Armed with laptops, three dozen journalists and fact-checkers braced for battle ...
JAKARTA - Armed with laptops, three dozen journalists and fact-checkers braced for battle before a live debate between Indonesian President Joko Widodo and his challenger, Prabowo Subianto.
They and other fact-checkers are fighting a running battle against fake news and propaganda ahead of an April 17 election in the world’s third-biggest democracy. Backed financially by Google News Lab, which also helps fund Mafindo, Cekfakta’s volunteers took over the U.S tech giant’s swanky Jakarta office for the debate on March 30.
With more than 100 million accounts, the country is Facebook’s third-largest market and a top-five market globally for its platforms WhatsApp and Instagram, as well as rival Twitter. Sasmito considers it a good result if fact-checked posts can reach even a small fraction of the audience the originals did.
He said he wrote only “true” negative stories, and cited as an example a post that 2,000 Chinese workers on Indonesia’s Sulawesi island were secretly part of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. But such claims also make it onto the campaign trail. A Prabowo campaign volunteer in West Java told Reuters last week that millions of Chinese workers had been secretly relocated to Sulawesi.Reuters found that the creator of the Sulawesi claim had also written stories in 2016 falsely depicting former Jakarta governor Basuki Tjaha Purnama as a Communist stooge of China.
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