The internet is agog with the news about the alleged sexual abuse of a student or students at the Ħamrun senior school. A girl is said to have reported being abused by fellow students after they were egged on to this by their teacher. The reactions to these reports range from the “lock up the teacher and throw away the key” to the far more graphically violent.
As panic-fuelled readers continue to exchange increasingly lurid stories about alleged class-wide abuse, the media seems to have gone into overdrive with this story. At this rate it seems it is only a matter of time before vigilante groups take to the streets to take matters into their own hands.
Now if the accused in question is found guilty after a thorough investigation there should be no bar to a suitably hard sanction and the accompanying social opprobrium. But this instant rush to judgement is worrying.
People make millions by writing crazily outlandish stories and publishing them online. When these are picked up and shared they create a whole new buzz
While it is true that there is no way that any authority can stop people discussing the case and that readers will reach their own conclusions, it is worth remembering that those conclusions are being reached on the basis of information that is available at this time.
Further revelations may reveal new facts that will affect the findings of guilt or otherwise.
Let us not forget that there have been recent cases where innocent men have been falsely accused and have had to face many tortuous years before their cases were decided.
■ The shockwaves after Donald Trump’s election have not subsided yet. People are still asking how someone so eminently unsuitable for high office could have made it to the White House.
There may be many complex political analyses about voter behaviour, but perhaps one of the factors that contributed overwhelmingly to Trump’s success was the fact that many people simply do not scrutinise what they read online and simply accept it as the truth. This leads to their forming an impression of different political candidates on the basis of totally incorrect information.
There are people who actually make millions by writing crazily outlandish stories and publishing them online. When these are picked up and widely shared they create a whole new momentum or buzz favouring a specific candidate. This is precisely what happened during the American electoral campaign with a variety of faux-news outlets creating an aura around Trump.
One infamous fake newsmonger is Paul Horner. He has been living off viral news hoaxes for several years. Horner is responsible for stories such as the one where he claimed that President Barack Obama had signed an executive order banning the singing of the national anthem before all sporting events.
Horner also published the totally false report that the sizeable Amish community in America pledging to vote for Trump to ensure that he would be elected. Then there was the totally mad one about Obama stating that he intended to invalidate the election results. Although this was utterly baseless it was had over 250,000 shares on Facebook.
Naturally this fake news created very different impressions from the realities.
When asked how this could have come about – and why people were accepting all news as being true – Horner replied: “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around.
“Nobody fact-checks anything anymore – I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it.
“It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
The scariest thing about it is that this laziness and reluctance to scrutinise the source and authenticity of news is not only prevalent in the US.
Unless we are vigilant and ready to weigh what we read from different sources, we may very well fall for the sort of fake news propagated by the online shock jocks – with equally dismal results.
drcbonello@gmail.com