The National Communications Commission (NCC) yesterday said it had communicated with Meta Platforms about a rising number of scam messages on Facebook.
The commission made the remarks after Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇) on Tuesday accused the NCC of allowing Meta to spread fraudulent job advertisements created by trafficking rings seeking to lure Taiwanese jobseekers to Cambodia, where they would face abusive working conditions.
Ying said the ads remained online even though police have notified Meta about them.
Photo: Yang Mien-chieh, Taipei Times
The NCC has the authority to ask Facebook to take them down, but it apparently chose to do nothing, making it a coconspirator of the scammers, she said.
NCC Department of Broadcasting and Content Affairs Director Huang Wen-che (黃文哲) said that the councilor’s statement misrepresented the commission’s authority.
“We have expressed our concerns with Meta, which pledged to handle false advertisements with their existing mechanism,” Huang said, adding that police should notify the Facebook operator about keywords that appear regularly in scam schemes.
Facebook did not say whether users would be shown a pop-up alert when they search “Cambodia” or other typical keywords.
A recent rise in online fraud also highlights the need for the legislature to pass the draft digital intermediary service act, which the NCC proposed to address challenges that arose due to increased use of online platforms, Huang said.
“People are wondering whether Facebook itself is capable of regulating the content on the platform. The draft act authorizes the creation of a specialized organization to coordinate among different stakeholders, which ensures that such matters can be handled in a timelier manner,” he said.
The draft act also stipulates that platform operators can only be exempt from responsibility for content under certain conditions, such as when they properly address users’ complaints, Huang said.
The commission said in a statement that controversies and illegal content on social media should be jointly tackled by government agencies.
“The Executive Yuan has stipulated strategic action plans against next-generation frauds, which will form an united front against Internet scams by combining efforts of the NCC, the Ministry of the Interior, the Financial Supervisory Commission and the Ministry of Justice,” it said.
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