לשם שמים
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13 “A Step Backward for Same-Sex Couples in Chile,” Human Rights Watch, October 28, 2020, www.hrw.org/ news/2020/09/24/step-backward-same-sex-coupleschile. 14 “Global Democracy Has a Very Bad Year,” The Economist, The Economist Newspaper, February 2,
Spring 2021
2021, www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/02/02/ global-democracy-has-a-very-bad-year. 15 Richard Rose, “Referendum or Plebiscite: What’s the Difference?,” UK in a Changing Europe, October 8, 2020, ukandeu.ac.uk/referendum-or-plebiscite-whatsthe-difference/.
An Avalanche of “Fake News”: The Global Misinformation Crisis By Benjamin Zelnick
Over the past five years, Americans have been bombarded with the term “fake news,” particularly as a description of politically slanted media outlets. The 2016 presidential campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were marked by invective about the alleged spread of inaccurate or misleading information pertaining to the candidates. In fact, during the first weeks of November 2016, the number of Google searches for “fake news” in the United States increased by 1,100 percent; in American literature published in 2019, the term is referenced 35,000 percent more often than it was at the beginning of the millennium.1 Even though the public is searching for, writing about, and referencing fake news, few truly understand that “[f]ake news is not news you disagree with.”2 The most pressing threat to information integrity, rather than biased news, is deliberately circulated fake news: disinformation propagated by foreign actors as an efficient “weapon of mass distraction,” intended to destabilize societies and generate panic while remaining difficult to detect and rectify.3
campaigns on the Internet. According to a 2012 methodical analysis, three out of ten Barack Obama followers (totaling 5.3 million “people”) on Twitter show behavior consistent with that of bots: accounts that are controlled by computer programs rather than humans.4 These bots could be used not only to mislead Americans about Obama’s popularity, but also to unleash a barrage of false information to sway public opinion; each of these accounts can post up to 2,400 Tweets per day, adding up to a staggering daily tsunami of 12.7 billion lies.5 A recently declassified National Intelligence Council report confirms that foreign governments used such disinformation warfare in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2020 elections. The document, released on March 15, 2021, reveals that Russia was responsible for disseminating injurious, false claims about Hunter Biden to support the Trump campaign; then-President Trump’s lawyer was even used to magnify false claims and channel them to the American public. It additionally confirms that Iran attempted to encourage Biden’s election by forging Boys, a One of the potent and insidious methods threatening emails from the Proud 6 far-right white nationalist group. Both of these of foreign interference in American politics, disinformation attacks wielded a destabilizing especially during the recent 2020 elections, influence in the United States, causing was the coordination of disinformation
