Lately, the retrenchment, VSS, and laid off has gotten more highlight online and offline. Although certain parties deny that economy is in crisis, but the fact that it has started impacting the manufacturing sectors earlier than expected is the sign that it will later impact downstream & upstream industries dependent on it.

Malaysia particularly Penang, where most of manufacturing facilities are residing have started to feel the pain. There are numerous emails saying this and that companies are going to close, VSS or take a long shut down during incoming holiday. Although there are indeed companies which are affected, but some appears to be inaccurate.

For instance, on one email circulated around (copy here) where it states that AMD Penang is going to offer VSS to 500 employees appears to be untrue. The truth is that, this is the number for worldwide retrenchment, as denied by its HR.

But if you do quick googling on this matter, a lot of blogs & forums have posted this news without doing any early fact finding. If you pay a little more attention to the end of first search result page (SERP), you’ll figure out the correct news. But the problem is most of us doesn’t pay attention to that and how many of us actually do some ‘googling’ or researhing before making any posts??

Yeah, I know that you’re not a journalist, but at least be little bit more responsible of what you’re writing.

Imagine if this post read by anyone who has son/daughter/husband/wife/relative working in AMD. What will they feel? And what will happen if they happen to have stroke or heart attack???

It is nature that such news gaining a lot of attention, and spreading like fire. Everyone wants a piece of traffics from such ‘breaking’ news right?? Everyone wants to be the first to report it without thinking of the consequences.

Obviously this is not the first case and not that serious. If you have a good memory, few months back there was a similar issue where a journalist from 1 local online news portal resigned after admitting posting a fake news that he received from unconfirmed resource.

But the damage has been done. It has been read by thousands of people who will misinterpret it, although he appologized about it later on (at least he does so once he’s aware of it). So the responsibility to post only accurate news not only at the hand premier online news portal or mainstream media (which we see sometimes lacking of it), but it has to start also from you and me as well.