Govt Official Apologizes for Uploading Hoax on Twitter

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - The Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform Minister Tjahjo Kumolo on Sunday issued a public apology after he uploaded a picture to Twitter lauding the construction of what he thought was an Indonesian toll road. His narrative turned out to be a hoax and that is in fact an image of a highway in Turkey.

The Minister, in his clarification tweet from his personal twitter account @tjahjo_kumolo, apologized for the mistake. “I apologize for the previous post which I thought was the West Java toll road, which in fact is not.” 

He claimed he was misled to believe the Turkish Mersin Antalya Highways construction was the West Java Cisumdawu Toll. His tweet with the false narrative has now been taken down.

Prior to his public apology, his tweet on Saturday initially lauded the toll construction to be one of Indonesia’s ‘coolest’ tolls that splits a mountain and further down the road goes under a mountain as a tunnel. 

Tempo’s fact-checkers found that similar hoaxes had spread on Facebook with false narratives claiming it to be in India, Pakistan, and Africa. An investigation by Tempo’s fact-check team compared the image Tjahjo Kumolo shared to a video of the highway featured in a Turksih youtube channel to confirm that it is, in fact, not the West Java toll construction. 

Read: Communication Ministry Shares Tips on Filtering Hoaxes

FRISKI RIANA