Be careful what you post and what you read on the Internet. Fake news can cause a lot of confusion to readers and cause a lot of trouble for countries.
The Independent Singapore (TISG) got called out by the Malaysian authorities for unsubstantiated claims about a fatal accident in JB.
LONG STORY SHORT: TISG had to apologise publicly to the Malaysian authorities and take down the original article.
Recently, another piece of fake news has caused a bit of stir in Singapore.
On 28 August 2017, an Australian magazine, Australian Teacher Magazine, claimed that the Singapore Ministry of Education’s Director-General of Education Wong Siew Hoong attributed Singapore’s education success to “standardised test drilling and a culture of compliance”.
The comments were reproduced on Mothership.sg and MOE clarified in a comment on the Facebook post by Mothership that Mr Wong had not made the statements as quoted in the article.
And late last week, our Singapore Police Force also got flamed, because some smart-alec Facebook user uploaded a picture of a police car that stopped right outside a prata stall.
In response, the police said that the car had stopped there because they were responding to a case of public nuisance.
Limpeh want to say: Fake news is all over the Internet.
So we got to be smart and find out what is the truth and what is fake, what is right and what is wrong.
If you’d like to contribute your story to us, drop us an email at editors@sureboh.sg and we’ll review it. We read each submission that comes to us within two weeks of receiving it.
