"According to the ministry’s AIS (negative content crawler) team's search result, the number of hoaxes, disinformation, and misinformation in January to May 2023 tended to increase when compared to the similar period of 2022," the ministry informed in a statement on Tuesday.
In January–May 2022, the number of hoax-related content identified by the ministry was recorded at 675.
According to the data, the number of hoax-related content increased by 35 in 2023.
In January–May 2023, the ministry found that hoaxes related to the government, such as fake reports on profiteering by public officials and fraud, were the most prevalent.
The hoaxes that were frequently circulated among the public were related to health, especially COVID-19.
In order to prevent hoaxes from circulating even faster among the public, the ministry has urged the people to be careful when they receive any information.
If they come across information whose veracity is in doubt, people can submit a complaint.
"The people can inform through the content complaint channels through the email: aduankonten@kominfo.go.id or Twitter account @aduankonten or through instant message application WhatsApp with phone number 081-1922-4545," the ministry said.
As a whole, the ministry's AIS team from the Directorate General for Application and Informatics has identified 11,642 hoax-related content in the period from August 2018 to May 2023.
The team found that hoaxes related to health were the most frequent, with the number of findings of such content pegged at 2,287.
They were followed by hoaxes related to the government, whose number reached 2,111, fraudulent content (1,938), and political content (1,373).
The ministry has been routinely monitoring the digital space, for instance, by forming the AIS Team in January 2018.
The AIS Team is responsible for scouring, identifying, verifying, and validating all Internet content, including on terrorism, radicalism, pornography, gambling, and other negative content.
Currently, there are 100 personnel in the AIS Team, who are supported by an AIS machine to crawl the negative content, which works 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
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Translator: Livia K, Fadhli Ruhman
Editor: Sri Haryati
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