Police yesterday questioned a suspect about a viral photograph of a spoiled-looking egg allegedly imported from Brazil, after the Ministry of Agriculture (MOA) filed a complaint.
New Taipei City Police questioned the suspect, surnamed Hsieh (謝), at the Taipei District Prosecutors’ Office, pending charges of “tarnishing reputation” under the Criminal Code.
MOA officials on Wednesday afternoon filed a judicial complaint regarding a Facebook post. The Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the Taipei Police Department found the Facebook account holder’s identity through his IP address. Hsieh, 43, resides in New Taipei City’s Sinjhuang District (新莊).
Photo: screen grab from Facebook
Hsieh told officers that he had made the post and insisted the “green spoiled egg” was for real, and he did not doctor the picture, investigators said.
Hsieh’s social media post on Monday last week showed a cracked open egg with its yellow yolk in a bowl tainted with green and black, and another bowl containing unidentified black liquid inside an egg shell.
Next to the two bowls was a clear plastic container with eggs. The container carried a Tai Nong Eggs Co label, the company based in Kaohsiung which has been criticized in previous weeks for mislabeling expiration dates on a batch of imported eggs.
Hsieh wrote in Mandarin: “On Sept. 18 I bought these Tai Nong eggs from Pxmart, and their expiration date is Oct. 7. May I ask, were these eggs imported?”
Hsieh also shared the Brazilian flag in his post, referring to egg imports from Brazil.
MOA officials said experts examined the photo closely, and concluded that the coloring looked “unnatural” and the photo could have been doctored.
“It is fake news aimed to damage the reputation of Taiwanese domestic egg producers and to undermine the MOA’s egg import policy designed to provide a steady supply to meet domestic demand. We remind the public not to share such disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement. “No confirmation can be made on where the egg in question had come from. We are requesting a judicial investigation to prevent people with harmful motives of spreading rumors and misinformation.”
If the photo is found to be manufactured, people sharing it could be breaching “offenses of tarnishing reputation” under the Criminal Code, and also could be contravening provisions of the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法), Taipei Police Department officials said.
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