STOMP shared a video which it claimed is from Stomper Widayawati alerting them to a Facebook video uploaded by The Local Society on June 17.

The SPH website which is supposed to be the bastion of ‘reliability’ did not do the basics of journalism – ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, and ‘how’. It merely quoted another unknown website as the source of its news.
If STOMP had done a simple Google search of the words of the video-taker, “I stopped sneaking this video and started waving at the baby saying hello and making funny faces!”, it would have discovered that the video was actually taken by a Facebook user, Cesia Meria, who is from Katsushika-ku, Tokyo, Japan.
Cesia captioned her video, “At Mcdo taking a rest after work with Karen for a cup of coffee… but….Just in front of me is a Filipina Mother….And how heartbreaking seeing this baby being hitted continously putting tissue paper inside her mouth (not on this video) ! Can’t stand it so instead …I Stopped sneaking this video and started waving at the baby saying hello and making funny faces! The baby stopped crying and keep on staring at me with teary eyes …. I tried to get the baby attention! Thanks God she Did stopped crying! Bakit kaya may mga ganitong Nanay????”
Cesia eventually removed the video from her Facebook after netizens criticised her for not doing anything to stop the child abuse besides filming it, but not before others had downloaded her video and shared it in other platforms.
If you had not seen the video, this is it:
[fvplayer src=”http://youtube.com/watch?v=Esq_s1kbZiM”]
The incident allegedly happened on 16 June (Thursday) and what the website The Local Society had done is downloaded it from ‘don’t know where’ and slapped their logo onto the video to give the impression that the footage was its original content. And STOMP just shared it without basic fact-checking.
By doing so, STOMP has misled several of its readers.
One of its readers, Aishwariyah Shanmuganathan said, “MSF needs to be alerted. A toddler that young does not deserve to be treated like that!!! Shutting the child’s mouth in such a manner can suffocate and kill the child! When dogs are abused, people go berserk…, the owner is tracked down and the dogs are rescued. this is a child people!!”
Sabta Wapunya, another one of its readers said, “bloody stomp.. instead stomp and make funny face be a man stop this so-called mom from hurting the child or get some help.. bloody goondoo .. stomper.. we are singaporean.”
When a Facebook user Judy Teo asked the SPH website why the video-taker did not do anything besides just filming it, STOMP replied, “Hi there, you may click the link to read the article to find out what he did.”
The original video-taker is not even a ‘he’!
But the original video-taker did do something, she handed over the video footage to the local authorities in Tokyo, Japan.
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