The huge increase in the popularity of social networks such as Facebook in the last decade, besides the many benefits, brought a lot of headaches in the area of politics. Facebook, in design, does not offer its own content, but it offers space for both physical and legal entities to share their content. This enabled the rapid growth of new media, internet portals, but also to propaganda pages that, although are not identified as media, perform similar activities and propaganda using exceptionally the virtual space provided by Facebook. At first, this problem was not taken seriously, since the main goal of the most fake news “factories” was clickbait, with the final goal being a financial benefit from various advertisers.
However, the political propaganda sectors quickly adapted to the new times and began to take advantage of the unregulated space of social networks for pushing their own propaganda and their own narratives. The technique over time was perfected to the point where it began to be used for spreading national state propaganda for the benefits of the international politics.
Facebook itself, but also the countries that have been affected by the false news, have underestimated this problem until 2016, when the red light of the alarm went off in full flesh.
Namely, in June 2016, the majority of Britons, contrary to all expectations and polls, voted BREXIT, creating waves that are present in the EU to date. Many serious analyzes (here and here) and statements from British institutions accuse Russia of influencing the results of the BREXIT Referendum through the false news.
Something similar happened a few months later with the US presidential election. In 2017, USA opened an official investigation about Russia’s involvement in the election of the US president through its fake news infrastructure. During that period, North Macedonia was on the front page of the most prestigious foreign media, due to the famous “factory” for false news from Veles.
By the end of May this year, the BBC published a survey also for the attempt of influencing the European Parliament elections through a similar fake news strategy.
All of these serious consequences caused Facebook not to sit with the arms crossed and to start a special fight against this phenomenon. But in his latest statements, Facebook director Mark Zuckerberg says that his company can not do it alone, and that governments need to be seriously involved in the fight against false news.
Republic of North Macedonia is not immune to this propaganda also, so that’s why services, such as F2N2, Criting, Fact File Testing exist, which independently check the facts of the content offered to Macedonian readers and through their work try to offer an objective disclosure of the false news that contaminate the virtual space in the country.
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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