The expression ‘fake news’ began to be widely used under the legislation of Donald Trump and it gave rise to what is known as the ‘post-truth’ era where what is sought for is not the reporting of objective facts but lies or half-truths disguised as real facts that appeal to the emotion rather than to reason.

People believe this news not because it is true but because it seems right.

In our tiny Malta, we have had our fair share of fake news. But the latest attacks on individuals such as Manuel Delia and news sites or blogs such as Truth be Told, Newsbook, Lovin’ Malta, Net News and the Repubblika website have taken this deceit to alarming proportions.

In all these cases, their online pages have been copied exactly to look like the real thing, only what is put into them is completely false and distorted.

Interestingly, these fake news are mainly in English and some really make an effort to copy the authors’ style in order to lure readers into believing that what they are reading is either true or written by a poisoned mind. 

This results, as our great author Immanuel Mifsud has pointed out, in mass confusion which he labels ‘dizziness’ (sturdament) because people are so confused by the contradictory news they do not know what to believe.

Meanwhile, the seeds of doubt have been planted in their minds, so they will look sceptically at the writers who are really trying to write truthfully and question what they say, using the wrong premises that have been fed to them.

Even more alarmingly, false WhatsApp messages have appeared between Delia and Jason Azzopardi, who, together with Therese Comodini Cachia, have been fighting the Maltese mafia that has been spinning lies and deceit ever since the Panama Papers scandal. Why these sudden attacks?

It is important to place all this against the background of what is going on in Malta and what civil society organisations and journalists have been pointing to.

One of the richest men in Malta, Yorgen Fenech, with money beyond the dreams of any normal man in the street, has been arraigned for a series of crimes that include the murder of a journalist, money laundering and even shopping for an arsenal of weaponry on the dark web.

A dizzying vortex of lies to confuse and make the truth seem questionable

This same person has managed to prove that money can buy quite a lot of people across the social spectrum, in particular, other businessmen, politicians from different sides of the political spectrum and people connected to them, senior officials, lawyers who unscrupulously switch sides for money, delinquents, taxi drivers and more.

Money also makes many friends, not the kind an honest person would like to have but,  still, ones that may be useful when the need arises. The extents to which some of these friends have gone in order to express their friendship betrays the respect they are supposed to have towards their own position of responsibility and/or their electorate.

The revelations that have emerged from the public inquiry, as well as from the courts, were effectively leading people who use their brains to ask questions about the web of relations linking all these people and what sort of compromises and illegalities it has led to.

They began to cast long grey shadows on certain people who play, or have played, prominent roles in society.

They made Joseph Muscat re-emerge from his retreat, to try, in his inimitable arrogant way, to cast shadows on other people in order to remove attention from himself and the ones he protects (or those who protect him).

All this was happening following Malta’s greylisting and against the background of a looming election that will decide the fate of this country before the fate of Fenech himself is decided. Labour constantly reminds us it will not lose. It cannot afford to lose.

This spate of false blogs and websites is more insidious than the threats of SLAPP suits that Times of Malta, Delia and Daphne Caruana Galizia have had to face.

This type of fake news is much closer to the ordinary readers who only get their news from Facebook, through which huge quantities of unverified information are sent out. It captures the attention of those do not go beyond it to question the truth of what they are reading or its real provenance.

Thanks to this, fake news has the power not only to mislead readers and manipulate people’s thinking but to be used in favour of those exploiting these means to create general doubt about the truth of their evil doings.

Information that is reliable, accurate and independent is made vulnerable to external forces aiming to distort it and to lead readers to ask the wrong questions about the wrong people. An effective strategy of a dizzying vortex of lies to confuse and make the truth seem questionable and to make those clearly fighting for justice seem to be rogues rather than victims of these lies.

The evil forces at work in this latest distortion of the truth will not be left to do their harm unchallenged. Civil society is here to challenge them; it expects the police to expose them.

We shall not be put off by these bullies, despite the deafening silence of the government and state authorities. We need the support of ordinary citizens to strive for clarity and fight confusion.

Join us in fighting this latest attack against our democratic values. Show your solidarity with journalists and activists today at 6.30pm in Valletta.  

Vicki Ann Cremona, member, Repubblika