U.S. tech company Google Inc. donated US$1 million Thursday to the Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) to help fund the center’s media literacy initiatives.
The US$1 million will be disbursed over the next three years under Google’s Intelligent Taiwan initiatives to help combat the effects of disinformation, the company said.
Google’s financial input will help fund some 600 workshops and coach 700 trainers, which the company says will benefit 23,000 people.
The tech firm added that the money will be used to fund workshops for the elderly, people in remote areas, indigenous groups, and newly naturalized citizens in particular.
Google said these types of people are more likely to be at a disadvantage in the digital era, and hence more susceptible to disinformation.
Under the project, the TFC will collaborate with other domestic groups, such as the National Association for the Promotion of Community Universities, Fakenewscleaner, Taiwan Media Watch, the Association of Quality Journalism and the Center for Media Literacy in Taiwan of National Chengchi University, to educate people and reach more diverse communities.
TFC Chairperson Hu Yuan-Hui (???) said that media literacy has never been more important in light of widespread pandemic-related disinformation in Taiwan.
“It’s not just a single initiative about fact-checking. It’s a social movement and the participation in and anticipation for democracy,” Hu said.
The TFC, jointly founded by the Association for Quality Journalism and Taiwan Media Watch, is a non-profit organization that aims to fact-check information in the public domain, improve the country’s information ecosystem, and boost the quality of news, according to the center’s website.
In Taiwan, the increasing spread of disinformation gained particular prominence at the beginning of a domestic COVID-19 outbreak in May.
At the time, several unverified news stories began spreading on social media, including one that claimed a hospital in Taiwan had to dump the bodies of people who died from COVID-19 into a river due to a packed morgue.
Another article, falsely presented as a news report, claimed that more than 20,000 COVID-19 patients had been collectively cremated in Taipei — including some who were still alive.
Experts described the sustained levels of pandemic disinformation as a “concentrated offensive” and “pressure test by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) against Taiwan.”
Indeed, Google Taiwan’s Head of Government Affairs and Public Policy Anita Chen (???) said that a survey conducted by the company showed that more than 80 percent of Taiwanese people agreed they had received misinformation.
Yet less than 10 percent had participated in any kind of media literacy program — despite 90 percent of them agreeing that the issue was important.
However, Google itself has come under scrutiny for accusations it has allowed disinformation to proliferate unchecked.
In March, its CEO Sundar Pichai was called to appear before a U.S. congressional hearing over the issue, and debate is ongoing in Washington over whether to revoke legal protections that prevent tech companies from being held liable for disinformation published on their platforms.
Source: Focus Taiwan News Channel