The flange of baboons
Last month, a teenager from the Cote-d'Or region of France was given a three month suspended sentence for publicly condoning a terrorist group after it was discovered that he had named his wi-fi network "Daesh21".
According to news reports in the region's newspaper, Le Bein Public, police were called when a passer by noticed an SSID of Daesh21 on his available networks list. When questioned, the unnamed teen told police that he did it as a joke, but was charged with public support for a terrorist organisation. Rather than accept a penalty of 100 hours community service, he opted for public trial, was found guilty, and received a suspended sentence and a criminal record. This is shocking, especially when you consider that Daesh is a derogatory term for the organisation which calls itself Islamic State, and not a term its supporters use.
Is there more to this story than meets the eye? Although it was reprinted in a number of newspapers, none of them have given details which can be verified easily, such as the name of the youth involved, or the location of the court which heard the case. This is probably an example of the fake news which circulates on the internet. When we hear an unlikely story from one person or one news source, we think it is a fake, but the more we hear it repeated from different sources, the more we believe it, and it becomes "a well known fact". And if the report also mirrors our personal beliefs, we suffer from confirmation bias, that we tend to give credibility to the things we want to be true.
Many of the fake news stories out there don't have such obvious question marks over them as this French story, and the forgers often go to great lengths to create fake back stories, embellish them with details to give an air of authority, and link to reposts of the fake story on other news sites.
Why would anyone go to such lengths to do this? One reason, of course, is the political agenda, that people use fake reports to discredit groups and stir up resentments. The bigger reason is probably commercial. Too many sites now present themselves as free news sites, funded by advertising, and positively encourage visitors to have their say and vent their prejudices on the news stories. It doesn't matter to those sites whether or not stories are fake. If it brings an audience to their sites, they make money out of it. For some of these sites, a single fake story which baits visitors into outraged arguments in the reader's comments section can bring in hundreds of dollars in advertising revenue.
In the last few days, and in the wake of accusations of social media and news reports influencing the US elections, both Google and Facebook have said they will clamp down on fake news stories appearing in their news feeds, and block sites which specialise in fake news from using their advertising networks. It should be mentioned though that Facebook made the same promise in January 2015, almost two years ago. Whatever Facebook and Google deliver this time, expect it to involve an element of crowd-source verification from the Facebook masses, which may come down to a public opinion poll to decide what is true and what is false.
Of course, fake news, spoofs, and parodies are not an invention of the internet. Here is a particularly fine piece from the 1980s which introduced a new collective noun into the English language.
24th November 2016
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.