The fundamental elements of this technological and digitally-driven age are the ease of access to information, speed of connectivity and the ability to share information and perhaps more importantly, to disseminate misinformation. There are many good things about the internet, but with that comes the challenges of the reliability and credibility of the source of information particularly from the many new citizen journalists and internet bots. Remember the Cambridge Analytica scandal when the whistleblower testified about meddling in the 2016 US presidential election as well as the Brexit vote in the UK of the same year.

Can we assume that a major reason behind the spread of fake news is because of an agenda of “Trump” morals? A moral-based objective would be focused on facts with a sprinkle of palatable pollutants or prejudices, whereas an agenda will only focus on the outcome and apply the “any means necessary” principle, good or bad, as a philosophy behind decisions and actions.

According to MIT Media Lab, misinformation on Twitter is 70 per cent more likely to spread than truth and will reach its first 1,500 people six times faster. This point is so significant that it should readily influence both sharers and recipients to inflect and contemplate their own personal roles as participants in the propagation of fake news. It is also researched that people who share fake news are lazier or distracted more than biased. So remember, it takes only a few minutes to confirm the information online before hitting that share button.

According to the online Stanford Magazine, the so-called “power law” of social media is a well-documented pattern in social networks, which holds that messages replicate most rapidly if they are targeted at relatively small numbers of influential people with large followings. The tendency in all of us to believe stories that reinforce our convictions – and the stronger those convictions, the more powerfully the person feels the pull of confirmation bias.

It is huge operation trying to combat the effects of misinformation, given that by the time your employee is bombarded by the different dimensions from various sources it becomes very real and that would eventually become a pervading fact according to his/her opinion.

I write about this at this time because of the negative beliefs many workers have about taking the covid19 vaccine because of fake news, rumours, hearsay and misinformation. It is quite alright and natural, and is expected that workers will have questions and doubts, particularly in the case of this new vaccine, but the steps to bring resolution in an attempt to find the answers should be handled with care and indeed with skill.

Rumours are integral to our culture and society, and I am sure, so too in other countries. I remember instances of people sharing videos and images of flooding from past years knowing very well they were old images although they understood their action could inflict angst to workers and dwellers in the ar