Google holding company Alphabet Inc last week donated US$1 million to the Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) to help fund the center’s media literacy initiatives.
The money would be disbursed over the next three years under Google’s Intelligent Taiwan initiative to help combat disinformation campaigns, the company said on Thursday.
The funding would help finance about 700 trainers and 600 workshops, which would benefit 23,000 people, including older Taiwanese, people living in remote areas, Aboriginal communities and newly naturalized citizens, the firm said.
Google has identified these groups as highly vulnerable to disinformation in the digital age, it said.
The center would collaborate with groups such as the National Association for the Promotion of Community Universities, Fakenewscleaner, Taiwan Media Watch, the Association of Quality Journalism and National Chengchi University’s Center for Media Literacy in Taiwan as part of its objective of reaching diverse communities.
TFC chairman Hu Yuan-hui (胡元輝) said media literacy has never been more important, as COVID-19-related disinformation has been widespread in Taiwan for almost two years.
“It’s not just a single initiative about fact-checking. It’s a social movement about participation in and anticipation of democracy,” Hu said.
The center, jointly founded by the Association for Quality Journalism and Taiwan Media Watch, is a nonprofit organization that aims to fact-check publicly available information, improve the country’s information ecosystem and boost the quality of news, the center says on its Web site.
Disinformation about COVID-19 gained widespread attention in Taiwan after a domestic outbreak in May.
At the time, unverified stories started circulating on social media, including a false claim that a hospital had disposed of the corpses of people who had died from the virus in a river because the local morgue was at full capacity.
Another article falsely claimed that more than 20,000 people who had died from COVID-19 had been cremated in Taipei and even that some COVID-19 patients had been burned alive in the mass cremation.
Experts have described the sustained levels of COVID-19 disinformation as a “concerted offensive” and a “pressure test by the Chinese Communist Party against Taiwan.”
Google Taiwan senior manager for public and government affairs Anita Chen (陳幼臻) said a Google survey showed that more than 80 percent of Taiwanese had received misinformation.
However, less than 10 percent of respondents in the study had participated in any kind of media literacy program — despite 90 percent agreeing that the issue was important, she said.
Google has also come under scrutiny over the issue, with critics saying that it has not done enough to rein in the spread of misinformation on its products.
In March, Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai appeared before a US congressional hearing about the issue, amid discussion in Washington on whether tech companies should be held accountable for misinformation on their platforms.
UNCONVINCING: The US Congress questioned whether the company’s Chinese owners pose a national security risk and how the app might influence young users TikTok chief executive officer Shou Chew (周受資), confronted with an unforgiving, distrustful US Congress, tried to give answers in his testimony on Thursday that avoided offending either the US government or China. However, his evasiveness left Congress unsatisfied, with representatives hungrier than ever to punish TikTok for ties to its parent company ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), based in Beijing. He did not bring his company any closer to a resolution. Politically, TikTok is in a tougher spot. Its executives had been discussing divesting from ByteDance to resolve US national security concerns, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg. However, China this week said
The Investment Commission yesterday approved a Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) application to invest an additional US$3.5 billion in its Arizona subsidiary to manufactured advanced chips. The world’s largest contract chipmaker’s board of directors last month approved the funding project after TSMC started moving manufacturing equipment into the fab in December last year in preparation for the production of 4-nanometer chips next year. TSMC said it has also commenced the second phase of facility construction in Arizona. The second fab is to produce semiconductors using 3-nanometer technology in 2026. Altogether, TSMC plans to spend US$40 billion on the Arizona fabs, doubling its
Microsoft Corp has threatened to cut off access to its Internet search data, which it licenses to rival search engines, if they do not stop using it as the basis for their own artificial intelligence (AI) chat products, people familiar with the dispute have said. The software maker licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer Web search, such as Apollo Global Management Inc’s Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Last month, Microsoft integrated a cousin of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chat technology, into Bing. Rivals
KEY SECTOR: Taiwan’s new chip legislation is insufficient, and a more strategic ‘chip act’ that covers the whole semiconductor ecosystem is needed, MediaTek’s chairman said MediaTek Inc (聯發科) chairman Rick Tsai (蔡明介) yesterday urged the government to formulate a state semiconductor strategy and comprehensive “chip act” that includes local chip designers and smaller-scale semiconductor companies, as they are facing intensifying competition from China. The government is playing an increasingly important role in safeguarding the local semiconductor industry’s competitiveness, given that the US, the EU and Japan are offering hefty subsidies and significant tax incentives to build semiconductor capacity domestically, as they have realized the strategic importance of semiconductors, Tsai said. To implement such a program, the government should take steps to finance a “chip act,” Tsai said
RSS