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Simfin

online safety and digital citizenship specialist

 Tagged with fake news


08 August 2024

What connects a dad living in Lahore in Pakistan, an amateur hockey player from Nova Scotia - and a man named Kevin from Houston, Texas?

They’re all linked to Channel3Now - a website whose story giving a false name for the 17-year-old charged over the Southport attack was widely quoted in viral posts on X. Channel3Now also wrongly suggested the attacker was an asylum seeker who arrived in the UK by boat last year.

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01 August 2024

SWGFL's Synthetic Media Hub is designed to help you and your communities understand synthetic media and the various forms of support available to guide parents, young people, and your communities through the essential online safety and digital literacy skills needed to address, identify and respond to synthetic content.

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14 June 2024

"Vote Reform UK", "Only Reform UK has a real plan for Britain" - an account on X has posted these and similar messages every couple of hours since the start of the election campaign.

The account, GenZBloomer, is one of dozens across X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok which the BBC has identified as posting hundreds of repeated messages in comment threads expressing support for Reform UK.

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29 April 2024

On April 17, 2024, an account named StorieSpot posted images of a purported "cat's eye dazzle" flower in the Facebook group National Geographic Wild Planet. (The group, which has more than 1.4 million members, does not appear to have any official affiliation with National Geographic.) According to the pictures, the flower closely resembles a kitten's face.

The post read, "Amazing plants! Cat's eye dazzle." It received more than 80,000 likes and 36,000 shares, at the time of this writing.

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15 April 2024

For 14 hours over the weekend, Sydney university student Ben Cohen was one of the most reviled men on the internet after he was falsely accused of being the knifeman who went on a stabbing rampage in a Sydney shopping centre, killing six people.

The ABC has pieced together how anti-semitic and pro-Kremlin accounts turned Mr Cohen into an internet villain.

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28 March 2024

Louise Bruder never forgets a face. Which is not only a handy skill at parties, but it has helped her carve out a career.

She has the fabulous job title of super-recogniser, and her work at UK digital ID firm Yoti involves comparing the photos on an identity document with an uploaded selfie, to determine if it is the same person.

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