Questions for CoFacts - Coda Story
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Names and Roles:

> Founder of Cofacts project, full-stack developer (Mainly front-end)
> [name=johnson]

### Q1 - Broadly, what are your personal thoughts and concerns about the current or potential impacts of disinformation in Taiwan?

Deomcratic societies rely on people making judgements, arguments and debate based on observations of facts. Disinformation mislead people with incorrect observations, breed anger, misunderstanding and gaps between groups in a society, ruins the space of public debate and finally degrade democracy into populism.
I think this applies to any democratic countries; but in Taiwan, due to its sensitive position between the U.S. and China, wrong decisions can have broad impact that affects how people in the world perceive Taiwanese people.
> [name=johnson]

### Q2 - What are some specific challenges or concerns around LINE, that differentiate it from other popular platforms in Taiwan, such as Facebook and Twitter?

LINE is much more like whatsapp, you would have personal chatroom and private group with each friends ans contacts.Which means your discussion and chatting content are more like secret to each other rather than broadcasting to everyone. Facebook and twitter have public post and retweet, share and public comment, however in LINE,they have been all in closing chatroom.This means while people were forwarding disinformation, and sharing their emotion, they would be all in the"bubbles" or so called echo chamber.
> [name=bil]

As Bil has said, it's relatively difficult to aware that something is being circulated between closed messaging apps like LINE. Even closed or secret facebook groups can contain more members in a group than LINE groups, which menas more chance for messages inside to propagate to public space; but in LINE such propagation across secret / public border is relatively difficult.
I think this issue is not specific to LINE in Taiwan. It is also the case for Thailand, where LINE is also super popular. In India fact checkers are also suffering from similar situation, with LINE replaced by WhatsApp.
> [name=johnson]

### Q3 - Since the election, and also after the initial wave of Covid-19 disinformation, have there been new trends when it comes to disinformation with a likely Chinese origin?
Some factor or element would be shown when there is a likely Chinese originated disinformation, simplified Chinese, Chinese Mandarin terms and misunderstanding to Taiwanese policy or organizational structure, these words and phrase could be easily fact-checked as Chinese propaganda when it pops up with some political issues and public opinion with misinformation.
> [name=bil]

### Q4 - As a company, has LINE been approchable or collaborative on this issue? Can you discuss their role as a platform?

LINE as the social platform which follows the serious policy, they don't do any censorship in the closing chatroom.
> [name=bil]

LINE's CSR branch is tackling with misinformation / disinformation by running an fact-checking official LINE account -- https://fact-checker.line.me/ . It has a automatic reply chatbot & public database like Cofacts', but only allows partners to compose replies.

LINE teams up with IFCN certified fact checkers in Taiwan -- like [Taiwan FactCheck center](https://tfc-taiwan.org.tw/) and [MyGoPen](https://www.mygopen.com/), and also individual fact checkers like [Rumtoast](https://www.rumtoast.com/). We are also invited to access the dashboard of that fact-checking official LINE account. All partners listed above can publish their fact-chekcing report on the platform and the offical LINE account.

Therefore, LINE's efforts tackling this issue works more like a 'platform' -- it collects user-reported hoax, and have fact-checkers outside LINE to reply to them.
> [name=johnson]

### Q5 - What more can LINE do to either make your work easier, or allow for more rapid detection of disinformation?
I supposed it might be media literacy lessons.The most effecctive way to combating disinformation might be education for different ages.
Currently, LINE has their own media platform called LINE today, it would refer other media or news platform, and duplicate the content to this platform.Usually it would contains fact-check reports or debunking content.
For Cofacts, bringing collaborating contributors to this project or fact-checking network could be an great way to improve the crowd sourcing fact-check alliance. No matter they are engineers, designers, fact-checkers, or researchers, each collaborator could easily find their position out in this project.
> [name=bil]