Fact-check: 'Ban Islamic dept, Friday prayers' poster is fake

Fact-check: 'Ban Islamic dept, Friday prayers' poster is fake


A poster purportedly asking the new government to review the existence of and, if possible, abolish the Islamic Religious Department is fake.

The poster circulating on social media, purportedly quoting one computer scientist Andrew Ng Koon Dah, also calls for the government to relook into the necessity of Muslims performing their Friday prayers, as it “wastes time, disrupts traffic, and also contains elements that could cause violence against non-Muslims.”

A check revealed that the person who is pictured in the poster and is attributed to the fake quote is actually Andrew Yan-Tak Ng, a British-born American computer scientist and technology entrepreneur focusing on machine learning and AI.

The 46-year-old Ng was a co-founder and head of Google Brain and was the former chief scientist at Baidu, building the company’s Artificial Intelligence Group into a team of several thousand people. He is currently an adjunct professor at Stanford University.

There is no evidence linking Ng to Malaysia, let alone affairs related to it in any way, and neither are there reported instances where he has spoken about Malaysian-related matters.

Furthermore, the fake poster is at least three years old - debunked by Malaysiakini BM on Dec 31, 2019.


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