There are times when something you do on social media backfires big time, and Subang MP R Sivarasa has found this out the hard way.

He shared an image doctored to look like Prime Minister Najib Razak had made it to the cover of Time magazine. He linked the fake image to a list in the magazine that places Malaysia second in a global corruption round-up. The image was accompanied by some text which mentioned the USD681 million that was found in Najib’s personal accounts.

No one who bothered to look closely at the image would have mistaken it for a genuine Time cover. There were a few red flags. The graphics were amateurish, but most glaring of all was a mistake in the date of the purported issue. It was given as March 22, which was Tuesday, whereas Time magazine publishes only every Monday.

The posting garnered thousands of shares in mere hours. Some, thinking the image was genuine, expressed shock, but a few sniffed out the con job. The post was eventually taken down.

A pro-BN blogger jumped to Najib’s defence. He posted a fake Time cover of his own, featuring Sivarara’s portrait, just to prove it could be done. He criticised Sivarasa by calling him names and demanded an apology from him.

There’s a lesson to be learnt here. Think before you press the share button.

Had Sivarasa and the thousands of others who shared the post done a little research before clicking on the button, they would have spared themselves from becoming the butt of jokes. We should mention here that the sharers included several of Sivarasa’s colleagues in the opposition.

All it takes is a simple Google search to look for the magazine’s cover page on the given date. In this instance, Malaysia did make it into the magazine’s list, but the cover was definitely fake.

What Sivarasa and the other opposition politicians have done is give the government more ammunition to push for Internet regulation.

It’s only a matter of time before someone from BN cites this example to justify Putrajaya’s need to tighten its control on social media.