UK Religious Groups Step Up Fight Against COVID-19 Misinformation in WhatsApp
Sputnik International
https://sputniknews.com/uk/202103131082330134-uk-religious-groups-step-up-fight-against-covid-19-misinformation-in-whatsapp/
The COVID-19 conspiracy theories have been on the rise throughout the pandemic, spreading across the internet and claiming that coronavirus is a hoax, and declaring that vaccines are a method for implanting microchips in humans to control the population.
Faith groups in the UK are fighting COVID-19 misinformation on WhatsApp applying the same tactics as the groups sharing them.
The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) assistant secretary-general told Sky News that the past 12 months have been an information war.
“Some of the stuff that we re seeing going around definitely goes into the territory of deliberate misinformation,” Wajid Akhter said. WhatsApp is a very specific lawless wasteland of social media, he added.
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Sputnik International
Even in 1938, US media companies had stepped in to silence the hate speech of a public figure
Father Charles E Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathising Catholic priest with unfettered access to vast radio audiences, used to attack his enemies using falsehoods. Jan 19, 2021 · 11:30 pm Twitter, YouTube and Facebook have recently silenced false claims of Donald Trump and his supporters. | Olivier Douliery/AFP
In speeches filled with hatred and falsehoods, a public figure attacks his enemies and calls for marches on Washington. Then, after one particularly virulent address, private media companies close down his channels of communication, prompting consternation from his supporters and calls for a code of conduct to filter out violent rhetoric.
Online supporters of President Donald Trump are scattering to smaller and more secretive social media platforms. They're fleeing what they say is unfair treatment by Facebook, Twitter and other big tech firms.
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Taylor Owen is the director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill and the host of the podcast.
Last week, social-media companies held hands, plugged their noses and jumped together, suspending the President of the United States from their platforms and delivering, in effect, the de-platforming of Donald Trump, which many thought was long overdue.
The kindest interpretation of this move is that the platforms, responding to the insurrection in Washington, acted swiftly and decisively to protect the country from further unrest, marking an evolution from their youthful and naive pretenses of neutrality to a more mature stature as responsible gatekeepers. More cynically, this moment could be seen as a deferential m