BRUSSELS, March 26. /TASS/. The Western crusade to fight fake news is actually a large-scale and systematic campaign to mislead public opinion. This is part of the struggle for control of the global information space, ex-lawmaker of the European parliament, Italian expert and journalist Julietto Kieza told TASS on Tuesday.
The Italian expert thus commented on the preparations for the elections to the European parliament, which are being made for the first time amid a powerful general European campaign for clearing the information space from the so-called fake news.
"I would say like this: the entire campaign for fighting misinformation is, in turn, misinformation from the beginning to the end. What is actually fake news? This is what the leading Western media outlets are producing themselves on a massive scale. This operation is underway not at the European but at the world level and the United States runs this orchestra," Kieza said.
"A group of American Internet monsters is at the center of this story: Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube. These companies are devising the world information space, forming the world outlook of their users who number already over 2 billion people in the Facebook alone. However, this project has turned out to be in a difficult situation: this system has transpired to be not effective enough with regard to the control of the content and, as a result, numerous opponents of the American elite throughout the world, including in the United States itself and in EU states, have started to use it actively and successfully," the expert noted.
"What is actually the current campaign for fighting misinformation? This is an attempt to use administrative institutions, for example, in the European Union, these are the European Commission and the European Parliament, to create new tight rules of the control of information in the Internet, cut off and block the unsuitable content. It was earlier presumed that it would be possible to fulfil this task covertly at the technical level. When the failure became obvious, legal mechanisms were launched, state and supra-state institutes were put into operation, from which leading Internet companies will now be receiving direct and binding administrative instructions on the issues of spreading and sifting through information," Kieza went on to say.
"We can see everywhere that the system of the Western control of information in its current form is faltering. Let me give two examples: in Europe, this is the British referendum on the Brexit and, in the United States, this is the election of Donald Trump as the US president. In both cases, all the leading media outlets and other players of the information space acted against but failed to format the public opinion in the required way and guarantee the necessary outcome," the Italian expert pointed out.
In the case with the Trump election, the local elite and directly officials responsible for the information policy in the US Democratic administration that had lost the elections tried to explain precisely the inability of the information system to program US electors for the required result by the thesis of the interference of Russian hackers. Here is the clear-cut logic: they tried to explain the inefficiency of the information system by the external information interference, the expert pointed out.
Integrated world and new wars
In the expert’s opinion, if this campaign crowns with success, this will just be the beginning of creating a really effective system of the control of the world information space, which "may allow the US to return its dominance in the world."
"We are at the dawn of creating 5G systems. This is not just a technical leap with the increase of the speed of the mobile Internet. This technology fully changes the entire ideology of the Internet," the expert pointed out.
Now the Internet is a network of computers, i.e. the system, to which electronic gadgets that are actually computers are connected: these are PCs, tablet computers, smartphones, and also some "smart" devices. The 5G system will allow creating practically any items and electric devices surrounding people - cars, TV sets, vacuum cleaners, all types of kitchen appliances, alarm and security systems and many other things - for their expected operation in the regime of their constant connection to the network, the expert said.
Apart from this, the systems connected to the network will be used in medical micro implants that will be increasingly available for correcting various human pathologies. The economy, be it bourses, banks or industry, will be even more integrated into the network. That is, Internet users can simply disconnect themselves from the Internet today whereas in 5-7 years an urban dweller will be unable to avoid the 5G Internet, the expert said.
"5G is a new world, which also offers with all its new prospects an unprecedented spectrum of possibilities for the control of the society fully integrated into the network. Precisely for this purpose, the United States is seeking today to secure an advantage in the control of 5G systems and technologies, trying to block the access of Chinese companies to it, by which, in particular, the attempts to persecute Huawei, including the arrests of the company’s managers, are motivated," the expert stressed.
Apart from all other things, the 5G technology creates a principally new measurement for conducting a war, the expert pointed out.
"Combat operations in the world integrated into the network will be conducted solely in a hybrid or cyberspace because it will open up actually unlimited possibilities of impact on the adversary, its economy, infrastructure, the armed forces and the population without the need to use kinetic weapons [based on the physical destruction of the enemy]," Kieza said.