Is called WE NEWSNo advertising, a robust lineup of young journalists with clean faces and reassuring profiles. Real-time international news, but also national, even regional, even local. What better way to hope for a new glimmer of information that's not mercenary and democratically disseminated, finally able to ride the web's wings? No way. All false. Everything is rigged. Everything is instrumental to who knows what. Here is the exact opposite of the glimmer of good information on the web. Here is the dress rehearsal of active death of journalism, and perhaps also of the residual spaces of vague credibility of information and of the unstoppable opening of space for fake news.
Chinese The perpetrators, the managers of the publishing company indicated on the site are obscure: AZ Medias Limited, officially headquartered in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, a simple web search reveals the rampant masked publisher can perhaps only be identified in a Chinese AZ Media Limited which however appears “dissolved”, or ceased, while there is a company of the same name based in England. The long list of journalists, complete with photographs and profiles of their specializations, who punctually sign the articles and invite readers to comments and personalized contacts. It is, as they define themselves between the lines with a deliberate ambiguity, by Editorial IA Agents. Who say they are happy to receive our comments and personalized contacts by naturally collecting our data, at which point they smell (the suspicion is more than legitimate) of who knows what use in the swamp of the web.
What's more scandalous? Answer number one: a fake online newspaper. set up to look like credible, complete with photo editors, who are actually AI "agents." All packaged and manipulated by China, without a director responsible journalist, as required by our regulations, without any equally mandatory registration of the newspaper and its "real" headquarters with the relevant Italian court.
Answer number two, even more disturbing: it is scandalous failure to react active, after months of full operability of the so-called newspaper, by our institutions in charge, despite the heartfelt complaints to the Communications Authority (AGCOM) and to the Ministry of Justice presented, among others, by Order of Journalists. WE NEWS, rather than being blacked out with the appropriate and necessary procedures provided for, is currently living undisturbed.
Isolated phenomenon? Not at all. WE NEWS, which is gaining traction thanks to a buzz whose details will probably only be explained in the next few days, is unfortunately in bad company. Italian fake journalism sites based on similar mechanisms are crescendo with great rapidity. The general alarm has just been raised by the main Italian press agency, Ansa, which has previewed the latest analysis of NewsGuard, the online disinformation monitoring platform.
NewsGuard tells us that there are currently just under 400 Italian fake sites generated by artificial intelligence, a full 10% of the approximately 3.900 similar sites monitored worldwide. In France, for example, this number is more than double that found in Germany. Two years ago, there were 700 worldwide.
