When 25-year-old Singaporean student Marcus Khoo received a Skype message from his close friend, he was shocked to learn that the number of COVID19 cases in Singapore would hit at least a thousand cases by 17 April.
This was before Singapore’s Ministry of Health released the daily case numbers to the public, and there were messages online circulating that Singapore had a record breaking 1,146 cases. Curious, Mr. Khoo asked his friend how she got the information before the public announcement.
“My mom’s friend got insider news,” she replied. “Then apparently he kept giving the correct numbers for the past few days.”
A conversation between 25-year-old Marcus Khoo and his close friend, discussing daily COVID19 case numbers in Singapore.
Although Mr. Khoo still had some suspicions, thinking “insider news is the scariest kind of news”, he still went on to share it with my family members. Hours later, Singapore’s health ministry preliminarily confirmed 623 COVID19 cases as of 12pm on 17 April. A civil servant allegedly leaked the number of cases and was then arrested.
After hearing the actual number of cases, Mr. Khoo quickly told his family members about the mistake.
“I trusted my friend in the sense that she’s our age. I thought she had good judgement to know what’s real and what’s fake,” he said.
The COVID19 outbreak has been deemed an “infodemic” by the World Health Organisation as information becomes abundant, making it challenging for people to find reliable and trustworthy sources to learn more about the virus.
Even for people aged under 30 years, many who are generally familiar with the Internet and are more tech-savvy than their parents, are finding it difficult to tell fake information from the truth.
Before the pandemic, a 2017 study conducted by Research Now showed that over 44 percent of 1,000 millennials lacked critical thinking skills to separate fake news from facts. Up to 37 percent of them also admitted to sharing inaccurate information on social media without realising.
For 24-year-old Hong Kong university student Sue Ng, she finds it most difficult to find reliable health information online.
“I have seen many so-called tips on Twitter and Instagram suggesting people to reuse or clean the masks, such as steaming them,” she shared.
“I will try to check where the sources come from first to see if they are reliable, but if the fake news is provided by news media I trust or experts, then I will probably believe them.”
While there is a plethora of useful face-checking tools and organisations to verify information, some young people are not familiar on how to use them.
Ms. Ng mentioned that she is following several fact-checking groups, including Annie Lab, run by the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong.
“These tools take time to do the fact-checking, so sometimes when I see the clarification it may already be two days after the fake news is out, so I can’t get the quickest clarification.”
Using fact-checking tools may take some practice, and relying simply on mobile phones to verify information is not always feasible.
“It’s not challenging but it can be time consuming,” said Jane Lytvynenko, a Buzzfeed reporter specialising in reporting on misinformation.
“The problem for regular people who are just sort of reading disinformation is just the way the interface on our phone works. If you're reading your stuff on your phone and not the computer, you need technical skills.”
One example is using InVid, a video verification tool, which does not have a mobile-friendly site.
Thankfully, more people are aware of their shortcomings when it comes to verifying information.
A survey in April on 3,000 people from six countries conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism revealed that 75 percent of respondents trust national or international public health organisations most. Scientists, doctors and health experts are generally deemed as trustworthy sources of information about COVID19.
Mr. Khoo says he hopes to be more wary when coming across COVID19 information, and aims to educate his older family members to be more aware of misinformation.
“It’s about whether the younger generation has the patience and responsibility to navigate fake news,” he said.