A bill submitted last week to the US Congress would call on US intelligence agencies to report on efforts to aid Taiwan as it battles Chinese influence in next year’s presidential election. While it remains to be seen whether the bill would boost US provision of intelligence and technical know-how to Taiwan or simply furnish a report after the fact, it is certainly a welcome piece of legislation in an area that seems to have stumped politicians.
For all their bluster about the threat of foreign meddling and false news reports, lawmakers have been slow to tackle the issue. Efforts discussed in the legislative chamber have largely been confined to beefing up fines against media outlets that disseminate false information, finding and punishing individuals who disseminate false news, and keeping foreign money out of political donations and ads.
The first method takes a narrow view of false or misleading information reported by traditional news media, such as TV and radio. While necessary to address, it fails to tackle the equally sinister effects of information shared online.
Laws that directly address the Internet target individuals who create or share such news, but this tactic not only consumes time and resources, it is often ineffective, as IP addresses are easily obscured.
Taiwanese lawmakers are not the only ones out of their depth on this issue. Governments have generally adopted one of two strategies: punish the platforms or strengthen the government.
Many European states have favored the former, with Germany last year passing an ambitious law that would require platforms to remove banned content within 24 hours or face a fine of up to 50 million euros (US$56.42 million).
While this type of “you break it, you fix it” policy might seem attractive, it comes with its own set of unintended consequences. Faced with such steep penalties, platforms will simply remove all flagged content. This strategy has already been exploited by actors who wish to silence others. Indeed, after only two months, Germany acknowledged that too much data had been incorrectly deleted and began drafting an amendment to address the issue.
In addition, requiring companies to police their own content would entrench the major players, once and for all wiping out any chance of competition — what start-up would be able to create a mandatory review division on the same level as those set up by Facebook and Twitter?
The second strategy is clearly rife with issues, to which media clampdowns in nations such as Malaysia and Russia can attest.
However, the legislature is not the only place such issues are being discussed. Taiwan is actually at the forefront of some exciting initiatives, even if they are not as flashy as a 50 million euro fine.
Most interesting among them is a project initiated by the civic technology collective g0v called Cofacts for “collaborative fact-checking.” The group collaborated with the Line messaging app to install a Cofacts bot that people can add as a friend. If someone is unsure of a claim someone sent them, they can simply forward the message to the bot. If the same thing was flagged by two or more people, it is sent to a board where editors can fact-check the claim and provide citations. After a reply is verified, any user who submits a fact-checking request for the same claim will automatically receive the verified response.
“People inoculate against that potentially weaponizable misinformation, so that it doesn’t actually turn into disinformation... It adds to the conversation without censoring anything away,” Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳) said while touting the initiative on April 24 at George Washington University.
The Web tangles issues of free speech, human rights and communication into a jumble unprecedented in human history. As one thread is straightened, the others constrict into a tighter knot. As politicians attempt to wade into the mess, they should be working with their civic and private partners to create solutions that address the root of the problem, instead of only punishing after the fact.
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