Half of the battle against disinformation campaigns is educating people about how they work. And that's why the Finnish public broadcasting company Yle—Finland's equivalent of the BBC—has created a game called Troll Factory. The game, which recently won the European Journalism Centre and Google News Initiative's Global Youth and News Media Prize for promoting media literacy, puts the player in the role of a disinformation operative working for an Internet Research Agency-like organization with an anti-immigrant agenda.

The gamification of education on disinformation campaigns has been shown to help build up a resistance to fake news in the past. The University of Cambridge conducted a study in 2018 using a browser game called "Bad News" and found that completing the 15-minute game increased "psychological resistance" to fake news on social media, reducing the perceived credibility of fake news headlines by an average of 21 percent across 15,000 participants.

Troll Factory takes Bad News' approach a step further by using real samples of memes, conspiracy theories, and fake news articles used in such campaigns that infect social media and heighten the polarization of public discourse around the world—and in the US and Western Europe in particular. With the increasing reliance on social media for news, Yle's interactive team sought to create more awareness of how weaponized social media has become and more understanding among social media users of how they could be drawn into unintentionally spreading false information.
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The result can be somewhat eye-opening for those who haven't tracked disinformation campaigns. "People have described Troll Factory experience to be 'scary awful' but informative and enlightening," Koponen said, "something that's needed in order to illustrate the reality, motives, intentions and potential effects, of different forms of information operations."

EU nations can force Facebook to remove content worldwide, court rules
The ruling could let EU nations override other countries' own laws, critics say.

The ruling (PDF) stems from a case that began in Austria three years ago. A Facebook user posted comments about an Austrian politician, Eva Glawischnig-Piesczek, that Austrian courts found to be illegally defamatory. Glawischnig-Piesczek in 2016 wrote to Facebook Ireland, the company's EU headquarters, asking the company to delete the comments and limit access to them globally. Facebook refused, Glawischnig-Piesczek sued, and the results of the years of legal wrangling are out today.

A service is not liable for information it's hosting "if it has no knowledge of its illegal nature or if it acts expeditiously to remove or disable access" to the illegal content as soon as it becomes aware of it, the court said; the United States operates under a similar standard. The EU's directive on electronic commerce also "prohibits any requirement for the host provider," meaning a company such as Facebook, "to monitor generally information which it stores or to seek actively facts or circumstances indicating illegal activity," the court said.

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Google wins case as court rules “right to be forgotten” is EU-only
But that directive does not preclude an EU member nation from ordering a service to remove or block access to content that is identical or equivalent to content that has been deemed unlawful in the past, the court ruled. Nations can require, the court said, the use of automated technologies and filters to make it happen. Crucially, the directive also does not prohibit EU member nations from requiring platforms to remove or block access to such information worldwide, "within the framework of the relevant international law."

The globe-spanning ruling is the opposite approach the court took less than two weeks ago in a different case, when it held that the so-called right to be forgotten under EU law does not require Google to make certain information inaccessible to the world beyond European borders.

In a matter of months, President Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, have twisted U.S. policy in Ukraine to their personal ends, touching off turmoil inside the White House and State Department and weakening — perhaps critically — a bilateral relationship that is crucial to containing Russian aggression in Europe.

The story of Trump’s strongarming of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is first and foremost one of Trump’s abuse of his presidential power in pursuit of personal political gain. But it is also an epic example of how Trump has destroyed U.S. diplomacy in places around the world where, for years, it had worked smoothly and relatively effectively despite the growing partisan polarization in Washington.

As one of the relatively few U.S. journalists who has followed Ukraine closely over the years, I find that the saddest part of this story has been watching a once-cohesive community of U.S. diplomatic pros on Ukraine be crushed as it tried to contain and manage the hurricane-like intervention of Giuliani and Trump. The whistleblower’s complaint offers a partial picture of this unraveling, and I have heard more in several conversations with longtime sources.

Though Trump never had a positive view of Ukraine, the trouble really started with Giuliani, who has a record of working for and with the very Ukrainian actors that U.S. policy has aimed to marginalize: shady business executives and corrupt politicians with ties to Russia, organized crime or both.