The future of fake news? A misleading map of ’refugee crime’ in Germany distorts reality in a slick and sophisticated way
Last year, an anonymously-produced map started to make its way around German social media. It claimed to show viewers the spread of “refugee and migrant crime” throughout Germany.
Unlike some of the lurid tales of migrant depravity that have circulated in Germany in recent months and turned out to be false, the interactive map seemed professionally put together. Each pin on it correlated to a police or media report of a crime ("we don’t document cases simply on the basis of hearsay", its makers claimed).
The map, called XY-Einzelfall (a sarcastic riposte to the idea each migrant crime is simply an ‘isolated case’ – Einzelfall in German) was viewed more than four million times.
One of the #XY-Einzelfall (#XYE) social media followers tweeted over 80 times as new crimes were added to the map: “The time’s coming when Germans will need to carry guns for self-protection.”
▻https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-02-27/the-future-of-fake-news
#fake_news #cartographie #visualisation #fake_map (du coup) #hate_crime #Allemagne #cartographie_participative #manipulation
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