Thursday, 16 January 2025
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Indonesia People Should Be Brilliant to Counter Hoaxes

MUHAMMADIYA.ID, SLEMAN - In 2016, Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) released a literacy ranking that Indonesia ranked 60 of 61 surveyed countries. It revealed that only one of 10,000 Indonesian people read. On the other hand, 56 percent of 268.2 million Indonesian people are active internet users.

The gap leads Indonesia to be an area where hoaxes can easily be disseminated.

A trainer of Google News Initiative at a workshop on ‘Hoax Busting and Digital Hygiene’ Inggried Dwi Wedhaswary stated that Indonesian people immediately receive hoaxes mostly spread on social media.

“A hoax dissemination rate in Indonesia is almost similar to what occurs in the Philippines because a condition Indonesians and Filipinos are the same,” declared Inggried at the workshop conducted by Department of Communication Science of Universitas ‘Aisyiyah Yogyakarta (Unisa).

A prominent cause of this phenomenon is that Indonesian people lack literacy. In the 60th rank of 61 countries, Indonesia was one rank upper than Botswana, a developing country in South Africa. Besides, Indonesian people prefer gadgets than books. It is showed that 355.5 million gadgets are distributed across Indonesia, while the number of Indonesians was 262.2 million people. Hence, it reached 113 percent of Indonesian people.

“No wonder, what we (Indonesian people) firstly do when we just get up is checking our phone,” Inggried asserted.

Indeed, in this disruptive era, news providers shift from conventional to digital media. Thus, Indonesian people must be going to be overwhelmed by vast information.

Meanwhile, a member of the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) Agung Purwandono conveyed that community does not always become a scapegoat, but news producers are also the ones responsible for the phenomenon.

“We have to be cautious since incompetent parties can create news,” asserted Agung.

Nevertheless, community can assist to preserve the hoax dissemination. The hoaxes are often from incredible sources, their title and contents are not related, the title is exaggerated, and they often use coercion. In fact, there are tools detect the hoaxes that one of them is copying a link of the news on domainbigdata.com.

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