The nation’s biggest academic bulletin board system (BBS) is under investigation by the Ministry of Education after the system reportedly became a playground for night club employees and drug dealers to lure or defraud college students and Netizens.
Minister of Education Wu Ching-chi (吳清基) told the legislature’s Education and Culture Committee yesterday that the ministry had organized a task force to probe the allegations.
The investigation comes in response to a story in the latest edition of the Chinese-language Next Magazine, which hit the shelves yesterday.
CLUBS AND DRUGS
The story said employees of night clubs and drug dealers had managed to become discussion board moderators at the Professional Technology Temple, known to most Netizens in the nation by its acronym, PTT.
The BBS is run by students or graduates of National Taiwan University’s (NTU) Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering. PTT’s main system, PTT1, hosts about 20,000 discussion boards while PTT’s second system, PTT2, hosts about 30,000 boards.
MODERATORS
The moderators allegedly lured college students and youngsters into a life of drugs at night clubs, the story said, adding that some victims ended up with tens of thousands of New Taiwan dollars in credit card debt, with one NTU graduate student forced to halt his schooling after exhausting NT$300,000 in savings.
Responding to the report, NTU secretary-general Sebastian Liao (廖咸浩) told reporters that as the BBS is a public forum, any user, including non-NTU students, was allowed to post articles.
DELETED
Liao said the PTT had deleted the relevant discussion boards and that while the administrators of the system would screen the identity of Netizens who applied to be moderators of discussion boards more strictly, the system would remain open to the general public.
Liao said the school would investigate whether any NTU student had been affected as alleged in the story.
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