Students play a role to do fact checking

Students from UNM’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences are part of a Malaysian initiative to conduct fact checking in a bid to combat misinformation. 

The five students are Muhammad Farhan Shahmi Abdullah, Nur Ain Nabila Mohamad Mazlan, and Stephanie Tan Zhi Ying from the School of Media Languages and Cultures, and Noor Alia Abrar Bestari Abrar and Joshua Ng from the School of Politics, History and International Relations. 

They will work with teams from three other universities under the leadership of FaqCheck, an organisation dedicated to fact checking, to identifying, verifying and reporting on information spread over various platforms that could potentially mislead audiences. 

Participating team members have undergone training provided by the Google News Lab on the techniques to conduct fact checking. 

The initiative plans to check information shared over various social media sites, chat apps, as well as other online sites. 

The UNM team is supervised by SMLC’s Gayathry Venkiteswaran. For more information, or to share content that could benefit from fact checking (subject to the decision by FaqCheck’s editorial team), please email: faqcheck.unm@gmail.com. 

More information about FaqCheck can be found here.