Emergency Situations Department's Arafat: Not everything on Facebook is reality

Not everything that is posted on Facebook is reality, said on Thursday the head of the Emergency Situations Department (DSU) Dr. Raed Arafat, adding that people have to have insight.

"One reads, has free access to all information, and yet one has to sort the information inside their head, with their brains, and analyse and see whether that piece of information could be true," Dr. Raed Arafat told the private TV broadcaster Digi 24. 

He came with an example of a call two days ago to the single number 112 by which the dialer said there was a strong gas smell in the Victoriei Square.

"The firefighters arrived at the scene, obviously, the person who dialed knew exactly what the firefighters were to come with (...), the special machinery to investigate the gas, the chemical substances. All of the samples harvested by the firefighters reported negative. They left. A few hours on... Their picture there stayed on a Facebook account and everything was correlated to an investigation upon war weaponry, with the UN and all of these things. Such news must be extremely carefully thought of by the population, and filtered," Dr. Arafat explained. 

He recommended the people to "read with their brains instead of their emotions, and make the difference of what could be true from what could not" when seeing a piece of information on Facebook.