
Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship - panic
https://cpj.org/blog/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-combatting-disinfor.php
======
ilaksh
I don't know if it's the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang
about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc. I can
understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister. I have
never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better
technical discussion in my life. And the work she did on that project scaling
EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and also the creation of webworker-threads
years ago, to me those were very inspiring projects. Never interacted with
anyone with better technical abilities.

That interaction gives me the idea that if I am critical and she happens to
enter this thread, it will not fall on deaf ears. I don't really like sounding
negative, and especially in this case they are much better than most
countries.

What is described is better than China, but it's not ideal. However I do think
they should be commended from explicitly avoiding censorship to the degree
that they do.

However, communications from the government to counter other communications
identified as disinformation are government propaganda. If they are not
identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original
disinformation.

Secondly, making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as
she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship. It's just a
brilliant type of crowd-sourced censorship. I know the theory is that that
would only be applied to false information. However, censorship doesn't work
like that. The end result is going to be a worldview that is reduced and
shaped by a dominant group rather than the free flow of information.
Especially if it relates to all of the information that people in a country
can see. This can be very dangerous.

So I will just say what I think would be ideal even if it may not be very
realistic. The history of government propaganda and censorship should be part
of the public context. I think it is good to be able to flag articles as being
propaganda and from what source. However I think that removing things from
being visible entirely is very dangerous for freedom.
Taiwanese/US/Chinese/etc. government propaganda or counter-propaganda should
be identified as such if possible. Perhaps a generic way to say something is
propaganda or bias and a generic way to indicate where you think it's coming
from (could be a political party or country). However the news that I see from
large media, about 90% of it qualifies. I don't think it should be possible
for these flags to remove information from the stream. Although certainly
there can be standards related to removing things like gore -- but this needs
to be monitored to make sure that it does not get used for political
censorship.

~~~
laughinghan
> However, communications from the government to counter other communications
> identified as disinformation are government propaganda. If they are not
> identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original
> disinformation.

Yes, that's why you need an independent media, as mentioned in the article:
"The mainstream media, of course, then picks up this counter-narratives and
then do a balanced report."

> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it [...] all of
> the information that people in a country can see

From the article, emphasis mine: "stop being _preferred_ to show on people's
newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend,
that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-
checked as false."

They key word here is _preferred_. It's not blocked, but rather deprioritized
and contextualized.

Obviously, there's good reason to still be uncomfortable with this, because
this advantages the dominant worldview. Fundamentally though, tradeoffs have
to be made, to prevent things like the Rohingya crisis and the emboldening of
the far-right. Deprioritizing and contextualizing of fringe worldviews,
without fully blocking them, seems like a good tradeoff to me.

~~~
chatmasta
Would any of this be a problem if social sites would restore chronological
news feeds?

99% of these “problems” stem from newsfeeds that are algorithmic rather than
simply chronological.

~~~
laughinghan
First of all, there's a known, deadly problem of disinformation spreading via
WhatsApp forwarding [1], and I'm pretty sure WhatsApp notifications are
chronological.

But in any case, definitely none of this would be a problem if we got rid of
the Internet. What's your point?

Algorithmic newsfeeds benefit social media companies enormously (by increasing
engagement) and at least some consumers (I'm not denying they also hurt some
consumers). They'll never voluntarily give them up, and banning them would be
an extremely oddly specific measure that's probably unconstitutional and
definitely has lots of loopholes ("we're not an algorithm newsfeed---we just
prioritizing your notifications, like Gmail's Priority Inbox").

They're here to stay. We can fix them or come up with something better that
eclipses them, but there's no banning them.

[1]: [https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191455/whatsapp-
forward...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191455/whatsapp-forwarding-
limit-five-messages-misinformation-battle)

~~~
chatmasta
I never suggested banning anything. I'm merely asking questions. But sure, to
play devil's advocate, is there some precedent here? Maybe with cigarettes for
example?

Nicotine cigarettes benefit tobacco companies enormously (by increasing
addiction). They'll never voluntarily give them up, either. Yet we have
approaches for dealing with addictive consumables; taxes, health warnings,
education, etc. I wonder if similar approaches might work when applied to
social media.

~~~
laughinghan
Thanks for the thoughtful response; upvoted.

I don't think cigarettes are a relevant precedent. It's not like cigarettes
cause cancer in some people and make others healthier. (I guess it can make
you thinner? But yet it still increases your likelihood of heart disease.)

Algorithmic newsfeeds are a much better experience for many people, who don't
want thoughtful discussion and wedding and family photos buried under people
announcing to the world that they're pooping.

You also didn't respond to my point that deadly viral WhatsApp forwards refute
your contention that "99%" of disinformation problems are due to algorithmic
rather than chronological newsfeeds.

~~~
kikoreis
Other than rate-limiting, I don't know how you can avoid WhatsApp forwards
becoming a problem without violating E2E encryption. However, WhatsApp seems
to act more as an amplifier than as a net originator of content, so it makes
sense to look at places where misinformation is first published.

