Efforts to Combat Hoaxes

Efforts to combat the wave of baseless news and hoaxes must be conducted seriously and systematically because it can get out of control. The Indonesian Anti-Defamation Society, earlier this week gave the idea of encouraging the mass media and wider community to fight hoaxes.

KOMPAS/RADITYA HELABUMI

Civil servants of the Home Ministry take part in a joint rally to call for a successful 2019 election and reject campaigns containing hate speech, hoaxes and slander at the ministry complex, Jakarta, Friday (22/3/2019).

Efforts to combat the wave of baseless news and hoaxes must be conducted seriously and systematically because it can get out of control.

As a suggestion, the Indonesian Anti-Defamation Society (Mafindo), earlier this week gave the idea of encouraging the mass media and wider community to fight hoaxes. The threat of false news is truly worrying. Mafindo\'s research results illustrate how the hoax epidemic has increased rapidly in the last two years in Indonesia.

A similar phenomenon is certainly not typical of Indonesia, but is faced by the world. Even though the circulation of false news is not a new story in the long history of human civilization, it is now developing into an epidemic, which is triggered by the advancement of digital technology. False news can be broadcast instantly and simultaneously.

POLDA JATENG

Information about hoaxes at the Central Java Police headquarters.

Despite all the glorious contributions to progress, digital communication technology has created great disturbances and digital disruption, which creates a tunnel of darkness in various aspects of human life. Lies have created uncertainty.

Digital disruptions that produce and reproduce false news do not only disrupt rationality, values and politeness, but also overturn the reality that drives the birth of a posttruth era. Most citizens of the world seem troubled to face the wave of false news, which comes one after another continuously.

Epidemics of false news move quickly, without any force that can stop it, at least until now. The outbreak of hoaxes continues to move wildly out of control, attacking educated circles and crushing social order and established values.

KOMPAS/HERU SRI KUMORO

Jakarta Police officers wear T-shirts in support of an antihoax campaign at the declaration event for an antihoax movement at the Jakarta Police headquarters, Jakarta, Monday (12/3/2019). The declaration was an effort from the police to encourage the public to reject false news.

Greater chaos is feared to spread more widely if there is no immediate solution. A number of countries have become chaotic as victims of hoax news circulation, triggered by social media. Efforts must be multiplied in the face of hoax news circulation. Of course it attracts Mafindo\'s proposal that the mass media does not only function to disseminate information, but to wage war against hoaxes.

However, the challenge is not small because conventional media itself loses a lot of power by the great disruption of digital technology. The role of the media, especially print, is under heavy pressure amid the progress of digital media. Efforts to control digital media are not easy in producing and reproducing false news.

Nevertheless, whatever the challenges, conventional media with its strength is still expected to wage war against hoaxes, which have disrupted various aspects of human life today. It is far more important, of course, to develop critical attitude education early so not to be easily trapped in the wild flow of hoax news.