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.
PRICE HIKES: The war in the Middle East would not significantly disrupt supply in the short term, but semiconductor companies are facing price surges for materials Taiwan’s semiconductor companies are not facing imminent supply disruptions of essential chemicals or raw materials due to the war in the Middle East, but surges in material costs loom large, industry association SEMI Taiwan said yesterday. The association’s comments came amid growing concerns that supplies of helium and other key raw materials used in semiconductor production could become a choke point after Qatar shut down its liquefied natural gas (LNG) production and helium output earlier this month due to the conflict. Qatar is the second-largest LNG supplier in the world and accounts for about 33 percent of global helium output. Helium is
STRONG INTEREST: Analysts have pointed to optimism in TSMC’s growth prospects in the artificial intelligence era as the cause of the rising number of shareholders The number of people holding shares of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) hit a new high last week despite a decline in its stock price, the Taiwan Depository and Clearing Corp (TDCC, 台灣集保) said. The number of TSMC shareholders rose to 2.46 million as of Friday, up 75,536 from a week earlier, TDCC data showed. The stock price fell 1.34 percent during the same week to close at NT$1,840 (US$57.55). The decline in TSMC’s share price resulted from volatility in global tech stocks, driven by rising international crude oil prices as the war against Iran continues. Dealers said
DOMESTIC COMPONENT: Huang identified several Taiwanese partners to be a key part of Nvidia’s Vera Rubin supply chain, including Asustek, Hon Hai and Wistron Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳), addressing crowds at the company’s biggest annual event, unveiled a variety of new products while predicting that its flagship artificial intelligence (AI) processors would help generate US$1 trillion in sales through next year. During a two-and-a-half-hour keynote address, Huang announced plans to push deeper into central processing units (CPUs) — Intel Corp’s home turf — and introduced semiconductors made with technology acquired from start-up Groq Inc. The company even said it was developing chips for data centers in outer space. At the heart of Huang’s speech was the message that demand for computing power
OPTIMISTIC: Inflation still has a chance of remaining below the central bank’s 2 percent alert level, as Taiwan’s economy is resilient with healthy exports, the NDC minister said Taiwan’s inflation could exceed 2 percent this year if oil prices continue to surge amid escalating tensions in the Middle East, prompting the government to reassess its economic outlook, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. DGBAS Minister Chen Shu-tzu (陳淑姿) told lawmakers at a meeting of the legislature’s Finance Committee that the agency’s earlier growth forecast of 1.68 percent in the consumer price index (CPI) and 7.71 percent for GDP this year did not account for the ongoing Middle East conflict and would need revision, if tensions persist. The previous forecast assumed an average international crude price of
RSS