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Italy turns to postal police to stamp out fake news on internet

- Bloomberg 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 leg is lacy ber crime. tion 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 Polizia Postale, or postal police, to stop the spread of unfounded reports on the internet.

Created in 1981 and based in Rome, the postal police originally guarded post offices and supplied armed escorts for cash-in-transit vans as well as fighting 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 internet, catching pedophilia, hacking, money laundering, credit-card fraud and copyright violations by monitoring other platforms.

The postal police now regularly issues warnings on its website to users about false news reports.

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 before being later denied by the police.

The then-interior minister, Marco Minniti, described the types of reports that would be flagged as “news which is clearly baseless.”

But Italy’s efforts to utilize the old guard, or France’s decision to create news laws, may not please Europe at large. The region has coordinate­d on privacy protection, such as with the introducti­on of the General Data Protection Regulation, but member nations have gone their own way to fight fake news.

“There have been several legislativ­e initiative­s to stop the spread of false informatio­n since the beginning of the 19th century,” either because those fakes could impact merchandis­e prices or politics, said Nathalie Mallet-Poujol, a director of research at French public laboratory CNRS. “With the black hole that is the internet, these old debates are taking on a whole other dimension.”

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