Category: News

(CN) — The U.S. government has seized nearly 100 domain names used by a branch of Iran’s armed forces that officials said Wednesday were being used to conduct a disinformation campaign featuring fake news sites targeting the United States and other countries.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has long been recognized as a prominent arm of the Iranian government and was officially designated as a terrorist organization by the United States government last year. 

It found its online influence diminished Wednesday when U.S. officials took control of 92 domain names previously controlled by the organization, according to law enforcement officials.

In an announcement made in part by U.S. Attorney David Anderson, officials seized the websites after evidence came to light that they were being utilized by IRGC to spread Iranian propaganda.

Seizure documents state that at least four of the captured domain names falsely masqueraded themselves as legitimate news outlets but were in fact being used to target the United States and attempted to influence domestic and foreign policy through misinformation — a direct violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. 

The remaining sites, according to officials, were focused largely on spreading misinformation in other parts of the world, notably around Western Europe, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

“Today we are 92
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BURLINGTON, Vt. (WCAX) – How do you know if you’re reading fake news?

Our Darren Perron spoke with writer and former WCAX Journalist Tom Farmer to get you tips on how to spot the differences. Watch the video to see the interview.

Copyright 2020 WCAX. All rights reserved.

• President Donald Trump tweeted that the “Fake News Media” is only focusing on COVID-19 one day after he was discharged from the hospital where he was treated for complications from the deadly virus, which he still has.
• “The Fake News Media refuses to discuss how good the Economy and Stock Market, including JOBS under the Trump Administration, are doing,” Trump tweeted. “We will soon be in RECORD TERRITORY. All they want to discuss is COVID 19, where they won’t say it, but we beat the Dems all day long, also!!!”
• Trump’s desire to focus on the economy — specifically how good it was before the pandemic — has been undermined by his COVID-19 diagnosis and the outbreak among his staff in the White House.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

President Donald Trump offered another edition of media criticism Tuesday, tweeting his dismay over the amount of COVID-19 coverage following his discharge from the hospital where he was treated for complications from the deadly disease.

—Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 6, 2020

“The Fake News Media refuses to discuss how good the Economy and Stock Market, including JOBS under the Trump Administration, are doing,” the president tweeted. “We will soon be in RECORD TERRITORY. All they want to discuss is COVID 19, where they won’t say it, but we beat the Dems all day long, also!!!”

Trump’s tweet is part of a larger pattern that has become a fixture with his reelection
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A funny thing happened at the Donald Trump medical media event on the weekend, and while in the great scheme of things it probably won’t change very much, it’s well worth taking note of.

On Saturday, a team of medical staff came out of the Walter Reed medical centre to update the media on U.S. President Donald Trump’s condition, following his hospitalization due to COVID-19.

They painted a mostly positive but confusing picture of the president’s condition, giving timelines about when his infection with the virus had been discovered — which later had to be publicly corrected — refusing to talk about whether the president had been on oxygen, and describing treatments he’d been given that are normally offered to patients in far more serious condition than the way they were describing Trump’s situation. (The next day, White House physician Dr. Sean P. Conley admitted the press statement had been deliberately upbeat.)

The anonymous source? Well, it was a pretty good one: Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff.

The cheery analysis didn’t suit everyone. Even as the news conference was drawing to a close, a senior Trump administration official, on condition of anonymity, was telling reporters that the situation was more severe than the doctors were admitting, saying, “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care. … We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

The anonymous source? Well, it was
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On Thursday, researchers at Cornell University released a study identifying the largest driver of misinformation about the coronavirus as the president of the United States.

Before the sun came up the next day, that same president had
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TAIPEI, TAIWAN – A surge in fake news around Southeast Asia, particularly bogus COVID-19 information, has prompted leaders to explore a regional crackdown after a suggestion from a Vietnamese security official.

Police agencies in the 10 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries – which represent a total population of about 650 million from Myanmar to the Philippines – should improve cooperation to stop fake news among other cross-border crimes, a Vietnamese official said at a September 25 meeting with peers from around Southeast Asia.

“I think the issue is something that ASEAN has been keeping tabs on, but perhaps I think the impetus for Vietnam’s call recently is due to the COVID-19 situation and the consequent infodemic,” said Harris Zainul, an analyst at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies Malaysia.

“We know that there has been a spike in false information related to COVID-19 ever since the pandemic had started and arrived in Southeast Asia, so perhaps Vietnam’s call should be viewed in that context,” Zainul said.

The bloc member states signed a declaration in 2014 to encourage socially responsible media and four years later reached a consensus to minimize the harmful effects of fake news. Fake news is on the rise now, Nguyen Thanh Son, head of the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security’s Foreign Relations Department, told the bloc’s Senior Officials Meeting on Transnational Crime.

Nguyen pointed to the COVID-19 pandemic as a reason for the spread of fake news as well as other crimes, according to Asian media
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Topline

The Kremlin-backed group accused of meddling in the 2016 election has been paying American writers to publish articles slamming Joe Biden, praising President Trump and criticizing Black Lives Matter for a faux conservative news site, according to a Thursday Reuters report, the second such Russian attempt to sow division among U.S. voters ahead of the election.

Key Facts

“Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president!”

“WikiLeaks confirms Hillary sold weapons to ISIS!”

“Ireland now officially accepting Trump refugees from America!”

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, such patently false headlines spread like wildfire across social media, ignited by fake news sites or hyper-partisan blogs. 

A few decades ago, such stories would have been shrugged off as satire or dismissed by discriminating journalists. But with the gatekeeping apparatus of mainstream media crumbling, trust in government on the decline and social media platforms providing a vehicle for anything to go viral, research shows such stories not only got distributed, they sometimes receive more clicks than stories in The New York Times.

“In 2016, you started to see the weaponization of social media platforms in ways that I would characterize as dangerous to democracy,” recalled CU’s Toby Hopp, assistant professor of advertising, public relations and media design, who has made a career out of studying what he calls “countermedia” (fake news). “There seemed to be no boundaries anymore in terms of the information being communicated and the responsibility to the truth. It was really concerning.”

Fast-forward to 2020, and the “fake news” phenomenon has become more glaring. Distant “troll factories” — businesses where paid writers churn out fake social media posts intentionally designed to sow discontent among U.S. voters — are thriving in Russia, Macedonia and elsewhere. Conspiracy theories like QAnon —
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Does fake news, also known as stories based on false information, influence voters? 

Although its effect may be small, one study concluded fake news did influence the outcome of the very close 2016 presidential election. 

The Ohio State University study suggests that about 4% of President Barack Obama’s 2012 supporters were dissuaded from voting for Hillary Clinton in 2016 by belief in stories based on false information.

According to Facebook in prepared Senate testimony, 126 million Americans were shown Russian-backed, politically-oriented false stories via the social media platform during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.

Not every Facebook user exposed to the fake news articles read the stories of course. But if only a fraction did and were influenced by them, it could have changed the outcome of a very close race, as the study above suggests.

Fake news outdraws real

Also, leading up to the 2016 presidential election, the 20 most popular false stories got more shares, reactions and comments (8.7 million engagements) than the most popular 20 real news stories (7.3 million engagements), according to NPR.

Social media drives more users to fake news sites than real ones.  More than 40% of visits to 65 fake news sites come from social media when compared to about 10% of visits to 690 top US news sites, according to a 2017 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

More than one-quarter of voting-age adults visited a fake news website supporting either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump in the final weeks of the
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