The public hearings by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods concluded on Thursday.

They ended with a marathon six-hour exchange between Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam and historian PJ Thum:

One thing that arose from the hearing was a discrepancy in the academic position Thum holds at Oxford University.

In his written submission to the Select Committee, Thum described himself as a Research Fellow in History at Oxford. At the hearing, however, Thum himself eventually confirmed, after questioning from Shanmugam, that he was in fact on a visiting professorship in Anthropology at the University of Oxford. Additionally, he admitted that he was not tenured with Oxford.

You can watch the exchange here (from 1:34 to 2:46):

Now perhaps with some irony, to wrap up a week focused on deliberate online falsehoods, a Facebook page with a seemingly authoritative name "Fact Check Singapore" took Thum's comments at the hearing and made it into the following image post:

This post made its rounds on social media. It garnered enough traction for Thum to reach out to the page to clarify, leading to the following follow-up post, and the first post above being removed by the page:

In case you can't see the post, here's what it said:

Pingtjin thum has reached out to clarify our early Fact Check. He has clarified that he is a "visiting research fellow in history within the dept of anthropology, while his full time post at Oxford is co-ordinator of Project Southeast Asia". Dr Thum goes on to explain that The Institute of Human Sciences, which is under the Dept of Social Anthropology, is multidisciplinary and so has a wide range of academics from different disciplines (sociology, economics, history, etc.) under its banner.

Fact Check

1. Oxford has a Faculty of History

2. There is a significant difference in being a Research Fellow and a Visiting Research Fellow

During the Select Committee Hearing, Dr Thum is on record identifying himself as "a Research Fellow in history and Co-ordinator of Project South-East Asia at the University of Oxford".

In light of Dr Thum's clarification, we have removed our earlier Fact Check to more accurately describe the situation.

[related_story]

"Fact Check" getting fact-checked

Certainly, a Facebook page with a name like "Fact Check Singapore" could have checked its facts more thoroughly before publishing.

The irony is that they wanted to show that Thum was not entirely accurate with his job description — and they did it by quoting him wholesale without doing their own fact-checking. And alas, they would go on to get "fact checked" by Thum himself.

Kudos to them for making the correction and taking down the original post, though. Unfortunately, this poor form has somewhat damaged its credibility judging from the comments it received:

And credibility is everything for a page which claims "to clarify misleading information on social media."

P.S. Priapism is a medical term for "persistent and painful erection of the penis."

More on PJ Thum's appearance before the Select Committee:

Top photo adapted via images from Fact Check Singapore Facebook page