Social media is one important medium of disbursing information in today's world. Information shared on these platforms greatly affects that country in a negative or positive way. One major duduk kasus today on social media is fake news. The US presidential election was thought to be influenced by fake news. Several civil unrests in countries like Turkey, India, Nigeria and other countries have been influenced by fake news. In a bid to tackle this, India enacted a law that punishes those spreading fake news on social media.
Following India's footstep, a Brazilian Senator has proposed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news on the internet ahead of the country's presidential elections.
According to the bill proposed by Senator Ciro Nogueira, spreading false news on the internet or operating hoax-spreading bots should be given jail sentence of up to three years.
"The creation of the new criminal type will contribute to repress and prevent the disclosures of fake news," Senator Nogueira stated in the proposed legislation.
However, other media sources such as radio, newspaper, TV are not mentioned extensively in the bill and so would attract lenient penalties with prison sentences ranging between six months to two years in case they disclose fake news.
The Bill is awaiting the designation of a rapporteur in the Brazilian Senate and is hoped to be voted before the campaigning for the presidential election starts in August this year.
Sometime last month, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) last month started working with internet giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook towards combating fake news in this year's presidential election.
Various social media platforms today has become a major source of easily getting information to the public.
Social media platforms help in the spread of information, ideas and best of all, we keep in touch with the people who matters most to us in our lives. There are so many positive things about social media that it might take me hours to put everything into writing.
Also Read: Hate Speech: Social media networks to face up to €50m fine in Germany
Amid the good things associated with social media, one major negative aspect of it is fake news. Fake news is stories or news created deliberately to deceive or misinform the readers.
Fake news is created for several reasons, the most common of which is for political reasons. This topic reminds me of Rober Mugabe former President of Zimbabwe who appointed a minister to curb the spread of fake news and hate speech on social media platforms in the country.
The former president appointed Mr Patrick Chinamasa, a former Finance minister as head of the new Cyber Security, Threat Detection, and Mitigation ministry. However, Mr Patrick's first task was to clamp down popularly used social media platforms in the country and get rid of or regulate the use of WhatsApp and Facebook. This is where the minister got the "minister for WhatsApp and Facebook" name among Zimbabweans.
News rules regulating the use of WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms in the country were made. One of such rules demanded that groups were to be registered and the direktur of the group to also have a government level clearance.
"Social media was abused to create a sense of panic, thereby creating some sort of destabilizing in the economy," Mr Patrick said.
Early Last year, an India magistrate court ruled that WhatsApp and other social media group admins were to report any fake posts or news that hurt religious sentiments to the police. Any admin who didn't take action would also be considered guilty and actions would be taken. Not long after the ruling, the Indian authorities arrested a WhatsApp group admin for not complying with the ruling.
Also Read: India threatens WhatsApp Group Admins over fake news
Malaysia too made a ruling against the distribution of fake news on social media platforms, threatening social media group admins with prosecution if they failed in stopping the distribution of fake news on their groups.
Last month, a Brazilian senator proposed a law that criminalizes the spread of fake news on the internet or other operating hoax-spreading bots. The bill proposed up to three years jail term for fake news authors.
Social media is one important medium of disbursing information in today's world. Information shared on these platforms greatly affects that country in a negative or positive way. One major duduk kasus today on social media is fake news. The US presidential election was thought to be influenced by fake news. Several civil unrests in countries like Turkey, India, Nigeria and other countries have been influenced by fake news. In a bid to tackle this, India enacted a law that punishes those spreading fake news on social media.
Following India's footstep, a Brazilian Senator has proposed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news on the internet ahead of the country's presidential elections.
According to the bill proposed by Senator Ciro Nogueira, spreading false news on the internet or operating hoax-spreading bots should be given jail sentence of up to three years.
"The creation of the new criminal type will contribute to repress and prevent the disclosures of fake news," Senator Nogueira stated in the proposed legislation.
However, other media sources such as radio, newspaper, TV are not mentioned extensively in the bill and so would attract lenient penalties with prison sentences ranging between six months to two years in case they disclose fake news.
The Bill is awaiting the designation of a rapporteur in the Brazilian Senate and is hoped to be voted before the campaigning for the presidential election starts in August this year.
Sometime last month, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) last month started working with internet giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook towards combating fake news in this year's presidential election.
Various social media platforms today has become a major source of easily getting information to the public.
Social media platforms help in the spread of information, ideas and best of all, we keep in touch with the people who matters most to us in our lives. There are so many positive things about social media that it might take me hours to put everything into writing.
