Orchan Consulting | Asia Sdn Bhd

The Streisand Effect (Commentary by Jordan Low) Censorship is becoming one of the most loathed “dirty words” in the age of digital media. There are companies that view censorship as a quick fix to negative press that might be inconveniencing them. These companies believe that once they silence the source of negative press, the problem will go away. However, they severely underestimate the human hunger for information. The Streisand Effect is the name of one such phenomenon; whereby attempts to censor or hide information will inadvertently draw far more attention to the issue, usually facilitated by the internet. Jonathan Becher explains that the origin of the term stems from a lawsuit in 2003. Celebrity singer Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman for including an aerial photograph of her Malibu home. The photo was one of thousands he took of the California coastline for researchers to use to study erosion. Streisand claimed that the photos w...

Searching Beyond Google (Commentary by Aidi Shukor) I remember the first time I discovered Google, and that was when I was just 10 years old. It was a truly fascinating experience knowing that you could make images appear just by typing out a word or two. Fast forward to 2019, Google is now seen as the answer to all our questions and uncertainties (it literally is, I admit, at least for me as a university student). It finds restaurants for you, it shows you the latest news, and even translates things for you! And now with Google Assistant which is powered by AI, the possibilities are endless. As we continue to rely heavily on Google, little did we realise that as we search, it decides everything for us rather than the other way around. It is true, Google gives us the search results that it wants us to see and, in some cases, results that would benefit the company the most which brought to European Union’s accusations on its violation of antitrust law back i...

Who Buys Fake News? (Commentary by Aidi Shukor) I remember a time when my grandmother shared to everyone on WhatsApp (yes, she can use WhatsApp) that there was a UFO that landed in a paddy field in Kedah. Everyone in my family could tell that the video she shared was fake, because it was so badly edited, and, are UFOs even real in the first place? But, like any other passionate grandmother, she insisted that the video was a hundred percent real. Then, I thought, how many more people in this world are there who are just like my grandmother, in the aspect of believing all the news shared on social media is legitimate? Well, instead of trying to answer that question, we should actually be asking, “why is fake news so easily believed and shared by people?”. In a Malaysian context, it comes on a daily basis, and the people “buying” fake news today is increasing when it’s not supposed too! Even teachers fall victim to such news. For businesses, this is something they...