Middle East worst place for fake news following Qatar hack, says report on The Independent
Western media has been rife with reports of the Qatar News Agency (QNA) hack that directly led to the blockade of Qatar by its neighboring countries.
Washington Post had reported earlier that the hack originated from United Arab Emirates. However, Emirati foreign minister Anwar Gargash was quick to deny his government's involvement.
More recently, British online newspaper, The Independent, published an opinion piece that calls out UAE for it's malicious role in engineering the crisis over Qatar.
The author of the op-ed, Anthony Harwood, went on to claim that Middle East is going through a fake news epidemic of sorts, largely contributed to by the Saudi-led alliance following the QNA hack.
Photo credit: Reuters
Harwood went as far as to say that UAE government "carried out a massive deception of it people" through this anti-Qatar campaign. For not only did they hack QNA and plant fake news in their own media, but also denied their people the right to know the truth from Qatar by blocking transmission of Qatari channels like Al Jazeera in the country.
More fake news
The misrepresentation of the Emir of Qatar was apparently not the only report of fake news.
International news agencies, including Reuters, fell for a false story which appeared in a fake website, which said that six Arab nations involved in Qatar’s illegal blockade had written to FIFA to revoke their rights for the 2022 World Cup.
The report was only dismissed as fake when FIFA denied ever receiving such a letter.
Fifa President denies ever receiving a letter from the six boycotting countries asking for #Qatar to be stripped of the #worldcup pic.twitter.com/bLO6wPZjH0
— Naser Al Wasmi (@nasalwasmi) July 16, 2017
Ongoing investigations
Qatar had sought help from US secret service agency FBI to assist them with the ongoing investigations.
The Post said that US intelligence officials learned last week of newly analysed information that showed that senior UAE government officials discussed the planned hacks on May 23, the day before they occurred.
The officials said it was unclear whether the UAE hacked the websites or paid for them to be carried out, the newspaper reported.
However, UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al Otaiba denied the report in a statement, saying it was ‘false.’
of course they will "denied' it...