Canada’s fake news to be cracked by Digital information platforms innovative tools

The occurrence of false online information has become a major concern both for U.S. and Canada.

The phenomenon of false news being disseminated online became a major storyline in the U.S. presidential campaign during November election of Donald Trump.

Canada’s Conservative leadership candidate Kellie Leitch’s campaign manager, Nick Kouvalis, had admitted posting false information about the Trudeau government had supposedly given to international aid organizations in the last year, including $351 million for the designated terrorist group Hamas. He later admitted the information was false, thestar.com news reports said.

Google and Facebook who have been testing online tools in the U.S. and the U.K. aimed at helping users identify credible information posted on their web portals say they expected to provide similar tools to Canadian users soon.

Google has incorporated a “fact-check” tag into some news pages to help readers find fact-checked content in large stories and added that they actively working to bring this feature to Canada in the near future.

Facebook said it was still in the early stages of testing, tweaking and rolling out tools to combat fake news.

“It is still early days, but we’re looking forward to learning and continuing to roll this out more broadly soon,” said Facebook spokesman Alex Kucharski, National Post reports said.

Heritage Minister Melanie Joly said she wanted to speak with social network and media managers to see what the government can do to ensure Canadians are viewing reliable information when they search the Internet.

Joly’s press secretary Pierre-Olivier Herbert said that they want to engage with digital platforms on the matter.

Over several months, the committee repeatedly heard from witnesses who raised the issue, said committee chair Hedy Fry.

During the U.S. presidential election campaign, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton pointed out that false news on the Internet had become a threat to human life.

She was talking about “Pizzagate,” a phoney election story that prompted a North Carolina man to open fire inside a pizza restaurant in Washington, D.C.

Fry noted that there were no easy ways of ensuring Canadians get verifiable facts without impacting freedom of the press.

The committee is expected to report its findings to the government in the spring.

(Reporting by Asha Bajaj, Image of Heritage Minister Melanie Joly: Wikipedia)