Going postal on internet crime, hackers and fake news

Italy’s leaning on crime fighters of yesteryear in its battle against fake news: the postal police.

As misinformation campaigns roil electoral processes, from the U.S. 2016 presidential race and the U.K.’s Brexit referendum to Italy’s March general elections, governments around the world are struggling to block the onslaught of fake news.

France’s effort to address the issue with new legislation — its anti-fake news bill lands in parliament Thursday — is already raising questions about whether it’s the best answer to a complicated problem.

Italy, for its part, is going down a different route, mixing the new with the old. The country is calling on its once-outdated Polizia Postale, or postal police, to stop the spread of unfounded reports on the web.

Created in 1981 and based in Rome, the postal police originally guarded post offices and supplied armed escorts for cashin-transit vans as well as fighting cybercrime of all sorts.

Today it counts about 2,000 members, each working within the Italian police force and dividing their time between cybersecurity operations and more traditional legal matters.

It still investigates fake postage stamps and related fraud, but its forces in locations across Italy have expanded their expertise to the web, catching pedophilia, hacking, money-laundering, creditcard fraud, copyright violations by monitoring other platforms.

The postal police now regularly issues warnings on its website to users about false news reports. It became extra active ahead of Italy’s March 4 election, when it launched a “red button” on its website for people to denounce fake claims.

Fabricated election polls and false reports about local incidents, often involving immigrants and other minorities, were among the fakes that plagued Italy over the past year.

Several news outlets in November reported that an underage Muslim girl had been assaulted by her much older husband in the city of Padua, and was in hospital — a story that made the rounds on social media and was shared by the likes of politician Matteo Salvini, before being later denied by the police.