Volunteers of Fake News Cleaner guide students through the LINE app to identify fake news during a class in Kaohsiung City, southern Taiwan on March 16, 2023. An anti-misinformation group in Taiwan called Fake News Cleaner has hosted more than 500 events, connecting with college students, elementary-school children—and the seniors that, some say, are the most vulnerable to such efforts.They’d head out to a church, a temple, a park and set up a stall.
Like any democratic society, Taiwan is flooded with assorted types of disinformation. It touches every aspect of a person’s life, from conspiracy theories on vaccines to health claims aimed at promoting supplements to rumors about major Taiwanese companies leaving the island. Yet many of the people most affected are the least tech-savvy. Fake News Cleaner believes addressing this gap requires an old-school approach: going offline. At the heart of the group’s work is approaching people with patience and respect while educating them about the algorithms and norms that drive the platforms they use.
With just one formal employee and a team of volunteers, Fake News Cleaner has combed Taiwan’s churches, temples, small fishing villages and parks, spreading awareness. While they started with a focus on seniors, the group has also lectured at colleges and even elementary schools. Early on, to catch their target audience, Hsieh and her co-founders would get to the hiking trails near her home by 5 a.m. to set up a stall while offering free bars of soap to entice people to stop and listen.
At Bangkah Church, the audience watches Tseng as he lectures the audience about content farms, websites that aggregate content or generate their own articles regardless of the truth, and how these content farms make money. He also asks: Do the articles have bylines? Who wrote them?