The Campaign

To combat fake news, we asked Waze users on the road to verify suspicious news. If there were no witnesses, we know the news wasn't real.

Creative Execution

Every day, Safe News Indonesia gathers all the news considered to be suspicious news in Indonesia. We then ask Waze users on the road whether it was true. This began on 13 January 2017 - and continues till this day. To be safe, we only trusted regular Wazers registered with Waze.

Media: This campaign ran on the chat platform of Waze, the most widely-used road traffic app in Indonesia. Result: There are more than 1 million users of Waze in Indonesia. According to Waze, it is one of the Top 10 Waze user communities in the world. Two days after we started Real Time Safe News, 80% of doubtful news was outed as fake news, thanks to Wazers. The time taken? 10 minutes, on average. Outcome: With limited means, Safe News Indonesia succeeded in meeting its desired objective faster than it dreamed possible: Determining if news was real or not – in real time. Social media in Indonesia went abuzz as word of this campaign spread quickly, without any prompting at all. This in turn helped to draw more users to Real Time Safe News, as online contributors and as online readers.

We decided to tap into Waze, Indonesia’s most popular community app for crowd-sourced traffic updates. Waze users report on road conditions all the time. In fact, they take great pride on sharing the most up-to-date information - as it happens, when it happens. This makes them the most reliable source to verify suspicious news. Especially since they are there in person - in real time.