Between last year’s US presidential election and the recent proposal in Taiwan of an anti-espionage act, the issue of fake news on social media has been a focus of much attention.
A few days ago, the Executive Yuan and the National Communications Commission (NCC) announced that they are looking to establish a cooperative relationship with Facebook and other social media Web sites in an attempt to establish a fact-checking mechanism.
Because the plan is to use Internet service providers’ keyword checks in combination with clarification by government agencies, it has been criticized as being too dependent on program algorithms and as being partially politically motivated.
In the US, Facebook’s current test method is to allow users to make reports, while also using systemic methods to detect content that is potentially false, and then pass such information on to independent third-party organizations for fact-checking.
If determined to be fake news, content will not appear as readily among the dynamically served up content on the Web site.
As content is not checked by Facebook alone, the process does not rely on opaque algorithms and the information is passed on to a neutral, specialized organization, this seems to be a more reasonable approach.
The question is how to find an organization with public credibility to fact-check news content if Taiwan were to adopt this approach. The fact checking of large volumes of daily news would require a large specialized workforce and this is not a responsibility that every non-governmental organization is capable of taking on.
If the task were handed to a government agency, it could easily develop into something of a public relations agency for the government, which would sacrifice the necessary independence.
Perhaps the responsibility could be handed to a mainstream media outlet, but that would raise the question of whether there is a commercial media outlet that does not belong to either the pan-blue or the pan-green camp, as well as which organization would not be influenced by advertisers or big investors.
In practice, public media outlets are the most likely organizations to have the public credibility required to engage in checking and verifying social media information.
Under current law, Taiwan Broadcasting System (TBS) would be the media organization best able to ignore commercial interests, while at the same time having quite a large number of professional media workers and not generally being criticized for having a particular political stance.
Given its workforce and newsroom resources, TBS would of course not be capable of taking on the full load of fact-checking the huge volume of social media content.
One possible way would be to let TBS coordinate a “national team” of media outlets, including the Central News Agency (CNA) and Radio Taiwan International (RTI), and divide the Internet and social media Web sites between them.
Another way would be to follow through on the Ministry of Culture’s long-standing promise to increase the legally specified budget for the Public Television Service (PTS) and use the extra resources to increase the workforce available to reign in fake news.
However, an increased workload would not be the only obstacle to letting TBS handle fact-checking. Doing so would also ignore the sluggish response of large media organizations compared with fast-paced and constantly changing social media Web sites.
One way of dealing with this problem would be to let a number of independent media outlets that specialize in certain areas — and are also are familiar with how the Internet works — participate in fact-checking under the direction of TBS.
Fact-checking by a combination of TBS and independent media outlets would be the most feasible solution in Taiwan’s media climate.
Even more important, the essence of the “post-truth” era crisis is not the prevalence of rumor, but rather the increased speed with which fake news is passed around among an already divided public.
People with different views embrace the rumors that they want to believe and this creates a stratification of opinion that blocks social dialogue.
Fake news is not only a matter of misusing data or basic facts, it also includes the intentional use of biased statements to distort context.
The best way to restore context is to rely on the professional media workers at TBS and independent media outlets that will not be influenced by political and economic interests.
When parsing social media for fake news, keyword algorithms frequently miss more instances than they catch, which leads to further controversy. This is why authorities should work to establish cooperation in fact-checking between Facebook, TBS and independent media outlets.
On the one hand, this would reduce the dissemination of rumor on social media, while on the other hand, it would promote the diversification and qualitative improvement of news reporting and resolve the threat to democracy that is posed by fake news.
Chad Liu is an associate professor of journalism at National Chengchi University’s College of Communication.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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