The "Democratic" PD daily has drawn up the first report on "fake news", before the political campaign for the upcoming elections is heated. The result is nothing short of confusing, where friends and adversaries often get confused with information and misleading scoops. The links with foreign networks and known populist propaganda and disinformation channels are not lacking. In this climate of confusion it is a common goal of political forces to adopt transparent methods.
To begin with, Di Maio could distance himself from the unofficial and less transparent channels that support his movement as the Democratic Party did towards a group of supporters who had used aggressive and disgraceful tones to attack our opponents, even if they were not misinformed or defamatory.
Likewise, Matteo Salvini could explain why the official account of the Lega has been publicly linked to a site that is part of an international disinformation network, it is still being read.
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The 'hoax' of a 'secret' meeting between the secretary of the Pd Matteo Renzi and the founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg has spread online. It is, says Democratica, “a fake news born from a satirical page 'Generator of low quality gentist images' which has about 50k fans and which plays on the thread of verisimilitude. The video shows the images of a meeting between Renzi and Zukerberg that actually took place in August 2016 at Palazzo Chigi and transforms its contents making it pass as a meeting that took place this month in Renzi's 'villa' in Florence in which the two would have talked about how to censor free information on the Web.
The video is immediately taken up, certainly not humorously, from 3 unofficial pages of the M5S (Virus5Stelle, M5SNews, We want the 5 Star Movement to the Government). Two of these (Virus5Stelle and Vogliamo il Movimento 5 Stelle al Government), however, are managed by the same people: Daniele Ferrari and Adriano Valente. Ferrari is also the admin of M5SNews, while Virus5Stelle is the same page that published on November 22 the card on Riina's funeral where authoritative institutional and PD representatives appeared: David Sassoli, Maria Elena Boschi, Laura Boldrini and Francesco Verducci and that in reality he was referring to a completely different ceremony: the funeral of Emmanuel Chidi Namdi ”. "A strange interweaving of references - concludes Democratica - that exploits the good faith of those who do not know how to judge or the veracity of the contents, nor even know their 'satirical' origin".
We need to take positions against these distortions of reality that often influence public opinion, hiding behind satire. These positions would be significant actions that are ever desirable in an international scenario increasingly alerted by the possible consequences of attempts to influence public opinion, especially during election campaigns in various democratic countries.
Joe Biden spoke on this issue a few days ago, shadowing an intervention by a disinformation center based in Russia in order to influence the results of last year's Constitutional Referendum, and Michael Carpenter - former assistant deputy secretary of state for defense USA - which confirmed and strengthened the position of the former US vice president through other elements. It therefore seems a priority to keep our guard up; all the political forces of our country should work together to avert any danger of interference in the public debate and guarantee the utmost correctness and transparency of information also in view of the upcoming electoral campaign.