Fake News Are Widely Spread for Less than 1 in 5 S’poreans Verify Information Before Sharing Them

Everyone has at least one relative who they’ve muted on WhatsApp.

This person, while well-meaning, sends messages all day long with some rather questionable information.

“Did you know that drinking beer can cure the coronavirus?”

“Did you know that drinking water at a certain time of the day can cure cancer?”

“Did you know that roasting peanuts in a particular manner can raise your IQ?”

You’d like to think that people would question the veracity of these claims before forwarding them to other people, but nope. 

In fact, very few Singaporeans do it at all.

Fake News Are Widely Spread for Less than 1 in 5 S’poreans Verify Information Before Sharing Them

Less than 20% of Singaporeans have good information hygiene, a recent survey found. Worryingly, the majority spread news they find interesting without verifying its truthfulness first.

The study –  the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer report –  measured information hygiene using four parameters:

• how regularly respondents engage with the news
• how regularly they engage with different points of view
• how often they verify information
• how often they avoid spreading unvetted information

A respondent would be considered to have good information hygiene if he or she does well in three or more of these parameters.

The findings were not good, to say the least.

Only 18% of Singaporean respondents were found to practise good information hygiene, while a whopping 46% were rated “poor” for fulfilling one or none of the criteria.

This puts us far below the global average of 27 countries, which is 26% for good information hygiene.

According to the findings of the report, Singaporeans are also slightly more likely to share news items they found interesting.

So what accounts for our low level of information hygiene?

Social Prestige

One word: social prestige.

Reader: That’s two words.

Sharing interesting news articles before any of your friends can build what is perceived as social prestige; it makes you more popular, and encourages to share even more news items.

The problem with this is that it often leads to the dissemination of fake news.

Our poor information hygiene could also be due to Singaporeans’ trust in the government’s anti-fake news law.

Trust In News Organisations Eroded

At the moment, the group of people Singaporeans trust the most are scientists, as 73% of respondents found them to be credible sources of information.

Next in line were government leaders (62%) and government officials (55%).

Interestingly, 57% of respondents said they believed global news organisations are more concerned with supporting an ideology or political position than informing the public.

49% also said the media was sometimes biased. These respondents felt that journalists, more so than business and government leaders, were trying to mislead readers with falsehoods.

Fortunately, everyone working at Goody Feed is secretly a cat, and cats, as we know, are not equipped with the ability to lie.

Plus, if you can’t trust a cat online, who can you trust?

Featured Image: ImYanis / Shutterstock.com