By: Yogi Gustaman (Chair of the Padang Regional Independent Social Media Activists Forum )
In the digital age, mainstreaming on speed and ease makes social media flooded with information. On the one hand it is very profitable, making digital society can easily access information and have many alternative choices of information. But on the other hand , it causes serious problems. One of them , information is no longer grounded in the truth as the rules of journalism.
Internet users, aka Citizens, are easy targets for the spread of Hoax on Social Media that they always use everyday. Within a day can be more than 10 hours citizens use social media to interact, work, study and find entertainment. So sad are these hoax creators that they use the Corona pandemic phenomenon to spread hoaxes.
Thousands of hoaxes spread so fast every day. Whatsapp group became the main place for its spread . The ease of use of social media makes the spread of hoaxes more massive and structured. Even so easy , citizens no longer care about the rules of journalism that should be held tight when social media .
As a result of the exclusion of the rules and norms of social media , it creates new diseases that are even more damaging than other diseases. Warganet to easily send, receive, forward, and even edit the information according to his will . So that what happens is just the error that corrupts the mind. So that mental illness will easily attack.
When mentally disturbed, all things that are inherent in human beings will also be disturbed. Like a computer with a corrupt system, it can damage other components and even become fertile fields for viruses and malware. Likewise with humans, bad mentality makes a person unable to think realistically let alone open-minded.
Therefore, not only is the body maintained to avoid Covid-19, but mental health also needs to be maintained and cared for to avoid hoaxes.
Preparedness and alertness to the Corona Virus hoax is one of the key contributions in accelerating the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic . Helping one another to correct misinformation, support one another, and help improve public literacy is something that is urgently needed in the current crisis.
This is our time to spread goodness to help protect the integrity of the nation from the threat of hoaxes and diseases that continue to lurk.
Read with critical awareness the key to fighting hoaxes
In the survey mastel (2017) revealed as much as 92.40% received hoaxes from social media and 62.10% in writing and 44.30% claimed to receive hoaxes every day. From the Daily Social survey (2018) also found almost the same results, namely social media dominating the spread of hoax, respectively Facebook (82.25%), WhatsApp (56.55%), and Instagram (29.48%) became the platform where hoaxes are often found. And worse, as much as 44.19% of respondents were not sure of their expertise in detecting hoax news.
From the explanation and survey above, it can be taken as a red thread that hoaxes have become a virus for cyberspace where hoax is distributed every day, repeated, and distributed using various forms of writing, video or images but the most is writing. And from the virtual community experiencing conditions of lack of confidence, feel unable to detect hoaxes. This distrust was caused by one of them because of the lack of literacy in our society.
In the context of information hoaxing, critical reading is carried out by continually finding out the purpose of the information content, why the information was made, what is the relevance and influence of the information. This means that reading with critical awareness strives not to swallow them raw and assumes one hundred percent of the information available on social media before going through the process of finding out.
Now, if the process of reading with critical awareness is continuously applied in social media , it means that we have contributed to breaking the hoax chain to its roots . Because if we are critical, selling hoax information will certainly not sell anymore, it can no longer create noise. As a result peace will remain and continue to be maintained. Let’s reduce the hoax with critical thinking that starts with yourself and continues to support the government’s efforts by reading positive news in order to fight the Covid-19 hoax virus.
