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.
STIMULUS PLANS: An official said that China would increase funding from special treasury bonds and expand another program focused on key strategic sectors China is to sharply increase funding from ultra-long treasury bonds this year to spur business investment and consumer-boosting initiatives, a state planner official told a news conference yesterday, as Beijing cranks up fiscal stimulus to revitalize its faltering economy. Special treasury bonds would be used to fund large-scale equipment upgrades and consumer goods trade-ins, said Yuan Da (袁達), deputy secretary-general of the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission. “The size of ultra-long special government bond funds will be sharply increased this year to intensify and expand the implementation of the two new initiatives,” Yuan said. Under the program launched last year, consumers can
Citigroup Inc and Bank of America Corp said they are leaving a global climate-banking group, becoming the latest Wall Street lenders to exit the coalition in the past month. In a statement, Citigroup said while it remains committed to achieving net zero emissions, it is exiting the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA). Bank of America said separately on Tuesday that it is also leaving NZBA, adding that it would continue to work with clients on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The banks’ departure from NZBA follows Goldman Sachs Group Inc and Wells Fargo & Co. The largest US financial institutions are under increasing pressure
TRENDS: The bitcoin rally sparked by US president-elect Donald Trump’s victory has slowed down, partly due to outflows from exchange-traded funds for the token Gold is heading for one of its biggest annual gains this century, with a 27 percent advance that has been fueled by US monetary easing, sustained geopolitical risks and a wave of purchases by central banks. While bullion has ticked lower since US president-elect Donald Trump’s sweeping victory in last month’s election, its gains this year still outstrip most other commodities. Base metals have had a mixed year, while iron ore has tumbled, and lithium’s woes have deepened. The varied performances highlight the absence of a single, over-riding driver that has steered the complex’s fortunes, while also putting the spotlight
Ibiden Co, the dominant supplier of chip package substrates used in Nvidia Corp’s cutting-edge semiconductors, might need to dial up the pace of production capacity increases to keep up with demand, company CEO Koji Kawashima said. Sales of the 112-year-old company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-use substrates are robust, with customers buying up all that Ibiden has, Kawashima said. That demand is likely to last at least through next year, he added. Ibiden is building a new substrate factory in Gifu Prefecture, Japan, which is expected to go online at 25 percent production capacity around the last quarter of next year before reaching 50
RSS