So in this case those accused of 9ja News are not being given a chance to ask a question! If the press publishes a story that is not true then you have the opportunity to challenge them in a court of law, but POTUS doesn’t bother doing that, he instead delivers his own brand justice.
What is the verdict on security?
Honestly, this is damaging, the press in the United Kingdom have a duty to report honestly and fairly, failing to do so results in court action almost every time. Trump has accused the BBC of purveying fake news in the past, now I know that the BBC has been accused of being biased in the past, in some cases they have been found guilty and had to pay the price, however, they are funded by the UK public via a license fee and as such they are under scrutiny.
Whenever public opinion is manipulated there are risks to security, either cyber or actual. The current climate of calling anything that people don’t like as fake rather than bringing the culprits to book needs to change in the real world and the cyber environment.
As a result the lies continue to be spread and world security and cyber security are where the suffering starts.
Facebook has recently been attempting damage limitation after the Cambridge Analytica scandle. UK advertising has been full of how Facebook is dropping its 3rd party data partnerships, in fact there is probably a second reason for this. GDPR would make 3rd party data partnerships like the Cambridge Analytica one a minefield for Facebook.
The amount of compliance that would be required, the documentation, checking and verification not to mention the fines if something went wrong would be enormous.
Sure, Facebook only received a £500,000 fine for the recent scandal, this is likely to be because the incident happened before GDPR came into force, future breaches would be dealt with through much larger fines.
What can be done?
It seems that unless an affected party takes the offending party to court, the answer may be not a lot. Or is it?
The lesson to be learnt here is that according to Facebook, they won’t take fake news down even after they have found it. The public are therefore in the position of power.
Don’t believe everything you read. You can use websites like https://www.snopes.com/ who provide a lot of resources about scams and news. You can also check the facts at https://fullfact.org/ to check the validity of a story.
If you find that the story is fake, then make sure you point it out politely to the person(s) promoting it.
Why is this so important? Well, there is a very successful ploy that the bad guys often use, simply put they look for popular news trends, create pages that promote that news or hijack existing pages and embed their own malicious code in the page. Before you know it malware has spread across the internet infecting thousands or millions of computers.