Fake News Buster

Fake News Buster was part of The Virus Vanguard, a team of five fictional superheroes introduced by Singapore’s Ministry of Communications and Information (now Ministry of Ministry of Digital Development and Information) on 20 April 2020 as part of the Gov.sg platform’s efforts to promote COVID-19 safety measures. Each character was designed to personify specific guidelines to combat the pandemic - Fake News Buster’s role was to combat misinformation related to COVID-19.

Gov.sg published a now-deleted backstory of Fake News Buster:

Fake News Buster wields the Mallet of Truth and wears a suit with force enhancing nodes to generate power when knocking sense into people. Otherwise, he is Felix, a corporate cog data cruncher in his late 20s.

Backstory: Felix was a flat earth believer until he failed his geography in secondary school and could not follow his girlfriend to the same JC. Devastated, he denounced flat earth and all things fake.

With his single-minded focus to study and memorise all the world’s information, he became a walking supercomputer, and a legit Fake News Buster to eliminate what he deems to have cost him his ultimate love.

Abilities: Walking Wikipedia and Google combined. Able to decipher big data and cull out facts or known truths.

Weakness: Maps or anything resembling a map (including suspicious-looking birthmarks) will render him into a temporary state of catatonia.

Plans for the Virus Vanguard were shelved on the same day as its introduction due to severe backlash online. Some expressed concerns that the characters were confusing and potentially trivialized the severity of the pandemic. Three of the five superheroes courted controversy: MAWA Man (seen as disrespecting Liverpool Football Club), Circuit Breaker and Care-leh Dee (accusations of plagiarism).

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