Category: News

A roundup of some of the most popular but completely untrue stories and visuals of the week. None of these are legit, even though they were shared widely on social media. The Associated Press checked them out. Here are the facts:

Biden policies did not lead to thousands of Shell layoffs

CLAIM: Shell is eliminating 9,000 jobs because of President Joe Biden.

THE FACTS: A post circulating on Facebook falsely links Shell layoffs to the Biden administration.

“Shell oil laying off 9000 workers Thanks Biden,” states the false post.

But energy producer Royal Dutch Shell announced in September, before Biden was even elected, that the company would cut up to 9,000 jobs worldwide. At the time, Shell said that around 1,500 employees had agreed to take voluntary redundancy.

The cuts follow a drop in oil demand during the pandemic. The false posts emerged weeks after Biden signed an executive order his first day in office revoking the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, halting construction. The 1,700-mile pipeline was planned to carry roughly 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Suggested:Delaware sues oil
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The Polish foreign ministry has accused a French radio station of producing “fake news” after it accused Warsaw of trying to prohibit any reference to its liability for crimes committed by the Nazis during World War Two.

In a feature posted on the website of France Culture on February 9, the French public radio station said Poland “wants to prohibit all references to its responsibility for the crimes committed by the Third Reich.”

In this context, Radio Culture referred to a Polish law from 2018 which penalises claims of Polish co-responsibility for Nazi crimes, and stated that the legislation had been severely criticised by Israel, among other counties, which called it an attempt to rewrite history.

In response to the accusations, on Monday Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk called the French broadcaster’s accusations “scandalous,” and announced a response by the Polish embassy in Paris.

“There will be no consent to such open and brazen historical falsehood, nor fake news attacks on Poland,” Szynkowski vel Sęk wrote on Twitter.

Adding to the anger felt by the Polish government were claims by the broadcaster that Poland wanted to penalise the use of the term “Polish death camps” to describe Nazi concentration camps in German-occupied Poland.

The station also accused Poland of “prosecuting its historians.” This appeared to be a reference to
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The NDA Government has started countering fake news by setting up a dedicated Fact-Check Unit in the Press Information Bureau (PIB). The Unit verifies the facts and disseminates correct information quickly. The Unit faces acute manpower crunch with no dedicated manpower. Personnel working there are information personnel charged to perform in the Unit in addition to their routine publicity and feedback work. It has, therefore, become truncated and moribund before it could be effective.

The Unit is intended to counter fake news on official policies, programmes and schemes, which becomes insurmountable for the Unit when progenitors of fake news are ruling party Members of Parliament, State legislators, Ministers and ruling party’s IT Cell and its troll army that militate against the constitutional postulates and for that matter against the very idea of India.

Set up in December 2019, PIB Fact Check Unit has presence on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. The Unit has received 771 complaints over WhatsApp, out of which 102 have been countered, and 561 complaints over Gmail, out of which 58 have been countered. 

The Unit takes suo motu cognizance of fake news going viral on social media and also complaints from outside. Complaints are received on Gmail: pibfactckeck@gmail.com, WhatsApp and hotline number 8799711259. According to the official sources, over 1332 complaints have been received.

The Approach of the Fact Check Unit is half-hearted, half-baked as it cannot
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At the Health Ministry COVID-19 operational headquarters, a number of tech-savvy employees are scouring the internet full-time in search of viral fake news which could potentially cause damage to Israel’s coronavirus vaccination drive, according to a report on Saturday.

The team of 11, with an additional seven staff members to join shortly, closely monitors traditional media and social media nearly 24/7 for misrepresented data and false ministry documents that may cause Israelis to refuse to be vaccinated, the Haaretz newspaper reported.

If a social media page or group is found to be spreading false COVID-19 information, it can be removed within 24 hours, using the assistance of the Justice Ministry’s cyber department that contacts the relevant social media giants, the report said.

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“The fake news stronghold online is Telegram, that is where most of our monitoring is,” Amit Goldstein, head of the “anti-fake news headquarters,” told Haaretz.

Illustrative: The messaging app Telegram is displayed on a smartphone (AP Photo)

Goldstein explained that what starts on the messaging app Telegram finds its way quickly to other platforms, and since Telegram doesn’t cooperate with authorities, the most they can do is watch where it spreads.

Not all fake news interests the team, only posts that have increased potential to cause damage in terms of the scope of the exposure, Goldstein said.

Over 3.8 million Israelis have received the first
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HOUSTON, TX – It is said that the only constant in life is change…well, that and taxes…and death…and seeing Tom Brady’s disgustingly well-preserved face lighting up as he plays in another Super Bowl (his 150th we think?), winning again, with his ageless Brazilian supermodel wife, incredible family and his specialized TB 12 program that makes all of us feel inadequate and…oh, sorry, where were we? Yes, anyway, the constant of change. Especially in the NFL (except Tom Brady…but then again, he did change teams, so it can even happen to him).