Also Read: Hate Speech: Social media networks to face up to €50m fine in Germany
Amid the good things associated with social media, one major negative aspect of it is fake news. Fake news is stories or news created deliberately to deceive or misinform the readers.
Fake news is created for several reasons, the most common of which is for political reasons. This topic reminds me of Rober Mugabe former President of Zimbabwe who appointed a minister to curb the spread of fake news and hate speech on social media platforms in the country.
The former president appointed Mr Patrick Chinamasa, a former Finance minister as head of the new Cyber Security, Threat Detection, and Mitigation ministry. However, Mr Patrick's first task was to clamp down popularly used social media platforms in the country and get rid of or regulate the use of WhatsApp and Facebook. This is where the minister got the "minister for WhatsApp and Facebook" name among Zimbabweans.
News rules regulating the use of WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms in the country were made. One of such rules demanded that groups were to be registered and the direktur of the group to also have a government level clearance.
"Social media was abused to create a sense of panic, thereby creating some sort of destabilizing in the economy," Mr Patrick said.
Early Last year, an India magistrate court ruled that WhatsApp and other social media group admins were to report any fake posts or news that hurt religious sentiments to the police. Any admin who didn't take action would also be considered guilty and actions would be taken. Not long after the ruling, the Indian authorities arrested a WhatsApp group admin for not complying with the ruling.
Also Read: India threatens WhatsApp Group Admins over fake news
Malaysia too made a ruling against the distribution of fake news on social media platforms, threatening social media group admins with prosecution if they failed in stopping the distribution of fake news on their groups.
Last month, a Brazilian senator proposed a law that criminalizes the spread of fake news on the internet or other operating hoax-spreading bots. The bill proposed up to three years jail term for fake news authors.
Social media is one important medium of disbursing information in today's world. Information shared on these platforms greatly affects that country in a negative or positive way. One major duduk kasus today on social media is fake news. The US presidential election was thought to be influenced by fake news. Several civil unrests in countries like Turkey, India, Nigeria and other countries have been influenced by fake news. In a bid to tackle this, India enacted a law that punishes those spreading fake news on social media.
Following India's footstep, a Brazilian Senator has proposed a bill criminalizing the spread of fake news on the internet ahead of the country's presidential elections.
According to the bill proposed by Senator Ciro Nogueira, spreading false news on the internet or operating hoax-spreading bots should be given jail sentence of up to three years.
"The creation of the new criminal type will contribute to repress and prevent the disclosures of fake news," Senator Nogueira stated in the proposed legislation.
However, other media sources such as radio, newspaper, TV are not mentioned extensively in the bill and so would attract lenient penalties with prison sentences ranging between six months to two years in case they disclose fake news.
The Bill is awaiting the designation of a rapporteur in the Brazilian Senate and is hoped to be voted before the campaigning for the presidential election starts in August this year.
Sometime last month, Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) last month started working with internet giants Google, Twitter, and Facebook towards combating fake news in this year's presidential election.
Various social media platforms today has become a major source of easily getting information to the public.
Social media platforms help in the spread of information, ideas and best of all, we keep in touch with the people who matters most to us in our lives. There are so many positive things about social media that it might take me hours to put everything into writing.
Also Read: Hate Speech: Social media networks to face up to €50m fine in Germany
Amid the good things associated with social media, one major negative aspect of it is fake news. Fake news is stories or news created deliberately to deceive or misinform the readers.
Fake news is created for several reasons, the most common of which is for political reasons. This topic reminds me of Rober Mugabe former President of Zimbabwe who appointed a minister to curb the spread of fake news and hate speech on social media platforms in the country.
The former president appointed Mr Patrick Chinamasa, a former Finance minister as head of the new Cyber Security, Threat Detection, and Mitigation ministry. However, Mr Patrick's first task was to clamp down popularly used social media platforms in the country and get rid of or regulate the use of WhatsApp and Facebook. This is where the minister got the "minister for WhatsApp and Facebook" name among Zimbabweans.
News rules regulating the use of WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media platforms in the country were made. One of such rules demanded that groups were to be registered and the direktur of the group to also have a government level clearance.
"Social media was abused to create a sense of panic, thereby creating some sort of destabilizing in the economy," Mr Patrick said.
Early Last year, an India magistrate court ruled that WhatsApp and other social media group admins were to report any fake posts or news that hurt religious sentiments to the police. Any admin who didn't take action would also be considered guilty and actions would be taken. Not long after the ruling, the Indian authorities arrested a WhatsApp group admin for not complying with the ruling.
Also Read: India threatens WhatsApp Group Admins over fake news
Malaysia too made a ruling against the distribution of fake news on social media platforms, threatening social media group admins with prosecution if they failed in stopping the distribution of fake news on their groups.
