MUHAMMAD HAMID

What is precisely fake news, and why has it been such a problem these days? Firstly, according to Cambridge dictionary, fake news is “false stories that appear to be news, spread on the internet or using other media, usually created to influence political views or as a joke”. In our current time, the rise of fake news has been detrimental to the people it targets and to the news organisations it is disguised under. “The resulting paranoia led people to accuse once-trusted sources, including The New York Times, of carrying fake news.

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Moreover, social media is a core part of the problem” (Aljazeera.com,2017). Also, with social media platforms, fake news has been much more comfortable to share around and has allowed anyone to create and disseminate information. Additionally, fake news also had an enormous impact on the 2016 US presidential elections whereby many fake stories published were taken seriously by news outlets such as ABC News and Fox News. This goes to show how easily manipulative fake news is. We will look at how the fake news phenomenon has caused problems around the world and whom it has affected.

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The first case of “fake news comes from Germany, where reports came out about a 13-year-old Russian-German girl known as Lisa F, who had been raped by refugees from the Middle East. The story received extensive coverage on Russian and German media who reported the allegations that she had been abducted on her way to school and gang-raped. The attack turned out to have been fabricated, as Berlin’s chief of police was quick to point out” (Connolly,2016). Additionally, “a TV interview given by a woman identified as the girl's aunt claimed that the girl was raped by numerous men over the 30 hours while she was missing. The report that sparked the protests was spread on social media and has so far been watched more than a million times on Facebook” (McGuinness,2016).

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Through this story, we can see that the Russian media was the main reason for the uproar and breakout of demonstrations against Muslims and refugees. Moreover, the community where the girl lived was mainly made up of Russian speaking migrants, where this story fuelled anti-migrant protests and sentiment. It even went as far as the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov accusing the German government of “covering up the case” which raised tensions between the two nations. Even when the case was cleared up, the fake news started which mentioned how she was gang-raped and beaten for 30 hours by southern looking asylum seekers. Overall, this story had a substantial adverse effect on the refugees who came to Germany as they faced attacks and experienced much hate towards them. This fake story also started a diplomatic row between Russia and Germany as the Kremlin tried to undermine the German response to the story and was intentionally trying to cause trouble.

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The second example of the fake news problem comes from the Middle East and from Qatar to be exact. Conspiracy theories and propaganda are not a new thing in the Middle East, as many governments in the region thrived on them to keep adversaries confused and citizens deceived. However, with the internet, fake news and disinformation have just gotten much more natural to spread and cause more harm. The now six-month-old standoff started when “the world took notice of the conflict in June, when Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) closed their borders with their tiny Gulf neighbour in response to comments attributed to the Qatari emir, Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani” (Salisbury,2017). The conflict started when hackers gained access to the website of Qatar News Agency (QNA) and posted false stories about Israel and Iran and linked fake comments praising the two countries to Qatar’s monarch, Sheikh Tamim.

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This led to chaos around the region and even when the Qatari government stated that this was a hack, the Arab countries still published negative news about Qatar and accused it of supporting terrorism and militant groups and being tolerant with Saudi Arabia’s rival Iran.

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 Also, the social media platform of QNA was hacked, and their twitter account was used to publish several tweets calling for the removal of the boycotting countries ambassadors. “By early June, the hashtag “قطع_العلاقات_مع_قطر#”—“Cut relations with Qatar”—was trending on Arabic-language Twitter”(Salisbury,2017). Furthermore, this, in turn, led to QNA shutting down its site and deleting the tweets. However, the damage had already been done, and by that time, the countries of Egypt, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and the UAE had cut all ties with Qatar and imposed economic and diplomatic sanctions against it.  

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As can be seen, the fake news that was posted on the website led to these problems which until now have not been resolved between the Gulf neighbours. Qatar has lost a great deal of money due to the sanctions imposed upon it by the blockading countries who are major exporters to the tiny Gulf state. Furthermore, the state airline, Qatar Airways, was banned from using the air borders of the four countries, which increased flight times and fuel consumption and led to higher ticket prices to recover costs. Nonetheless, it is believed that investigations that were carried out after the hack took place, showed that the attack on Qatari media was coordinated by its neighbours to damage its reputation and warn the US by showing them that “Qatar was a rogue state in cahoots with Iran and a supporter of terrorism. Initially, at least, Trump seems to have taken the bait, going as far as to suggest the blockade was his idea” (Salisbury,2017).

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In conclusion, fake news is a very problematic issue which seems to be getting worse day by day. The fake news phenomenon has caused irreversible damage to countries, people, and corporations, and with the help of social media, it has just become more comfortable to spread lies than the truth to millions of people online. Additionally, the fact that it can be state-backed makes the prospect much more damaging and dangerous to the receiving end as can be seen from my two examples. “Unfortunately, we live in a time where the level of analysis that is done with the data is disregarded, not because it is filled with fake news, but because it conflicts with deeply held false conclusions. Such conclusions cause us to make extremely poor pronouncements about a wide range of public policy issues. Until we are willing to fess up to our distorted false conclusions, all the true news in the world might as well be fake” (Patrick, 2017).