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Chinese authorities banned the BBC World Service on Thursday, accusing the British broadcaster of not being “factual and fair,” according to a government statement.

The decision was a result of a “slew of falsified reporting” on issues including the Xinjiang region and China’s handling of the coronavirus, state media Global Times said, adding that “fake news” is not tolerated in China.

The BBC’s series of reporting about Xinjiang internment camps, forced labor and, most recently, systematic rape of Muslim women have infuriated Beijing authorities.

While the BBC was not available in most Chinese households, the ban suggests it will no longer be streamed in any venues such as hotels.

The U.K.’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab called it “an unacceptable curtailing of media freedom.”

“China has some of the most severe restrictions on media & internet freedoms across the globe, & this latest step will only damage China’s reputation in the eyes of the world,” Raab wrote on Twitter.

Labour Party MP Yasmin Qureshi, the shadow minister for international development, said the decision showed the Chinese government’s intolerance of “recent reports revealing the horrific systematic rape and sexual abuse of Uyghurs and other detainees in the Xinjiang prison camps.”

“If the Chinese government has got nothing to hide in Xinjiang, what has it got to fear from the free press?” Qureshi said in a statement issued by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

Beijing’s move came a week after Britain banned Chinese state-run CGTN channels due to its links to
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DENVER (CBS4) – The internet has expanded kids’ access to information. Now, two state lawmakers want to help them identify misinformation and disinformation.

From Facebook and Twitter to blogs and apps, the information landscape is vast, and State Rep. Barbara McLachlan says facts can vary widely.

(credit: CBS)

“Whenever somebody starts off a sentence with ‘I read somewhere that this happened,’ you think, ‘Wait a minute.’ I think we all need to be a little distrustful about where people are getting their information,” McLachlan said.

A school teacher-turned-state lawmaker, McLachlan says kids who consume news almost exclusively online are especially vulnerable. A study by Stanford University found 82 percent of middle school students can’t tell the difference between an online ad and a news story.

McLachlan and State Rep. Lisa Cutter are carrying a bill to improve media literacy among kids.

“We don’t want to teach kids what to think,” says Cutter. “We’re not taking a stand that one side is right and another is wrong, or one outlet is good and one outlet is bad. We just want to give them the tools so they can figure it out and understand what makes a credible source, and then they can form their own opinions about that information.”

The bill creates an online bank
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    DENVER, CO (KCNC) — The internet has expanded kids’ access to information. Now, two state lawmakers want to help them identify misinformation and disinformation.

From Facebook and Twitter to blogs and apps, the information landscape is vast, and State Rep. Barbara McLachlan says facts can vary widely.

“Whenever somebody starts off a sentence with ‘I read somewhere that this happened,’ you think, ‘Wait a minute.’ I think we all need to be a little distrustful about where people are getting their information,” McLachlan said.

A school teacher-turned-state lawmaker, McLachlan says kids who consume news almost exclusively online are especially vulnerable. A study by Stanford University found 82 percent of middle school students can’t tell the difference between an online ad and a news story.

McLachlan and State Rep. Lisa Cutter are carrying a bill to improve media literacy among kids.

“We don’t want to teach kids what to think,” says Cutter. “We’re not taking a stand that one side is right and another is wrong, or one outlet is good and one outlet is bad. We just want to give them the tools so they can figure it out and understand what makes a credible source, and then they can form their own opinions about that information.”

The bill creates an online bank of media literacy resources in the Colorado Department of Education to help teachers incorporate media literacy in everyday curriculum.

“So it’s not like everybody stops and says ‘Okay, now
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The COVID vaccine being administered by the government of India raises safety and efficacy concerns, stemming from a rushed approval process. However, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) vide a letter dated January 19 has recommended that all state governments pursue criminal action against individuals and organisations spreading “unfounded” or “misleading” rumours that “create doubt” about the vaccine’s efficacy relying on the ambiguously worded penal provisions of the Disaster Management Act (DMA), 2005 and the Indian Penal Code (IPC), 1860.

Given the government’s lack of proactive transparency on safety issues with respect to the vaccines’ approval, public scrutiny serves an important function. The evolution of a nebulous category of “fake news” has become the bedrock of curtailment of free speech. The constitutional guarantee of the right to free speech can only be restricted in a manner that is reasonable and on grounds listed under Article 19(2). The SC has also reiterated that the proportionality of restrictions on speech must be examined while determining their reasonableness. Where restrictions are vague, overbroad, and punitive, they create a chilling effect on free speech and have been held to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

The terms “unfounded”, “misleading” and “doubt” give the police unhindered elbow room to subject individuals to detention and prosecution for raising any questions about government actions in a pandemic.

This is not the first time that the state has resorted to chilling free speech during the pandemic. When the lockdown was first imposed, several state governments (under the
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