The recently concluded US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the re-centring of the terror group IS in the public discourse seems to further bolster my fears about the approaching days. IS is the abbreviation of the Islamic State a name the terror group seems to have chosen with a lot of deliberation as the best gift to Islams detractors. It will be used to revive Huntingtons propaganda against Muslims in the world.

Meanwhile, two trends from our Eastern neighbours are instructive. India seems to be trying really hard to link IS Khorasan Province with Pakistan. Sadly, its own documented links with the group and the attacks by the said body against Pakistan are making this job difficult.

Second trend. You must have seen a viral video claiming that the Taliban hanged a man to death from the US abandoned Black Hawk helicopter. In a tweet, CNNs fact-checker Daniel Dale then shared a story by Alt-News, to its credit an Indian online fact-checker, which showed that this was not just a patent lie but was initially promoted by Indian editors and senior journalists like Sudhir Chaudhary. Hatred, intolerance and total abdication of professionalism and objectivity are making India, once a trusted voice on democracy, a laughing stock of the world. With Indias mighty troll army and its journalists also assuming the role of trolls the threat of fake news and its damage to civilisation is only likely to grow exponentially.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 4th, 2021.

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Fake news - The Express Tribune

That Facebook and social media have a very serious problem with misinformation it is something that no one escapes. Since the times of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it is known that there are many sources of false news and aimed at manipulating public opinion through falsehoods in all areas. From politics to health (and in this regard we have had very clear examples with the coronavirus), everything has a place on Facebook.

Although Facebook claims to work against this type of content, and certainly in the case of the coronavirus its efforts are being noticed on the network, the truth is that there is generally the opinion that they act too lightly in this regard. And as a result of a peer-reviewed study by researchers from New York University and the Universit Grenoble Alpes in France, it appears that this could have an explanation. And it is that the investigation shows that lFalse information garnered six times more engagement on Facebook than real news.

As we can read in The Washington Post, the study analyzed the Facebook page posts of more than 2,500 news publishers between August 2020 and January 2021. The researchers found that Pages that post more false information on a regular basis get more likes, shares, and comments. This circumstance was observed across the political spectrum, but the study found that editors on the right are much more likely to share misleading information than editors in other political categories, according to the report.

In response to this study, a Facebook spokesperson told the US newspaper that interactions do not represent the full scope of each post. In other words, a publication with fewer interactions could, in reality, have reached many more users of the social network and, consequently, have been more read. However, the researchers affirm that the social network does not provide such information at all.

As an example, the researchers used CrowdTangle, a Facebook tool that offers analytics on posts. The problem is that In August, Facebook cut off this group of researchers access to this data, as well as the library of political ads on the platform. Facebook claimed that continuing to give outside investigators access to the data could violate an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission it signed after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, a claim the FTC called inaccurate.

If Facebook is acting against disinformation, why are you concerned about this type of investigation? The US regulator has already stated that the justification provided by the social network is inaccurate? They may be wary of your capabilities in this regard, and dislike anything that is known to have become a platform for spreading fake news. Nevertheless, limiting outside research that might help you, it certainly sounds a bit ugly.

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Disinformation and fake news triumph on Facebook - InTallaght

Ratan Tata, 83, has called out fake news in the past as well.

Industrialist Ratan Tata took to Instagram once again this afternoon to flag a quote wrongly attributed to him. The widely-shared quote seems to suggest that Mr Tata had advocated for "liquor sales through Aadhaar cards."

"Liquor sales should be sold through Aadhaar card. Government food subsidies should be stopped for alcohol buyers [sic]," the quote attributed to Ratan Tata read, according to a screenshot the business leader shared on his Instagram Stories this afternoon. "Those who have the facility to buy alcohol can definitely buy food. When we give them free food they buy alcohol," it continued.

Ratan Tata, Chairman Emeritus of Tata Sons, flagged the post as fake. "This was not said by me. Thank you," the 83-year-old wrote while sharing a screenshot of the post, along with a GIF with the words "Fake News".

This is not the first time that Mr Tata has had to flag a quote wrongly attributed to him. Last year, he gave a clarification after a post with remarks attributed to him - linking "huge downfall of economy" to the coronavirus pandemic - was widely shared on social media.

Mr Tata, at the time, had people to verify media circulated on WhatsApp and over social media platforms before sharing it. "If I have something to say, I will say it on my official channels," Mr Tata had written.

Yesterday, another industrialist was also forced to issue a clarification on a post attributed wrongly to him. The post purportedly contained some "life changing advice" from Anand Mahindra, but the chairman of Mahindra Group clarified yesterday that he never said those words.

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"Not Said By Me": Ratan Tata On Post Linking Liquor Sale To Aadhaar Card - NDTV