A case study on fake 'Malaysia Kini' website

MP SPEAKS | If you are a follower of Malaysiakini page on Facebook, you should come across a clarification recently that Malaysiakini has been alerting readers about an imposter website.

I did not pay attention to it until there was a very weird sponsored advertisement which popped up on my Facebook timeline today. The sponsored content shows as if it is a piece of news from Malaysiakini, but it is clearly fake news. So who is sponsoring the fake news?

The culprit behind this particular fake news is a page called “Art News”, and it was newly founded - on March 2, 2020. Its web link URL is https://www.facebook.com/Art-News-105290151083000/. 

Mind you, you will not be able to get what you are looking for by searching “Art News” as it was so new. You can only get to the right landing page by keying in the page ID - “Art-News-105290151083000”.

The page has 14 posts on its timeline, and all of the posts are linked to the legitimate artnews.com, a 100-year art media in the United States. It has only been registered on Facebook for merely 10 days and yet, there are 7,387 followers and 7,362 likes. Hebat kan?

More interestingly, the page has 16 advertisement records for the same piece of news mentioned above, and the admin didn’t post that news on the page timeline. In other words, you will only trace all these if you click into the page transparency button.

If you click into their sponsored content that impersonates Malaysiakini, it will link you to the following URL: http://www.nelassa.com/lp/lim/. 

This page tries to impersonate Malaysia's biggest news portal by using “Malaysia Kini” (with a space between the words) as its name. However, it is obviously fake for any rational reader who clicks the link. So, the most important thing is the clickbait headline being shown on Facebook timelines that give users a false impression.

The most interesting part of this search is, I was directed to The Star's Instagram account when I clicked on the link of the Facebook advertisement record. It jumps from http://www.nelassa.com/lp/lim/ to https://www.instagram.com/thestaronline/

However, I don’t rule out the possibility that the fake page and its owner behind may just want to falsely link the MCA-owned newspaper into this disinformation warfare.

To stay clear from all the fake news and disinformation, one has to be very alert all the time with what you see (even just for three seconds) and read.

This article first appeared here.

WONG SHU QI is member of parliament for Kluang, Malaysia. A former journalist, she is an advocate for media literacy.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.