Fake news is one of the weapons of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but its use dates back to much earlier times.
These eras began with the explosion of the American warship “USS Maine” and its sinking in Havana in 1898. American correspondents then spread that Spain was responsible for the explosion. The US-Spain war broke out later that year. In 1917, British newspapers reported that the Germans were extracting fat from the bodies of fallen soldiers to make soap and margarine.
In 2003, the New York Times published a report by the George W. Bush administration that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (and in 2004 the newspaper apologized for this). During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US tanks flocked to the streets of Baghdad. This can be seen on television footage, at the moment when the Iraqi Minister of Intelligence boldly states in a press conference that the Americans have not arrived in the city.
Recently in the war, however, in the war in Ukraine, a Russian general spread false details about the civilians of Mariupol: 4,000 of them were armed and fighting in three strong pockets of the city. Thus, the Russian army was forced to attack them. Russian television claimed that Ukrainians were lying to the victims of the war using actors, and aired a Ukrainian video in which make-up artists painted Ukrainian faces red. (It was a video from the shooting of a Ukrainian serial long before the start of the war).
There are many examples. But why does a state, either democratic or authoritarian, use fake news in the war? The reasons are obvious:
- To unite the nation in the rear and to cheer the soldiers on the front.
- To establish and / or maintain military alliances with other states.
- To gain international support.
- Authoritarian leaders, in order to legitimize their authoritarian regime.
Authoritarian leaders rarely use violence today. They are content with full control of the media and the dissemination of fake news and thus are re-elected solemnly.
In short, making and spreading misleading news is now as complex and effective as needing a weapon to deal with it, although revealing the deception would not affect domestic and foreign gaming fans. We currently have two weapons,
One is investigative journalism but it requires financial and organizational resources to which a financier will hardly pay for the sake of truth.
The second weapon has its limits. This control each one can not fight the propaganda which is a wider communication system and includes symbols, and other cultural elements. Disturbed by the phenomenon of misleading news The European Commission published in 2018 the action plan against misinformation and in 2019 it was established by the European Digital Observatory.
