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Within two hours, other PTT users had refuted the original post
and traced it to an IP address registered in mainland China. The
post, according to PTT founder Ethan Du, was taken down that
same day. But false stories continued to spread throughout
Taiwanese social media and news outlets, even as doubts arose
when a Taiwanese tourist who had been stranded at Kansai
Airport said buses could not enter the flooded airport in the first
place.
Their report was released just one day after Su Chii-cherng, the
director-general of Taiwan’s Osaka representative office,
committed suicide. According to Japanese public broadcaster NHK,
Su left a note expressing that he was pained by the scathing public
criticism of his office, spurred by the cacophony of false reports,
for not doing enough to help its citizens.
What happened in Osaka, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang
said, was a situation “where people collectively look back and start
to think, maybe we rushed to conclusions. Maybe we should have
stopped and said: ‘Is it true or not?’”
Tang, who became Taiwan’s first digital minister in 2016, rolled out
the country’s pioneering vTaiwan digital platform for policy
deliberation and debate which, by encouraging participatory
behavior and open engagement with public officials, aims to help
eradicate the climate of fear and distrust in which rumors and
outright lies breed. Outside of government, Taiwan’s civic tech
community, g0v (pronounced “gov-zero”), has produced tools such
as Cofacts, a fact-checking social media chatbot, part of a culture of
innovation in Taiwan that has flourished under the shadow of its
neighbor, China.
“It’s great that [critics] can talk candidly,” she said, pulling up a
world map of press freedom by country on a projector and
pointing to Taiwan, alone in a sea of relatively unfree countries.
“We take pride in being the only green dot there.”
The line between disinformation and criminality, however, is now
at stake in Taiwan. Resulting legislation, if deemed to overreach,
could potentially threaten Taiwan’s green hue on the press
freedom map.
Prior to discussions of amending the National Security Act,
legislator Chiu Chih-wei of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP) proposed an amendment to Article 63 of Taiwan’s Social
Order Maintenance Act, which would make the spread of false
information online punishable by fines or detentions of up to three
days. The idea was slammed by opposition legislators, netizens,
and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
While momentum for such an amendment has petered out, some
officials do insist that Taiwan use the “sword of the state,” as DPP
legislator Cheng Pao-ching put it when blasting the National
Communications Commission (NCC) for not using a law allowing it
to punish broadcasters who fail to verify facts and promote
fairness in news and commentary. At the October 4 hearing, NCC
chairwoman Nicole Chan responded to harsh attacks from
incensed fellow DPP legislators by saying free speech concerns had
led to that particular sword being kept in its sheath.
The law would also put into law a clear distinction between
misinformed yet legal online speech and criminality. If
disinformation leads to someone committing a criminal offense,
she said, “of course it will be a threat to national security.”
Potentially thorny questions as to which online speech should be
defined as criminal in nature would be sorted out by democratic
processes. “For any emergent issue, there should be a multi-
stakeholder conversation with civil society, the social sector, and
international actors” once the bill passes, said Tang. The bill is
scheduled to be debated and voted upon by Taiwan’s legislature
this autumn.
Nick Aspinwall
The center quickly ran into financial issues during its response to
the false Kansai story, said Huang, who is also an assistant
professor at National Taiwan University’s journalism school. “We
didn’t have the money to hire an expert translator,” she said.
Eventually, she enlisted one of her Japanese-speaking students to
translate a list of seven questions which were sent to a fact-
checking center in Japan and forwarded to the Japanese
government.
Johnson Liang (left), founder of Cofacts, explains the LINE fact-checking chatbot's functionality
at g0v Summit 2018.
Editors respond to about 250 inquiries each week from over 45,000
LINE accounts that have downloaded the chatbot; real-time data
visualizations are publicly available online. Replies to popularly
submitted messages, said Cofacts founder Johnson Liang in an
open response to questions from The Diplomat, generally take one
to two days to turn around. The chatbot responds to about 70
percent of queries, according to Liang, and judges just over a third
of them to be false.
“The war of the 21st century,” said Huang of TFC, “is information.”
Taiwan is venturing into this present-day digital battlefield facing
the same hefty civic dilemmas as many of its democratic
counterparts. Its response may dictate whether it can be, as U.S.
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scott Busby said in remarks at
the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, an “invaluable model” for
its Asia-Pacific neighbors.
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