Update May 6, 1400Hrs: A reader alerted Mothership.sg to an apology by Must Share News for plagiarising Mothership.sg’s content. MSN has now attributed the source and claims that it was “an oversight”. Mothership.sg was not contacted by MSN regarding their apology. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Must Share News, a website that allegedly publishes news and which is co-owned by ethically-dubious advertising network Gushcloud, has urged other news-related websites in Singapore to draft their own guidelines on what to write about.

Even as we all wonder who died and made them king, the seven-month old website issued this line of reckoning following the shutdown of socio-political site The Real Singapore.

As reported in TODAY newspaper on May 4, 2015:

To Mr Tan Wen Chuan, editor of Must Share News, the incident “offers a case study of what is acceptable and what isn’t, so sites like ours need to bear these in mind”.

He shared that his team has been working on editorial guidelines, in a bid to become more credible, and urged alternative media sites to come together to draft guidelines.

Before we proceed, here is a refresher.

If what Must Share News said sounds familiar, it is because this is similar to what Gushcloud CEO Vincent Ha said after Gushcloud was fired for their ethical violation over their role in Singtel's shoddy marketing practices in March 2015:

"Moving forward, my team and I are committed to doing better for everyone.

1. We have initiated talks with various industry partners including regulatory bodies and established companies to create proper guidelines for the influencer marketing industry.

2. We are implementing and educating the Gushcloud team and our influencers on a clear code of conduct and recommended practices."

(From Vincent Ha's Gushcloud Facebook)

Must Share News has a bad habit of theft

And here's the main reason why there is a chasm between credibility and Must Share News: They were caught stealing liberally borrowing content from Mothership.sg without any proper credit and even did so without bothering to hide their tracks.

Just last month in April, they copied images and lifted quotes from Mothership.sg's Cheryl's birthday article without attribution

Here's the proof of Must Share News directly saving an image from our page and using it on their own site without even bothering to change the file name.

And how are we so sure they took from us? Mothership.sg has a tendency to hide subliminal images like Dick Butt in our pictures. But in this case, we had cropped the image in a certain way by cutting off parts of the first word.

Can't see where the special crop is? We've circled it for you:

The letters "O" and "B" with parts of it cropped off from the original is our doing.

We know for sure because the original of this image was an "exclusive" we got from Singapore and Asian Schools Math Olympiads (SASMO) personally.

Even international news organisations acknowledged Mothership.sg as source of news

And here's the thing: It is hard to shake off the fact that Mothership.sg was the first site in Singapore to have spotted the Cheryl maths question.

Simply because all other international news sites acknowledged our role in breaking this piece of "news".

Guardian UK

BuzzFeed

Business Insider Australia

Stuff New Zealand

NY Daily News

Clearly, ethical guidelines -- how to not plagiarise, declaring conflicts of interests, avoiding dishonesty -- are needed in the online space more so than guidelines on what to write.

Come to think of it, it is Must Share News that needs to work on their guidelines.

Because they are the ones that badly need it.

Related articles:

“P5″ logic question is actually a Math Olympiad question for Sec 3 and 4 students

How a fight between Gen Y bloggers led to an apology by the CEO of a $68 billion company

Both Singtel and Gushcloud apologise for shoddy marketing practices

Xiaxue’s exposé Part 2: Website co-owned by Gushcloud questions Xiaxue’s motives for her exposé, downplays saga

Xiaxue’s exposé Part 2: Leaked phone conversation reveals Gushcloud co-founder has no qualms inflating advertising figures

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