FOR YEARS, FAKE NEWS ARE SPREADING ABOUT KIDNAPPING CHILDREN AND ILLEGAL ORGAN TRAFFICKING

For years, fake news are spreading about kidnapping children and illegal organ trafficking

Fake news about kidnapping children and illegal organ trafficking have been periodically spreading in the recent years. These news are recognized as being most often followed by stolen photos from other, mostly foreign media, or films that show abduction, violent pulling of children or adult characters who appear in these photos.

How fake texts are created and spread

The texts are created in the following way: They are called upon by posts from Facebook profiles (which can not be accessed during the attempt to check) or “citizens” who do not write their name and last name. The key words that this group of media uses when publishing the news are: panic, warnings, kidnapped, missing, self-organizing, which should lead the readers, the public, that there is a state of emergency with the number of missing persons, that institutions are not functioning and are unable to cope with this problem and that citizens should be self-organized. The same media either only partially or not at all transmit the denials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and other relevant institutions.

The F2N2 team conducted a more extensive research of this type of news that lead us to the conclusion that the reason is probably the organized media spreading, rather than simply transmitting the same news. Planned manipulation with the public will be presented starting with this article, entitled: The Citizens are in Panic: There are currently 64 people missing in Macedonia.

The tendency of the reporting in this text is that it actually gives the exact number of missing persons, but it does not mention that this is not the number of persons that have disappeared this period, but that it is the total number of missing persons from any time. In these 64 there are also persons who are missing 27 years ago, for example, or 12 years ago, etc. The data can be seen here.

Additionally, the Ministry of Internal Affairs reported at a press conference that the number of missing persons is in no way differs from the figures from the previous 5-6 years, and even that in 2014 there were almost twice more missing persons reported. On this press conference, the Minister of Internal Affairs denied also the allegations on one of the sites that claims that, besides the kidnapping, there was also organs trafficking and that the police was involved in that.

The F2N2 team could not find these claims anywhere, and when trying to contact the editor, it couldn’t find any phone or contact information on the site, nor a responsible company or individual. More details about this case can be found here.

The scheme of spreading these false news

Some of the media publish the fake news and then it spreads in an organized way on social networks and similar sites. Although it is about new fictional news, however, our team checked in more detail and went several years earlier to find this news published in September 2016. Most of the texts are unsigned and the track of the editorial board behind the site or article cannot even be entered in.

The fake news then is taken over by profiles of social networks, and spread to Facebook groups, most of them with an Orthodox or ethnic Christian sign, such as “Orthodox News and Travel”, Macedonian Woman, Byzantine singing, Bigorski Monastery, Mission, Life is a fight and so on.

But the fake information is spreading further. Downloaded from the Macedonian language portals, they were published on some Albanian language portals and on their facebook pages.

This type of news usually ends with a conclusion that doesn’t substantiate with anything that these kidnappings are part of a developed network of illegal trafficking with human organs, pointing the Balkans as the focus of this kind of crime.

The purpose of these media

The purpose of the media that urges citizens to “self-organize”, ignoring the official reactions and announcements of the institutions, the police, is sowing fear on social networks, spreading panic among the citizens and infecting the audience with distrust of the institutions, especially those who care about public security and order.

A part of the citizens, however, with an honest intention, without checking the source, the date of the announcement, or reading the news completely, guided only by the title, spread these false news on their profiles in order to help. Therefore, the F2N2 editorial decided in this text not to publish the private profiles of the people who shared these fake news, but only the groups that are public, which we mentioned above.