Be aware of fake news

We all share the responsibility to sharpen our listening skills and distinguish between news and fake news, says Neels van Heerden.

He who has ears, let him hear. In Communication 101, students learn that the sender encodes a message before it is transmitted through a communication channel, and a recipient then decodes the message to make sense of it. All sorts of disruptions, however, can cause the message to be poorly formulated and coded. Deficiencies in a communication channel disrupt a message, and a recipient distorts the decoding of a message – and that often means the message makes little to no sense.

Our president repeatedly appeals to all South Africans to wear masks, wash our hands and maintain social distance. The subsequent Government Gazette, published shortly after the president’s speeches, unfortunately contributes to large-scale confusion as it often contains rules that create room for different interpretations. It distorts the message.

FAKE NEWS SPREADS

quickly afterward as nonsense is more easily believed than an official announcement by the government. The main reason for this is that we have little faith in what the government communicates to us or we do not understand what the agenda is.

In my opinion, there is a complete misunderstanding among senior decision-makers in the tourism department about the unique nature of camping. Therefore, this industry is simply regarded as a form of accommodation.

Many petitions, pleas and submissions regarding the camping industry were addressed to the Minister of Tourism and her advisers, but they fell on deaf ears. Her advisers were simply unable to decode our messages – not even the personal conversations people in the tourism industry had with her directly. All we wanted was for her to try to understand that camping worldwide is considered extremely low risk in terms of spreading the virus. Therefore, all COVID-19 regulations contained in the Government Gazette are still simply applied to accommodation in general.

IN DECEMBER, A LOCAL AUTHORITY

on the Cape West Coast closed its campsites to the public’s dismay. They issued an official statement that the closure was done to protect lives. Dams and game reserves in the Free State were also closed, without them even being in a so-called hotspot. That local authority’s justification was that they wanted to prevent large numbers of anglers from hotspots travelling to the dams.

People are ‘too lazy to work’, soon became a refrain on social media. However, the regulations announced in early 2021 make it clear that beaches, dams, lakes and rivers and all connected leisure facilities had be closed.

We ‘hear’ that our ‘fun and entertainment’ is being curtailed, but we do not ‘hear’ that the spread of the virus must be stopped in a preventative manner – even in regions that have not (yet) been declared hotspots.

I give full marks to those campsite owners and managers who gave credits to campers who shortened their camping stay, and those who turned their websites into efficient communication channels.

Camping-oriented social media has an obligation to stop the spread of fake news. We all also have a great responsibility to sharpen our listening skills in order to separate the wheat from the chaff when we receive videos that spread nonsense. Good listening skills are an asset and an internal ‘nonsense detector’ a must.

Camping-oriented social media has an obligation to stop the spread of fake news