In the mood for lies

Philip Golingai The Star

THERE’S a photograph on the Internet that is the perfect tool if you want to fool the public. It shows a brown box containing thousands of ringgit – some say half a million ringgit. And it is perfect when you want to mix truth with lies.

Here’s how to do it. Take a photograph of something that actually happened, say, a collision between a luxury 4WD vehicle and a lorry.

You share on WhatsApp or Facebook several snapshots of the fatal accident and you also include that photograph of the box full of money.

Then you post a message: “Money was found in a vehicle that was involved in an accident with a lorry at Sandakan-Ranau road yesterday. It is learnt that the car belongs to a Sabah Barisan Nasional leader.”

There’s a variation of that message: “Is this true? Sabah BN politician dies in car crash. Box full of cash in car.”

Many were fooled by these messages.

The accident did happen. On Tuesday, a luxury 4WD vehicle, a pickup truck and a lorry were involved in a crash at KM171.6, Ja­lan Kota Kinabalu-Sandakan-Ranau. The driver of the 4WD was killed.

But a lie was insidiously inserted into some posts on the incident to add a false political angle.

If you use an app called Reverse Image Search, you could do a quick check on the ringgit-in-a-box image.

Download it on Google Play. Copy and the paste the image into the app, which will tell you that the photograph was taken from a story titled “Woman detained for trying to change ‘black money’ in a bank”.

The photograph was also used to turn viral a fake message on WhatsApp, Telegram and Facebook that there is a syndicate distributing counterfeit RM100 notes in Kuala Lumpur.

There’s another trick. Take a video clip from GE13 and share it on WhatsApp with the message: “At 3am, a bus on the North-South Expressway was transporting Ban­gla­­deshis who possessed MyKad and they were detained by the public.”

The video showed foreigners – men who looked like Bangladesh and Thai nationals – and they were aggressively ordered to leave a bus by vigilante Malaysians.

A search on YouTube will tell you that the video was not taken at 3am this year but in 2013.

Many people – to be exact zombies (those who blindly support their political parties) – will believe these fake messages. Shockingly, these zombies can be a PhD holder, an ex-top civil servant, a doctor or a lawyer.

It is as if GE14 has made them dumb. And for these zombies, the phrase “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me” doesn’t apply. They always get fooled.

Here’s another example. This fake message has been in circulation for the last few months. And yet people still get fooled.

Several photographs of a massive crowd in a ceramah are shared. The accompanying message is: “Tun Dr Mahathir is now at Johor, the biggest crowd seen. At Parit Sulong, Johor. Parit Sulong, many Malay and Javanese there.”

Zombies get pumped up seeing the photographs.

For them, Pakatan Harapan su­­dah manang (Sabah slang for “has already won”) GE14.

If a zombie were to scrutinise the photographs and if he was politically savvy, he would see that there was a green flag with a white moon among the sea of people.

Basic political knowledge will tell you that PAS is not with Pakatan Harapan, which is led by Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

The photograph was taken when PAS was still with Pakatan Rakyat in GE13. Also, if you used Reverse Image Search, you would know that the picture was taken in 2013.

This message is for the zombies: PAS. IS. NOT. WITH. PAKATAN. HARAPAN. IF. YOU. SEE. A. FLAG. WITH. A. MOON. SYMBOL. AND. THERE. IS. A. CLAIM. THAT. IT. WAS. TAKEN. AT. A. PAKATAN. HARAPAN. CERAMAH. WITH. MASSIVE. CROWD. DON’T. BE. FOOLED.

Zombies believe the fake messa­ges because they want to believe what they want to believe.

But I was also curious to know why clever people – like doctors and lawyers – fall for such fakery or why they spread the fakery.

So, I Googled and found an article on the website (theweek.com) of The Week news magazine.

The story discusses a paper by Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Tech­nology, titled “Telling the Truth about Believing the Lies? Evidence for the Limited Prevalence of Expressive Survey Responding”.

On how people so readily internalise rumours and falsehoods as facts, Berinsky argued that motiva­ted reasoning contributes as well.

“People who do not like Obama (or Trump, or any other politico) are motivated to find information that justified and confirms their existing beliefs.

“In our eagerness to prove that we are correct, we lower the bar for supporting evidence. ‘Facts’ that make little sense or collapse under scrutiny are often accepted as true when they tell us what we want to hear,” theweek.com reported.

In other words, we are fooled by fake news because we want to be fooled.