You know how it’s a trend now where you share viral content on social media? The problem with these sort of posts is that no one bothers checking if it’s legit or not before sharing.
Now you can verify those stories with this cool new portal by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC): SEBENARNYA.MY
This Bahasa Malaysia portal is said to be a one stop site for Malaysians to check and report unauthenticated news stories that have been spread via social networks like Facebook and instant messaging services.
With a tagline like ‘Tidak Pasti Jangan Kongsi’ (translating to don’t share if you’re not sure), they have debunked quite a number of viral images and videos already. For example, 216 students from Perak catching the H1N1 virus, and paracetamol that’s made of tissue.
During the launch of the portal, Minister of Communications and Multimedia, Datuk Seri Dr Salleh Said Keruak said, information will be collected, analysed, approved and finally uploaded onto the portal for the people to read, regardless of how political the information is.
He also added that MCMC has identified almost 1000 fake news stories that has gone viral in the country.
This portal has also caught the attention of Jason Ng, an ex-WSJ journalist, who said in a tweet the site “could be useful if it’s accurate and frequently updated”. Unfortunately, he also mentioned in another tweet that there is “nothing on 1MDB so far”, eventhough the oldest article on the site dates back to October 4th 2012 and 1MDB is relatively recent.
