The number of Italian fake news sites has grown significantly since 2015, Michelangelo Coltelli, founder of Butac.it, a fact-checking website which highlights cases of fake news, told The Local.
“And the number of times these stories are then shared on social media has been phenomenal,” he said.
“In Italy there are sites used for political purposes, for disinformation, and those that make money through clickbait. Sadly I don’t think there’s a solution to this apart from education - it needs to start with schools teaching children the difference between fake news and real news.” [Emphasis added.]
Fake news is not limited to secular matters. As reported by Crux on February 10, 2017, "[b]arely a week after Rome woke up [to] full of anti- Pope Francis posters," a fake version of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's newspaper, with the date of January 17, 2017, was sent out "to cardinals and officials via email, claiming that the pontiff had answered five dubia, or questions, posed to him by four conservative cardinals about his document Amoris Laetita." [2] Rather than getting upset, the "editor-in-chief of L’Osservatore Romano, Giovanni Maria Vian, was unperturbed: 'We were only sad because the layout wasn’t as nice as ours.'" [3] If only everyone could be as humorous as Giovanni Maria Vian, the world would be full of smiling faces, but not everyone is and one such person is Michelangelo Coltelli (see above) who wants to set things right, and had suggested that "schools [teach] children the difference between fake news and real news."
It would be a miracle if schools in Italy can teach children how to differentiate between fake news and real news. Perhaps they could be taught first how to distinguish between the foods they eat, the real foods that come from God and fake foods that are GMOs (genetically modified organisms [4]).
Perhaps the children should also learn what is organic food, and whether "organic" means 100 percent natural or whether it is just a marketing label that fakes the consumer into believing that organic food is the food Mother Nature naturally provides, uncontaminated by added chemicals at every link along the food chain.
Beyond that, perhaps the children should also be taught the difference between what is fake wealth, which is wealth that relies on the relentless printing of money, credit, speculation, bitcoins and blind faith in the continuity of the world's banking and electronic systems, versus real wealth which is tangible, which has been accreted by virtue of physical labor and can be bartered.
People today live in a world with fake wealth, fake foods, fake drugs [5], fake leather, fake diamonds, fake gold and even fake Bordeaux wines, so why should people be shocked by fake news, or by a fake pope without legitimacy? They should not, nor should they be surprised that God is not fake.
Those who want the real truth which is the same as God's Truth must follow Christ and do "'[w]hatever He says.'" [6] However, one must be very careful not to confuse the voice of Satan with the voice of God. It ought to be easy to tell one from the other. If the voice is Satan's, then it would reinforce the pride that is in the person "hearing" it, compounded by an enticing and nearly irresistible temptation; if, on the other hand, it is God's voice, then it would be "heard" with an unexpected sense of Heavenly peace, without the promise of a personal reward.
[1] http://www.thelocal.it/20170210/italians-joing-fight-against-fake-news-francesco-totti-laura-boldrini
[2] https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2017/02/10/fake-vatican-newspaper-delivers-new-shot-pope-francis/
[3] Ibid.
[4] https://gmo-awareness.com/all-about-gmos/gmo-defined/
[5] http://www.newsweek.com/2015/09/25/fake-drug-industry-exploding-and-we-cant-do-anything-about-it-373088.html; http://www.iracm.com/en/2017/02/spain-10-15-fake-pharmaceutical-products-european-market-sold-spain/
[6] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+2%3A1-11&version=NKJV
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