- 17/10/2018
- Category: Commentaries
Life inside the midst of the internet civilization is a racetrack for humankind to participate in the newly-concepted social life. One of the most revolutionary ideas can be seen from the utilization of social media in daily practice by users from various background. Indeed, we can consider ourselves as the social media generation. For the social media generation, discovering a piece of information is just one click away. Nonetheless, behind the convenience offered by the social media, here lies the latent threat sourced from the occurrence of hoaxes that may cause commotion in the society. At this moment, the social media generation shall show its critical thinking ability to avoid being trapped within such a moment. One strategy can be started by starting to institutionalize the fact-checking culture.
In general, fact-checking can be defined as an effort to test the truth of one information by making a comparison to other sources[1]. Originally, fact-checking is a mandatory ability for every journalist or people working in media outlets. However, in the era where information can be gathered and formed by everyone as long as they have access to the internet or social media, fact-checking should be a mandatory skill for everyone in the social media generation. Fact checking can be used as a last resort to tackle the distribution of hoax or fake news.
The Absence of Fact-Checking Culture in Indonesia: Cause and Implications
The darkest side of the social media era can be seen from the amount of misguided information that is intentionally produced to put someone in favor or putting a blame on someone. Researchers from RAND corporation introduced the term of ‘The Firehose of Falsehood’ as a method of negative content distribution on the internet with two characters; multichannel (multiplatform) distribution, and also the tendency to spread the partial truth[2]. The aforementioned concept can be defined as an effort to use some truths of one big event as the main component that can generalize the whole truth of the event. In utilizing the firehose of falsehood model, partial truth can be developed through a rapid and intense distribution of ones version of information and rejecting any ideas that are not in favor of ones version of truth.
The latest case of hoax epidemic in Indonesia can be seen from the case of one social activist that claimed herself being persecuted by a group of men. The interesting point in this case refers to the fact that a lot of politicians and social media users with high education level are misguided – or intentionally acting as being misguided – and contribute to spreading the message instead. The tweet from users with a high number of followers creates a partial truth that the activist was being truly a victim of brutal persecution.
Hence, why the fact-checking culture in Indonesia is still very much in absence? Indeed, this phenomenon is a reflection from the weak critical ability thinking among social media users in Indonesia. It is not very surprising given the fact that the literacy rate in Indonesia is ranked as the second worst (60 out of 61 countries) based on a research conducted by Central Connecticut State University.[3] The combination of low literacy level and the overload of information sources in the social media era, social media users become impatient in processing information. Furthermore, the social media users that face such problem tend to process and prioritize information that comes from their limited social circle and those that shares similar thinking with them, later what we called as the effect of the filter bubble.[4]
Rank of Literacy Rate.
High exposure toward social media also gives subsequent impact to the neurotransmitter ability of human’s brain. According to a research by Jaclyn Cabral, this change affects human to become impatient to process information. Eventually, this tendency affects human to focus on the most entertaining part of the information and neglect other facts that may affect the context of the information. [5]
Cultivating fact-checking culture in Indonesia
It is acknowledged that there are several cases where fact-checking instruments can only be accessed by an authorized party, for example: the police that have the legal authority to check an individual’s call record and CCTV footage on critical infrastructures. Nevertheless, fact-checking also can be done easily by utilizing public-friendly internet tools. We can see this instance in the recent case of BBC Africa investigative journalism. The BBC Africa team produced an investigative report masterpiece that discovers the truth behind a sadistic mass-shooting video footage by comparing the content with the real condition through Google Earth and Google Images, a publicly available Internet tools.[6]
In Indonesia, a positive effort in cultivating fact-checking culture already established by several news companies. Twenty-two news companies had signed the agreement to combat hoax distribution in mass media. Furthermore, during the Trusted Media Summit 2018 a few months ago, the www.cekfakta.com was being launched as a common place for concerned parties to regularly update the recent case of fake news or hoax distribution in Indonesia.[7] Also, the Indonesian Independent Journalist Association (AJI) frequently conduct fact-checking training to fellow journalists and communities around Indonesia to equip them with simple information verification ability through internet tools.
In the end, the remaining big challenge is the need to develop the fact-checking ability comprehensively to the social media users around Indonesia. Improving the capability of the journalists only solve the problem in one side; there is a growing need to touch the general social media users – including public figure – which does not have an adequate capability in fact-checking.
A reformation in the youth education system and the active role from the government are critical to strengthen the fact-checking culture in Indonesia. However, considering that Indonesia is now entering the political year, we shall not put too much hope to the stakeholders to put an effort in developing a much needed yet “less interesting” discourse such as the fact-checking capability among social media users.
Editor: Lia Wulandari & Treviliana Eka Putri
Read another article written by Fahreza Daniswara or article about negative content.
[1] Myslinksi, L. J., (2012), Fact Checking Method & System, US 8,185,448, B1
[2] Paul, C. & Matthews, M., (2016), The Russian “Firehose of Falsehood” Propaganda Model: Why It Might Work and Options to Counter It. Santa Monica, RAND Corporation, California, USA, p. 2.
[3] Gunawan, A., (2016), Indonesia second least literate of 61 nations, The Jakarta Post [online], 12 March, available at: < http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2016/03/12/indonesia-second-least-literate-61-nations.html>, [Accessed 13 October 2018]
[4] Farajtabar, M., Du, N., Rodriguez, M.G., Valera, I., Zha, H. and Song, L., (2014) Shaping social activity by incentivizing users. In Advances in neural information processing systems (pp. 2474-2482).
[5] Cabral, J., (2008) Is generation Y addicted to social media. Future of children, 18, p.125.
[6] See the twitter feed of BBC Africa in uncovering the truth behind the sadistic mass-killing video done by a group of soldiers in Africa. After further fact-checking, it was discovered that the video was taken at Zelevet, a town in Cameroon. See: https://twitter.com/bbcafrica/status/1044186344153583616?s=21
[7] Siregar, E. (2018), ‘Trusted Media Summit 2018, Kolaborasi Lawan Hoax,’ Liputan 6 [Online], 5 May, available at: <https://www.liputan6.com/news/read/3503667/trusted-media-summit-2018-kolaborasi-lawan-hoax>, [Accessed 13 October 2018]
