United States

Facebook's war on 'fake news' has skeptics asking: Who decides? … Facebook’s big crackdown on so-called “fake news” has one glaring fault, according to critics: Who gets to say what’s real and what’s not? – Fox News

Facebook, which is rapidly becoming the largest “news” agency in the world, intends to use a selected group of supposedly non-government facilities to determine what’s fake or not when it comes to news dissemination on its vast ‘Net site.

The Obama administration has been threatening a retaliatory strike on Russia for the US election hacking and leaking scandal that gave Donald Trump the White House instead of establishment favourite Hillary Clinton. US President Barack Obama is planning a massive cyberattack against the Russian Federation before leaving office that could put the United States and Russia in a state of virtual war.

The man who is undisputedly ground zero of the "Russian hacking campaign", former Clinton campaign chairman, John Podesta, whose emails provided an in-depth glimpse into the illict practices of the top echelon of US politics, and certainly the Clinton campaign itself, confirmed accusations of "pay-to-play" lobbed against the Clinton Family Foundation, and exposed the incestuous relationship between the Clinton dynasty and the "free press", which was revealed to be at times nothing more than the Public Relations arm of the Clinton campaign, spoke on NBC's Meet The Press this morning

With Facebook having announced last week the launch of measure to flag and eliminate fake news from appearing on its website, Germany does not think the process is fast enough, and according to Germany's Justice Minister Heiko Maas, German judges and state prosecutors need to crack down straight away on fake news disseminated through social media platforms such as Facebook. Interviewed by Bild am Sontag, Maas, a Social Democrat in conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition, has repeatedly warned the U.S.

In a fiery press conference on Friday, shortly before departing for his last Hawaiian vacation, president Obama accused the press of being responsible for Hillary Clinton's loss, slammed "domestic propagandists" who he said were responsible for the risk of "fake news" and assisting foreign counter-US propaganda, but more importantly Obama vowed to “send a clear message to Russia” in retaliation for its election hacking - of which the CIA still has to demonstrate evidence - as both a punishment and a deterrent.