British Government Trolls

“Cyber troop teams” have been found to be charged with producing substantive content for the purposes of spreading political messages. This is more than simple Twitter or Facebook updates and responses, but includes blog articles, YouTube vlogs and videos, “fake news,” and memes that promote the government’s agenda. In Britain the government has been shown to have been creating “persuasive messages” under a whole host of false personas and aliases in psy-ops framed as “anti-radicalisation” campaigns.

What is the News?

As we have become increasingly more aware of fake news and how it functions we have also come to recognise that more trustworthy news media sites – newspapers and news channels – have been, to quite some considerable degree, producing what amounts to fake news for a long time. Admittedly this is not fake news insofar as the content is not a simple fabrication, but the emphasis and the spin that many have been putting on the facts, often to political ends, certainly places them well within any acceptable definition of fake news.