Find 2 fake news that has been widely shared online. Discuss where the stories were published and their impacts on the news organizations and the members of the public. As a journalist, what can you do to mitigate the spread of this fake news? List the mitigation measures and explain them.
1. Message about people spreading that the death after using Sinovac vaccine.
This is a fake message that spread on Twitter when the Sinovac had been introduced to Malaysians. Twitter is a platform that is usually and often used for official information such as the pandemic and so on from the government. There are some users who retweet the post from an official account with the status that written there already 56 cases of death after using the Sinovac vaccine in Hong Kong and even the WHO doesn’t even trust the vaccines. This had easily affected the people’s mindset due to the covid-19 vaccination being quite new and the public are not having much information and trust toward the vaccination, this kind of message can easily affect people not getting vaccinated.
As a journalist, to mitigate the spread of this fake news is publishing news with the statistic that having the reason of why the death happened after using the Sinovac vaccine to let the public understand which type of people are a suit or not suitable for Sinovac. This is because that the vaccination might have a different effect on different types of people. After that, the journalist should give research about the effectiveness of Sinovac to build trust in the public and decrease the spreading of covid-19 by getting vaccinated. The journalist can use this kind of information to raise the awareness to the public not to believe the unauthorized statement from those unofficial parties.
Clarification
2. The message was that JAKIM didn’t have a Halal Certification Agreement (HCA) on virtual currency products.
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