Mainstream Media has Met Its Maker (click image to enlarge)

 
Fake news and rumors may prompt mentally unstable or particularly impressionable individuals to carry out terrorist attacks, a Danish intelligence report says.

“The social media are increasingly being used for making threatening and hostile comments, for example against public figures and to spread rumors and fake news,” said the report released by the Center for Terror Analysis (CTA), run by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET).

The report states that while the majority of these comments “do not lead to actual attack planning, CTA assesses that such commentary may lead people who are mentally unstable or easily influenced, to commit acts of violence that could constitute acts of terrorism.”

According to Danish media analyst Jan Birkemose, fake news could be “a huge problem.”

“I can definitely imagine how fake news could trigger a feeling that gets an extra twist when you aren’t concerned with the truth. It could definitely influence the mentally unstable and unbalanced,” he told Ritzau news agency.

[…]

In January this year scientists at Cambridge, Yale and George Mason Universities even said they were seriously considering a “psychological vaccine” against fake news.

According to social psychologist Dr. Sander van der Linden, “Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus.”

Full article at RT News