Last month, a Brazilian senator proposed a law that criminalizes the spread of fake news on the internet or other operating hoax-spreading bots. The bill proposed up to three years jail term for fake news authors.
The spread of fake news and spam messages is one of the major problems social media networks are facing today.
Top social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. have become a major source for people to get news update, information and also share views and influence other people's decision on trending topics.
Also Read: You Can Now Lock Your WhatsApp With Face ID Or Touch ID
However, the spread of fake news is one of the major problems that never seem to fade away on social media networks. Fake news has credit for so many deaths and destruction arising from several religious crises and political violence around the world today.
Messaging service WhatApp, which recently toppled its parent company Facebook to become the world most popular social network has introduced several features that combats the spread of fake news and spam messages.
Last month, we saw WhatsApp introduce a change that limit users from forwarding unlimited messages to just five messages.
Still on the spread of fake news and spam messages, WhatsApp said that it bans about 2 million problematic accounts on its platform each month to combat the spread of fake news and spam messages.
According to Venturebeats, Matt Jones, a software engineer at WhatsApp said the company uses a machine learning system from the company's previous experience with troublesome accounts to dictate accounts that will be problematic.
In fact so sophisticated is this machine that it has been able to ban about "20% of bad accounts at the time of registration."
"As with any communications platform, sometimes people attempt to exploit our service," WhatsApp said. "Some may want to distribute click-bait links designed to capture personal information, while others want to promote an idea. Regardless of the intent, automated and bulk messaging violates our terms of service, and one of our priorities is to prevent and stop this kind of abuse."
Fake news has become a menace that we face every. Hardly a day goes by without us witnessing an online miscreant(s) trying to trick unsuspecting users with all sort of malicious ploy.
Mr. Bean star Rowan Atkinson is the latest victim of a death hoax. The fake news of Mr. Bean's death which began to spread on social media networks on Wednesday, 18 July, 2018 comes with a headlines that reads:
"FOX BREAKING NEWS: 'Mr. BEAN (Rowan Atkinson)' died at 62 After Crashing his Car on Attempt perfecting a Stun - Today July, 2017".
According to news reports, clicking on the video link would lead users to an error page claiming that the computer is in a lockdown. The user will be told to contact a support number to unlock the system.
However, the support number is a fake number meant to extract personal data such as credit card details, bank account information and other personal data of the victim.
As it is a common demam isu on social media network, fans began to troop in, bombarding their condolence messages on different social media platforms which even helped in fueling the scam. Such was it that the it became one of the trending topics on Google and other search engines.
Fake news has become a menace that we face every. Hardly a day goes by without us witnessing an online miscreant(s) trying to trick unsuspecting users with all sort of malicious ploy.
Mr. Bean star Rowan Atkinson is the latest victim of a death hoax. The fake news of Mr. Bean's death which began to spread on social media networks on Wednesday, 18 July, 2018 comes with a headlines that reads:
"FOX BREAKING NEWS: 'Mr. BEAN (Rowan Atkinson)' died at 62 After Crashing his Car on Attempt perfecting a Stun - Today July, 2017".
According to news reports, clicking on the video link would lead users to an error page claiming that the computer is in a lockdown. The user will be told to contact a support number to unlock the system.
However, the support number is a fake number meant to extract personal data such as credit card details, bank account information and other personal data of the victim.
As it is a common demam isu on social media network, fans began to troop in, bombarding their condolence messages on different social media platforms which even helped in fueling the scam. Such was it that the it became one of the trending topics on Google and other search engines.
The spread of fake news and misinformation is one of the major downside of social media. Social has is one of the major source of circulating information around the world, and thus, some abuse that privilege to use it for the dissemination of false news. One country in which the spread of false news is rampant is India.
Whatsapp in an effort to tackle the spread of false news and phishing links on its platform, is testing a feature called "Suspicious Link Indicator" in Android beta version 2.18.221. This new feature which is mean't to limit the amount of forwarded messages per users, has a FAQ page by WhatsApp detailing how it works.
Also Read: Indian WhatsApp group admin arrested for posting fake content
According to WABetainfo, this new update is expected to warn users of any link before they open it. Users will be alerted by WhatsApp for the second time if the link has a suspicious character. Two options will be provided to the user which are; Open Link and Go back. The suspicious character will be high lighted in the dialogue box when the user try to open the link.
India which is the second-most populous country in the world has witnessed a rise in violence and killings due to the spread of false news and rumours from social media networks (most especially WhatsApp). WhatsApp said Indians forward more messages and videos more than any other market in the world
Sometime last week, WhatsApp said that it was planning to limit message forwarding capabilities for Indian users. The Facebook owned social media platform plans to lower the rate of forwarded messages to 5 and also the removal of quick shortcut from media messages..
