Essay prompt draft 1

Because in Singapore politics, the vocal minority are able to express their views over social media, resulting in dissidents spreading hate and deceiving readers, the ministry of education (MOE) should start educating teenagers to be well discerning of false information.

How content people do not post, and discontent people post a lot.

Explain how people frustrated with something tend to post their views online more than people who are content, giving arise to the vocal minority.

No proper vetting, whatever they want to post can be posted.

Lack of rules and regulation results for a free for all online landscape, where almost anything goes and the reader is supposed to be well discerning. People easily believe what they hear easily. The spread of the most ridiculous news proves that many are often unable to discern from disinformation

Well sounding arguments with false figures can easily sway people. Especially dangerous are those information spread by individuals with vested interests as they can stir up the emotions of many to get them to support their cause.

Current solution 1. Regulation of news websites. For news websites which will have perceived added reliability (due to being news), the government takes the role of deciding if the news reported is true, and take the step to stop it. This approach is a reactive approach, and disinformation can still be spread in the forms of facebook posts and tweets which are almost impossible to regulate.

Proposed solution 1. A active solution would be to educate the masses to equip them with skills to be able to evaluate arguments and spot people who are trying to deceive others. Once people are able to discern for themselves what is true, and what may be trying to mislead, disinformation would not get much attention and be immediately frowned upon. It is only because so many people believe them that they are able to become so popular. One way to achieve this would be to introduce critical thinking classes in secondary school. Critical thinking helps people think and choose from themselves what to believe.

However, there might be reasons for why even the government might not want to correct the problem with education. By equipping the masses with such skills, it would become harder to run the government as citizens will become more critical towards their actions, and hold them to a higher standard.