Bangladesh’s fight against fake news

Arun Devnath, The Hindu
In its battle against the abuse of its network, Facebook shut down nine pages that imitated leading news outlets and six fake personal accounts in Bangladesh. It came on December 20, just 10 days before the nationwide election. Hours later, Twitter announced its decision to take down 15 accounts for “engaging in coordinated platform manipulation”. Both social networks pointed fingers at state-sponsored actors.
In a statement, Facebook said it began its investigation partly based on a tip from Graphika, a threat intelligence company that it works with.
“We discovered that these pages were designed to look like independent news outlets and posted pro-government and anti-Opposition content. Our investigation indicates that this activity is linked to individuals associated with the Bangladesh government,” Nathaniel Gleicher, head of Facebook’s cybersecurity policy, said in a statement.
One false post reported that Khaleda Zia, chief of the Opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party, sacked party secretary-general Mirza Fakhrul Islam. The report also falsely said Ms. Zia, the jailed former Prime Minister, had ordered the expulsion in a message recorded on a mobile phone from prison and later circulated by a spokesman for the party. A webpage, bdsnews24, which published the false story, tops Facebook’s list of rogues and bears a close resemblance to bdnews24.com, with just an extra letter in the URL and the logo.
“For more than 12 years now, we have been suffering; it is common knowledge that even major news publishers commit the crime and we lose revenue. When a complaint about a cloned news site doesn’t get any response from copyright enforcers, it’s a frustrating scenario,” said Toufique Imrose Khalidi, editor-in-chief of bdnews24.com.
The news site had written to the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission, the Copyright Office and other relevant law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, seeking steps to block fake news websites.
The threat of fake news and manipulation is far greater than the discovery of 30 accounts and pages on the two social networks. “What Facebook has done recently is just a fraction of what needs to be done. There’s a clear lack of commitment and accountability,” Mr. Khalidi said. Another page taken down by Facebook cloned BBC’s Bangla news service.
Facebook said that about 11,900 people followed at least one of these blocked pages. The probe discovered that about $800 was spent in ads on Facebook, with the first ad running in July 2017 and the last in November this year. “Weak regulatory infrastructure and poor enforcement of laws make it easy in Bangladesh (to run fake news sites),” Mr. Khalidi said.
For its part, the government is fighting its own battle against fake news. A rumour identification and prevention cell, set up in September, spotted a report that falsely claimed that the nation’s Bangabandhu satellite had vanished. The cell was formed to prevent “false online propaganda” from spreading prior to the election. In November, a Bangladeshi student studying in South Korea was arrested for his involvement in creating 22 fake news sites, spreading anti-government propaganda. Police said the student is a member of Islami Chhatra Shibir, the student wing of Jamaat-e-Islami, a key ally of Ms. Zia’s party.
As Bangladesh is sharply divided along political lines, social media is rife with propaganda spread by those on both sides of the fence. Mr. Khalidi summed it up: “These days, political rivals have taken it to a different level.”