KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 26): “Don’t try to debunk [fake news], you prebunk it instead,” said Dr Ian Lim Wern Han from the School of IT, Monash University Malaysia during a session on "Social Networks Content Algorithms and the Spread of Misinformation", at a data security forum at Monash University Malaysia on Wednesday. 

Prebunking fake news is essentially building misinformation resilience as a measure in tackling the issue of labelling knowledge and information which exists online. Coupling prebunking fake news with WoTC (wisdom of the crowd) is key to intercepting fake news. 

WoTC is the idea that the collective opinions, knowledge and judgments of a diverse group of individuals can be more accurate and insightful than that of any single expert or individual.

Lim argued that knowledge and information online is very difficult to label, hence, instead of focusing on moderation, users should focus on being diverse in mitigating fake news. 

Lim said fake news can be broken down into three categories, misinformation, disinformation and malinformation. To segregate fake news, Lim thinks that embracing WoTC as a tool is the most resilient way.

The idea is not to prevent manipulation of information, but to make the cost of manipulation so expensive that it is not worth the effort to manipulate it, said Lim. 

WoTC examples such as Reddit and X’s Community Note empowers users to collaboratively add context or information to potentially misleading posts. The collaborative concept allows information that is deemed truthful by the users to be disseminated, decreasing the likelihood of fake news to be received on platforms.