Keeping up with Rumour Mongers

I welcomed the new year with a phone call from my brother a few hours before mid night urging me to go and fill up my car before 12 o’clock. He said that petrol price would be raised by 40 sen at midnight on the new year. He had heard rumours going around and people started queuing up at some filling stations across KL. I said I didn’t see anything unusual when I was driving back from office on New Year's eve. Besides, it would not make much difference if I filled up then or on the next day because the most I could save was only on a tankful of petrol. I would have to fill up the whole of water tank in my home to realise any significant savings from a sudden fuel hike.

Now just days into the new year, people are queuing up again at supermarkets because of rumours that cooking oil price would be hiked soon. It is a pity that we are the world’s largest producer of palm oil yet the government has had to ration it because of panic buying due to rumour mongering. Almost two years back there was severe shortage of sugar in some parts of the country because of rumours that the government would allow the price of sugar to go up. The shortage was severe then, as it is now, closer to border areas because of hoarding by traders hoping to make quick bucks when the price is actually increased. There are also a lot of smuggling activities along our porous border. Utusan Malaysia reports that it is now easier to get cooking oil in the town of Sg Golok on the other side of the border than in Rantau Panjang.

The issue here is not the price hike. Prices will always go up anyway because of inflation. The real issue is people’s tendency to believe in rumours and act irrationally upon hearing them. To me, this underlies public distrust of official sources of news and their natural tendency to believe in pseudo-news spread by SMS or chain e-mails. Recent spread of false SMS about ethnic riots in some parts of KL is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The mandatory registration of pre-paid mobile number does not seem to have the intended effect of controlling the spread of false rumours via SMS. And you cannot blame the public either because our official sources of news have thrown their integrity out of the window and at times they themselves become rumour mongers. If you ask me who started all these rumours, I will not be able to give an accurate answer. But in all likelihood, those who gain most from the spread of a rumour are the ones most likely to start it.

7 January 2008