The price of fake news.
Former chief of news and media at the International Labour Organization (ILO), Rosalind Yarde, highlights how fake news can be deadly : “More journalists and media workers were killed in 2025 since records began. However, the threat to independent journalism goes far beyond warfare. Misinformation, disinformation and fake news, combined with economic pressures and increasingly concentrated and politicised media ownership, have diminished the ability of many journalists to speak truth to power. "The result is weakened democracies and unravelling social cohesion. "The 2024 UK racist riots, following the brutal murders of three children, were sparked by faked AI imagery and social media disinformation that falsely claimed that the murderer was a Muslim asylum seeker who had arrived illegally from across the English Channel in a small boat. "Millions of people believed it because the ground had been laid over decades by right-wing mainstream media that had deliberately and ...
