AN OPEN INTERNET
Taiwan any of Asia’s many progressive democracies plus enjoys a much freer media environment than the authoritarian Chinese landmass, where a “great firewall” and state censorship keeps watch.
But this means false information often spreads effortlessly, both on major social media sites and much more local messaging planks such as PTT.
Taiwanese defence authorities said they had identified some 270 “false” online claims within recent weeks.
In one case, police arrested a woman charged of sharing a false message around the messaging app COLLECTION saying that Beijing had decided to evacuate Chinese language citizens in Taiwan.
In a press briefing, a law enforcement spokesman said the woman was trying to “destabilise Taiwan” by expressing the message.
In other widely seen posts, a caution message purportedly issued by China’s state-run Xinhua news agency erroneously claimed China and taiwan would “resume sovereignty” over Taiwan upon Aug 15.
The message – viewed more than 356, 000 times in the Chinese-owned app TikTok – said Taiwan’s army would be disbanded and that an opposition party politician will be installed as chief excutive.
The same claim also circulated repeatedly on Facebook.
AFP’s fact check team found no evidence that the state-run news agency experienced run such a statement.
Another video clip falsely claiming the particular Kinmen Islands — a collection of Taiwanese-controlled island destinations off the coast associated with mainland China : had agreed to become transferred to Chinese principle racked up a lot more than 80, 000 sights on YouTube within 2 days.
“SHAPING OPEN PUBLIC OPINION”
Summer Chen, editor-in-chief pertaining to Taiwan’s FactCheck Middle, said Chinese-language false information spreads rapidly plus widely, making it impossible for fact-checkers by yourself to entirely stem the flow.
“(Fact-checkers) mostly lay out the particular misleading claims and official clarification alongside, but by this time, the claims will have already achieved their particular purpose of shaping the public’s opinion, ” she said.
Since 2018, a small number of Chinese-language fact-checking organisations have been founded in Taiwan, most of them non-profit organisations, citing a growing need to tackle false information that they say seeks to destabilise the particular island’s democracy.
MyGoPen and Taiwan’s FactCheck Center are among the Taiwanese companies working with Meta, which owns Facebook, to reduce the spread associated with misinformation.
Chen said it was essential for Taiwanese people to think critically about what these people read online and not rely entirely on fact-checkers.
“It is easy (for us) to debunk this sort of misinformation, but it is more important for the public to rationally reject this kind of information and avoid dropping into traps, ” she said.