The Cabinet last week announced a plan to commission a third party to establish a fact-checking mechanism to combat rampant “fake news” on the Internet. While rumors and false information could be any governing entity’s bugbear, caution should be exercised when trying to contain them, as the red line of free speech could easily — and inadvertently — be crossed.
Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) — the Cabinet’s young tech prodigy and “civic hacker-turned official” — is reportedly to help coordinate the establishment of fact-checking mechanisms on Internet platforms, which are to notify users if posts they are interacting with contain fake news.
In a reply on Facebook to critics of the proposed measure, she cited a fact-checking tool recently rolled out by Facebook — in cooperation with Snopes.com and the Associated Press — which alerts users to “disputed content” when they attempt to share a story whose veracity has been challenged by the independent fact-checkers.
“It is important to be able to have immediate access to balanced reports, under the precondition that freedom of speech is not sacrificed,” she said.
However, her remarks have been challenged, with some asking how she will ensure that freedom of speech is not harmed and that the tool is not used for censorship, especially as the government seems to be lurking behind the mechanism.
The concern is all the more real after Cabinet spokesperson Hsu Kuo-yung (徐國勇), while stressing that alerts would not block users’ ability to share disputed content to ensure freedom of expression, said that users who ignore warnings and “share disputed content anyway would face subsequent legal consequences.”
However, the critical question in the example Hsu gave — in which an individual might be in violation of the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法) if they post disinformation about birds dying of avian influenza after the government has already clarified the situation — is how would authorities become aware that the person spread the false information?
If the law against spreading misinformation about diseases is already in place and has been effectively enforced — as evidenced by cases of people being fined for violating it — what more would the new fact-checking tool offer other than improved monitoring of public comments? The issue still boils down to whether the government will be overly proactive in overseeing online comments.
There is a risk in the government having the authority to unilaterally proclaim what is fake news, and it has so far failed to expound on what its relationship with the proposed third-party fact-checking mechanism will be.
If anything is to be established, it should be an intragovernmental mechanism to ensure that the government is providing correct and full information to the public. All too often it is the government’s belated disclosure of information that is interpreted as a reason for the public to disbelieve what the government is saying.
It is also worth remembering that it is not just social media, but more traditional outlets as well, that have sometimes spread unsubstantiated reports.
Facebook’s attempt to cooperate with third-party fact-checkers to warn users of disputed content is an interesting — and probably a responsible — development, as it has been criticized for helping spread such news. However, it was not a government-initiated program.
The government — run by an administration that touts its progressiveness and calls for transitional justice from the “Big Brother” state of the Martial Law era — is expected to be more aware of and sensitive to such implications.
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