For now, the Suspicious Link Detection feature isn't available on iOS and Windows phones but will be rolled out in future updates on those platforms.
The spread of fake news and misinformation is one of the major downside of social media. Social has is one of the major source of circulating information around the world, and thus, some abuse that privilege to use it for the dissemination of false news. One country in which the spread of false news is rampant is India.
Whatsapp in an effort to tackle the spread of false news and phishing links on its platform, is testing a feature called "Suspicious Link Indicator" in Android beta version 2.18.221. This new feature which is mean't to limit the amount of forwarded messages per users, has a FAQ page by WhatsApp detailing how it works.
Also Read: Indian WhatsApp group admin arrested for posting fake content
According to WABetainfo, this new update is expected to warn users of any link before they open it. Users will be alerted by WhatsApp for the second time if the link has a suspicious character. Two options will be provided to the user which are; Open Link and Go back. The suspicious character will be high lighted in the dialogue box when the user try to open the link.
India which is the second-most populous country in the world has witnessed a rise in violence and killings due to the spread of false news and rumours from social media networks (most especially WhatsApp). WhatsApp said Indians forward more messages and videos more than any other market in the world
Sometime last week, WhatsApp said that it was planning to limit message forwarding capabilities for Indian users. The Facebook owned social media platform plans to lower the rate of forwarded messages to 5 and also the removal of quick shortcut from media messages..
For now, the Suspicious Link Detection feature isn't available on iOS and Windows phones but will be rolled out in future updates on those platforms.
Social media is one of the easiest platform of disseminating information these days. However, those information shared on these social media networks can greatly affect a country either in a positive or negative way.
Unfortunately, social media has been one of the major keys used in spreading violence around world. From religious violence in India to political instability in Brazil and civil unrest in countries like Turkey and Cameroon, social media has played a major part in influencing these violence. Now two men has suffered an unfortunate fate due to fake news. Also Read: WhatsApp Is Testing A New Feature To Curb The Spread Of Fake News And Phishing Links Two men in San Vicente Boqueron, Mexico, have met their untimely death when they were wrongly accused of kidnapping children and selling off their body parts amid a WhatsApp rumour of a kidnap syndicate which specialized in selling children's body parts. The whole issue began when a rumour began to spread on WhatsApp, talking of a "plague of child kidnappers" which had entered the country and targeted children for the purpose of trafficking their organ. The rumour went on to say that some children aged 4, 8 and 14, had been found dead with their internal organs ripped out.
Also Read: Brazil Set To Enact Jail Term For Fake News Authors
Heres the message that was shared on the social messaging app:
"Please everyone be alert because a plague of kidnappers has entered the country. It appears that these criminals are involved in organ trafficking...
"In the past few days, children aged four, eight and 14 have disappeared and some of these kids have been found dead with signs that their internal organs were removed. Their abdomens had been cut open and were empty."
According to Linda Ikeji's blog, Ricardo Flores, a 21-year-old law student, and his uncle Alberto Flores, a 43-year-old farmer, were accused by locals of disturbing the peace after they were spotted near an elementary school.
The blog explained that the two were buying construction supplies for a water well when the locals labeled those the accusation on them which led the police to arrest them.
However, their arrest fueled the spread of the rumour which had been spreading on WhatsApp. In anger, the locals rallied up and stormed the police station, while demanding for the arrested men.
The police at the station tried to placate the mob as they assured them that the men had not abducted any children. However, the mob remained unconvinced. Over powered the police men, broke into the cell and then dragged the men out.
The mob beat the men, and then poured petrol on them and then set them ablaze.
Also Read: Beware! Fake News Spreading Mr. Bean's Death Will Only Steal Your Data
The lynching of these men was live streamed on Facebook, and Ricardo's mother Guadalupe who had been alerted of the event pleaded with the crowd, posting a comment on the live stream telling them that the two were innocent.
"Please don't hurt them, don't kill them, they're not child kidnappers," she said.
Despite her plea, the crowd went ahead and burned the men alive as the mother watched in horror. The crowd numbering about 150 in number cheered and applauded the sick act.
The State Attorney General of Puebla state has said the killings of the two men was due to false rumours, and the case is being treated murder.
So far, state authorities say about five people have been arrested and charged with the killings, while four others have been charged with carrying out the murder. To curb the spread of fake news, WhatsApp introduced the preview feature in its beta version to make users have a glimpse of what they are about to share, giving them that moment to retract their decision to forward a message if the content wasn't ok.
