Thai Govt: Anti-Fake News Centre with 5 channels to be opened
Ministry of Digital Economy and Society (MDES) opens Anti-Fake News Centre on 1 Nov 2019 and in collaboration with Thailand’s Actions Taskforce for Information Technology Crime Suppression under the Royal Thai Police namely the Police Cyber Taskforce (PCT) to make public awareness over any viral online content that misleads people and its impact towards life and properties and damages the country’s image. It aims to help public obtaining and sharing correct data on social media platforms and prevent cybercrime.
MDES supervises, verifies, examines, and destroys those fake news which mislead public broadly. It is driven by a committee comprising of professions, academics, media press in planning, supervising, conducting, coordinating, analysing and resolving fake news as well as those online and social media contents.
Criterias in classifying fake news are its critical threats towards society broadly and could harmfully affect people’s lives and the properties. For example, epidemic, natural disaster, economics, environment, news that cause social divide, spur mass misinformation and ruin the country’s reputation. Code-of-principles of PCT are as follows:
- Fairness and unbias in news selection
- Privacy and liberal rights in news release
- Conflict of interests will not lead to any conflicts
- Equal treatment of the accused parties and other relevant parties
- Ability to elaborate the process of investigation, examination, source of reports and facts
- Adequate knowledge of suspicious news and people can verify the news unreservedly, faithfully, and transparently
- Independent organization
Anti-Fake News Center’s main responsibility includes monitoring and examining those online and internet contents, analyzing trends and indicators of fake news, coordinating with relevant parties to reproduce the correct information and dissiminating them to the data owner for onwards public release through media press release eg Thai News Agency, Association of Journalists or other medias or networks of public, private, and household sectors. Also, this Center encourages public knowledge, consciousness, and efficient tools for fake news examination. 4 main categories of news are
- Natural disaster eg floods, earthquakes, breakage dams, Tsunami, fire.
- Economics, financial and banking, stock market
- Healthcare products, toxic, cosmetics, other products and services illegally
- Govt policies, official news, peace and order, good morals, and national security
MDES is developing web application called Anti-Fake News Centre with online and offline and in accordance with international standards of International Fact Checking Network (IFCN). www.antifakenewscenter.com is official website to allow people sending information they find suspicious to this website and the result can be preliminarily checked within 2 hours. Other channels are Lineid: @antifakenewscenter; FB: anti-fake news center; Twitter: @AFNCTHAILAND; and 6th Floor, MDES. Besides MDES coordinates with main online networks and open discussions with govt units and workshops within Nov 2019 to come up with concrete action plans and representatives of respective govt units so that Anti-Fake News Centre can work efficiently and resolve the issues correctly and clearly.
