The Power of Rumour

When I first came to Malaysia I remember being shocked to the core by a news story I read in the now-defunct Sarawak Tribune. The story reported a police case in which someone had been spreading rumours through SMS (Short Message Service). The police threatened to arrest the culprit, and charge them under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act (ISA) which allows for detention without trial for at least two years!

I remember thinking then, in my naive Western Liberal fashion: goreblimey luvaduck gawd bless the Queen Mum, how can you be arrested just for spreading rumours? Surely rumours are just rumours, right? Well, as I have discovered since my time in Malaysia, rumours are not just rumours. They can be very dangerous weapons.

The other night, just twenty four hours after returning from Spain, I received an SMS from one of my colleagues informing me that all petrol stations in Malaysia were going on strike for five days starting from the next day. Something to do with the recent rise in petrol prices.

Of course I smelled a rat straight away. For one thing, how can the petrol stations go on strike – they are surely making money hand over fist with the petrol price rises? And in any case, as anyone who reads this blog will know, I can sense a blatant scam from 20,000 miles away, so it was obvious to me that the whole thing was a setup to fleece bucketloads of cash from frightened motorists.

But She Who Must Be Obeyed – aka the wife – sent my son and I out on separate missions to top up our two cars’ tanks JUST IN CASE. And indeed, the Petronas stations we both went to were jammed with panicking motorists rushing to fill up before the Deadline of Doom arrived.

And of course, just as I suspected, the next day saw every single petrol station I passed working perfectly normally – no strike, no closed pumps, but I’m sure every station had a planet-sized skipful of cash hidden away at the back waiting to be taken to the bank.

And why were we taken in by this scam? Because of the power of rumour.

A few days later, the Inspector-General of Police, Tan Sri Musa Hassan, announced that those responsible for starting the rumour about the petrol strike will, if caught, be prosecuted under the Internal Security Act. History repeating itself...

And you know what? This time I wasn’t shocked or indignant at such a strong statement by the police. I agreed with it entirely. That’s because, in the few years I have lived here, I have come to realise how damaging rumours can be – even to the extent of making thousands of people waste their evenings by queueing up at the petrol station for no reason.

I have come to appreciate that in Malaysian culture, and indeed in Islamic teachings, rumour-mongering is not only a social crime, it is a sin. Muslims call it ‘fitnah’, and it is considered as bad, if not worse, than murder to Muslims.

Add to this the high ownership of mobile phones with SMS capability, and the fact that information, and the means to verify it, are often in short supply, and you have a powder keg waiting to go off.

I worked it out – all you need to do to cause real trouble is to send an SMS to one friend saying something dangerous like “X is having an affair with Y” or “there will be a tsunami tomorrow morning”. That friend sends the message to five friends and each of them send it to five friends and so on and so on until you have hundreds if not thousands of chattering or panicking people who receive the rumour within a short span of time. What started off as a simple statement, probably sent in jest, can expand exponentially until it becomes something much greater, uglier and more frightening.

As Adolf Hitler is supposed to have said: “when a lie becomes big enough, it becomes the truth”. And Hitler didn’t even have SMS!!