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Europe has a battle against fake news on its hands

The EU has created a multinational group known as East Stratcom to battle disinformation campaign

As Europe faces a year of crucial elections, a movement is coalescing to fight the tide of fake news, hacking and hate speech spreading across the Internet. From Germany to France, Spain, Italy, and beyond, governments, institutions and the media are scrambling to formulate practical responses to a danger that many think poses the greatest threat to Western democracies since the Cold War.
Concerns were heightened after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States last November, a surprise victory that left many wondering if Russian hacking and fake news shaved just enough points from Hilary Clinton's vote count to swing the election. A fake news factory was traced to a town of 44,000 in Macedonia, where massive numbers of sensational stories were copied from extremist sources and pasted onto deceptive websites, then promoted over an equally astounding number of counterfeit social media accounts.
The European Union has created a multinational group known as East Stratcom to battle what it says is Russia's ongoing disinformation campaign. Led by a 10-member team of diplomats, bureaucrats and former journalists with backgrounds in a range of languages, the myth-busters have debunked some 2,500 fake stories since March 2015, but they acknowledge it is just as a drop in the ocean of misinformation.
Germany is now engaged in a strenuous battle against "alternative facts", with Thomas Oppermann of the Social Democratic Party calling for stiff daily fines on social media if fake reports are not quickly removed. Facebook now employs independent fact checkers in Germany who contact original sources of a story if the headline looks suspicious or originates from a dubious website. In France, mainstream media and civil society groups have launched a project called CrossCheck that works to track and stem the spread of viral fake news stories, while Facebook users can flag suspicious content and send it to a pool of moderators.
Italy's head of the lower house of parliament Laura Boldrini said that "fake news is the anteroom of hatred and debunking it is an action of civil resistance". In response she has launched the website www.bastabufale.it, or "stop fake news".
"No mere college prank, fake news can cause real harm to people - just think of those about paediatric vaccines, improvised medical therapies or online scams," she said.
A community of Italian communicators, teachers and influencers including Boldrini also launched www.paroleostili.com, a platform and manifesto against the dangers inherent in hate speech, which can sow the seeds of actual violence. Boldrini has written to Mark Zuckenberg, CEO of Facebook, asking for an answer about closed groups that praise sexism and violence or apologise for fascism. She wonders if the lack of local responsiveness is due to the absence of a Facebook operations office in Italy.
In Spain, the El País newspaper has begun to respond to fake news, partly for its readers in Mexico, by assigning five more reporters to debunk false reports and starting a blog to discredit offenders they uncover. Also of concern in Europe is expansion of the alt-right website Breitbart News, formerly headed by Steve Bannon, currently Trump's top advisor in the White House. Now with operations in the UK, Germany, France and Italy, it is using the same approach that worked in the US by appealing to anti-globalisation and anti-immigrant sentiment and through aligning itself with opposition parties.
More recently, Breitbart "revealed" that a "1,000-man mob" of immigrants attacked police and set "Germany's oldest church" alight on New Year's Eve in Dortmund. A BBC investigation found eyewitnesses, including one quoted by Breibart, who said the story "misrepresented true events in service of an agenda that was divisive and unjust".
But the threat doesn't only come from those with a political agenda. Perhaps a bigger motive is profit. Unscrupulous creators of websites have found that the most outrageous stories have the best chance of going viral online, so they churn out sites with completely untrue, sensational stories, then use Facebook and Google ads to spread and monetise the vast numbers of clicks. The two Internet giants have responded with initiatives, but most view the progress as limited at best.
And fake news can have lasting effects even if discredited. Last November Oxford Dictionaries chose "post-truth" as its international word of the year. The adjective denotes circumstances where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief. Use of the term increased some 2,000 per cent in 2016 over the year previous. More than trying control the vast in the liquid ecosystem of the Web, the long-term answer is likely education and instruction in critical thinking. A Stanford study confirmed that teenagers absorb social media news without considering the source. More than ever those in the smartphone generation need to be alert to the accuracy of claims.
For now Europe, like the rest of the world, can only hope to dampen some of the more damaging effects of fake news. Whether a solution can be found remains to be seen, but many on the continent are now girding for the battle.
Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli are editors at Luminosity Italia, a news agency based in Milan, Italy.