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Expert: Fake newspaper sites

Published: 30 July 2019

Two websites claiming to be the pages for newspapers located in Quebec are the latest in a series of fake sites.  The sites have extensive mastheads with staff titles, pictures and names.  Stories posted on this site are translations or rewrites of original stories posted by other media outlets.  These sites are earning revenue with little effort through Google AdSense.  CBC

Ignacio Cofone, Faculty of Law, McGill University

"This is an example a legal problem that, while unrelated to privacy interests, privacy law can solve. Because they published inaccurate information about staff, the websites breached Canadian privacy law, and judges can apply this law extra territorially easier than they can apply the consumer protection laws involved." - Ignacio Cofone

Ignacio Cofone is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Law, where he teaches Privacy Law, Business Associations, and Artificial Intelligence Law. His work addresses how the law should adapt to technology, with a focus on privacy and algorithmic decision-making.

ignacio.cofone [at] mcgill.ca  (English, Spanish)

 

Kimiz Dalkir, School of Information Studies, McGill University

"My work in this area is a comprehensive approach to detecting and preventing fake news, namely: policy + informed consumers + tech. We do need company policies (e.g. privacy) but also country legislation where there is a real consequence to intentionally spreading fake news and garnering profits from them. In addition, we need users to be more digitally literate to quickly assess the legitimacy of any given website (we have refined a very effective approach to this and the article alludes to some of these aspects such as doing an image search on the photo). Last but not least, there are a number of technological tools that can quickly identify misinformation (e.g. detection of speed and pattern of sharing of the content) that can help." - Kimiz Dalkir

Kimiz Dalkir is the Director and Associate Professor at the School of Information Studies.  Her work focuses on information and knowledge management as well as Knowledge sharing through human, social and technological enablers.

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