Check before you forward!

IF someone had been visiting Malaysia for the first time in the last two or three weeks, we wouldn’t blame them for thinking Malaysia is the kidnap capital of the world.

The social media rumour mill was extra hyper with stories about kidnappings in many states beginning, as far as we can see, with a tale of a primary school student narrowly escaping being kidnapped, complete with a picture of the white panel van allegedly involved.

It was a hoax.

To be exact, it was a story started by a scared girl who was worried by social media stories about kids being kidnapped for organ harvesting and wanted the police to take action.

It turns out the girl unwittingly became part of an experiment in how Malaysians respond to fake news.

And results are really bad, because how we responded was by circulating even more fake news about attempted kidnappings.

There was the story about two students narrowly escaping a kidnap attempt in Gua Musang, Kelantan; another of someone in a heavily tinted vehicle trying to make off with children in Termeloh, Pahang; then there was the video showing a student escaping kidnappers in Pasir Gudang, Johor; and reports of three students from two different families almost being taken from in front of their primary school in Gombak, Selangor.

All of them bogus. Each one debunked by the police.

The “news” and videos about organ harvesting that frightened that girl in Ipoh is, according to Bukit Aman corporate communications head Asst Comm A. Skandaguru, from 2017 and were probably being reshared in light of the surge in supposed kidnap incidents.

And it’s not just Malaysia that went slightly mad in these last few weeks: the whole world was taken up with stories of an attempted military coup in China that had President Xi Jinping under house arrest – complete with video footage of columns of military vehicles, some 80km long, heading to Beijing going viral on social media.

Turns out it was cooked up by an anti-China group.

The one-minute video clip on Instagram and Facebook of a suicide bombing that purportedly happened in France? Took place in Syria, some 4,000km away – and it wasn’t a terrorist suicide bombing but a family dispute.

Fake news isn’t anything new, such stories have been around almost as long as messaging apps and social media have.

So why haven’t Malaysians – and the whole world, really – still not learned not to react and to verify before hitting forward?

People were repeatedly forwarding these messages without thinking, without even doing a simple Google check.

In some cases, the “news” had been circulated repeatedly for years but continued to make the rounds, taking everyone by hook, line and sinker.

We simply must become smarter about how we use the Internet and social media. All the technological advances will come to naught if we can’t do something as simple as checking something before forwarding it.

Maybe even call us, the local mainstream media, if you’re not sure. Journalists know how to authenticate news properly and don’t depend on dubious blog sites, unknown Twitter handles or Facebook posts from nowhere.

“Trustworthy journalism is news and information that is accountable, accurate, fair, and produced in line with journalism’s highest ethical standards”, as one journalist points out in a World News Day article (“Journalists must explain our work to our readers”, The Star, Sept 28; online at bit.ly/star_newsday).

Or even, as we said, just do a Google search. Please.

After all, the cops have enough work to do dealing with real crime without having to take time and resources to debunk fake news.