Defamatory post that an Indonesian citizen had lodged a police report in Singapore, alleging that he had been sodomised by Anwar.
Detractors wasted no time, making use of social media to thwart Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s attempts at a political comeback.
Just a couple of hours after Pakatan Harapan said it would monitor social media to neutralise attempts to sabotage the PKR president-elect’s campaign for the Port Dickson by-election, a post claiming that Anwar sodomised an Indonesian student in Singapore recently went viral.
Anwar’s team, led by PKR communications director Fahmi Fadzil, quickly denied the allegation which among others, claimed that the victim had lodged a police report.
Umno Supreme Council member Lokman Noor Adam took down the defamatory Facebook post on Anwar after being alerted that it is fake news.
“I have checked and removed it. I have announced that the statement is untrue,” he told The Malaysian Insight.
“I posted about a sodomy case in Singapore. But upon checking with the source, it didn’t happen.”
Earlier, Singaporean publication beritamediacorp told Lokman to remove the post and denied that it was the source of the report referred to by Lokman.
“We have been told that Lokman claimed his post was sourced from beritamediacorp,” said the media agency.
“This is not true, and the news spread by Lokman is fake news.”
Beritamediacorp is a Bahasa Malaysia news portal under Singaporean conglomerate Mediacorp.
In the post, Lokman said an Indonesian citizen had lodged a police report in Singapore, alleging that he had been sodomised by Deputy Prime Minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s husband.
“The incident is said to have happened in Singapore recently.
“Her husband is Anwar Ibrahim. The victim is currently being guarded by Singapore police in a hospital,” said the post by Lokman, who was a communications director in the Finance Ministry under the Barisan Nasional government.
A check found that Lokman had posted on his Facebook account a correction that beritamediacorp did not publish the news.
Fahmi said with the advent of technology, people could use whatever means to disparage and slander others.
He urged the media to verify reports with the Pakatan team to curb the spread of fake news.
“If 50 million people can have their Facebook accounts compromised, we too need to be on our toes. It has happened before and can happen again,” he said.