With pure timeline-based views, the ability to reinforce misinformation is
diminished -- yes, people can repost and troll news mechanically, but that can
be rate-limited. So I don't think we should throw the idea out the window just
yet.

~~~
laughinghan
I'm not sure what you mean about acting as an amplifier---how is that
different from social media like Facebook?

You might be right about the reinforcement being diminished, just like
misinformation existed before the Internet, but getting rid of the Internet
would surely diminish the reinforcement. Like I asked above, so what? There's
no going back.

------
mc32
Tang speaks of propaganda and disinformation and how historic propaganda by
the government is more or less indistinguishable from disinformation at least
by a significant segment of the population.

...But she says that to combat disinformation campaigns the government
ministries are in charge of pre-empting disinformation by disseminating their
version of information...

But that seems like a contradiction. Government was a source of misinformation
in the past, but now is the source of truth (as in the past). How is that
reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus
being propagandists?

Now, I get that the PRC has definite identifiable goals so it might be easier
to suss out here, but what about other areas?

~~~
ThrowawayR2
" _propaganda (n.) information, especially of a biased or misleading nature,
used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view._ "

If the Taiwanese government ministries were putting out information _of a
misleading or slanted nature_ in their official capacity, the press and public
would rightly call them out on it.

~~~
mc32
But the minister herself indicates the government did just that in the past

Beside, if the press and public could and would call out government propaganda
(which according to the minister is pretty much indistinguishable from
disinformation) why would they need the government to pre-empt and counter it
if it's easy to spot?

~~~
my_first_acct
In the "past" that the minister is referring to, Taiwan was a military
dictatorship; other than a few brave souls sitting in jail, there was no
political opposition, and there was no free press. There was no (legal)
alternative to government propaganda. Even publications from overseas were
censored (by ink and scissors) as they entered Taiwan.

The article suggests that today's government, under the careful supervision of
the opposition parties and the independent press (both of which now exist),
has resources that allow it to detect propaganda, and preemptively respond to
it, in a way that individuals cannot.

~~~
mc32
Let’s just say the KMT (blue) and the DPP (Green Party) have differing takes
on some things.

~~~
Ericson2314
KMT being basically pro unification means the PRC is more Chiang Kai-Shek
style than DPP I guess?

Conservativism trumps historical rivalries.

------
GavinMcG
There's an attitude in the United States that any and all legal restrictions
are "bad for business" and should be rejected out of hand. I think this
article offers a counterpoint: even with the restrictions the article
describes, these social media companies still find it worthwhile to be in the
market and to invest staff and tools to work within the law. One of
government's core jobs is to regulate the boundaries within which the market
competes, and this is a great example of that.

~~~
nine_k
Any restriction, well, restricts the space of available business moves.

OTOH not every restriction is going to ruin a business, or even affect its
bottom line materially. Certain businesses can even ask for a restriction if
the restriction limits them much less than it limits their competition.

~~~
bobthepanda
Is that a sufficient criteria to say that regulation is bad? As a society we
decide on minimum standards that businesses must follow; for example, if a
domestic American company needs child labor to survive we‘ve already decided
it‘s a company and jobs not worth having.

------
CharlesColeman
For a very brief time, late in the Cold War, the US State Department had a
_very shoestring_ team called the "Active Measures Working Group" who worked
to investigate and counteracting disinformation. They had some success, such
as uncovering the Soviet origins of the lie that the US created AIDS in a
military lab, but the effort was wound down after the Soviet Union fell:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-
meddling-d...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-
disinformation-fake-news-elections.html) (very good video series, highly
recommend for anyone interested in disinformation)

[https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-
russia...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-russian-
disinformation-targeting-the-u-s)

~~~
ilaksh
Off the top of my head, I don't have a bunch of links, but it is my impression
that propaganda and counter-propaganda are extremely important strategic
ongoing activities for all major governments including the US. This is due to
the relationship between overt state activities (i.e., they need to be
motivated by ethical concerns) and the press.

------
suiting
Wiki page of Audrey Tang:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang)

She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source
software.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
One of her projects, EtherCalc, is my preferred spreadsheet software of
choice. So it's a bit of a context shift to see political interviews! But her
position on combating disinformation without censorship seems pretty on-point,
and where I'd really like to see the conversation shift here.

------
mleonhard
Combatting disinformation will become more and more important for every
organization. I'm glad to see at least one government taking it seriously and
pushing social/media companies to actually do something and add tools. When
will we have degree programs in Disinformation Prevention and Control, Anti-
Manipulation, Discourse Integrity? How about job titles like Discourse
Protector, Media Accountability Officer, Fact-Checker, and Truth Wielder? I
think companies usually hire PR firms to do this work. That's like hiring
thieves to protect your valuables. It can work, but is it really the best
strategy?

------
cryoshon
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect
that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the
masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more
convincing narrative.

a very interesting approach that seems to be working for taiwan. i think that
European countries may be able to implement something similar with good
results. of course, it relies on the government ministries being uniformly
oriented against disinformation -- something that we in the US cannot manage,
as many elements in our government benefit from certain kinds of
disinformation.

notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the
government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think
that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship. i don't
have enough context to tell whether this is the case or not, but at the core
the entire taiwanese plan relies on the ministries as being able to tell the
difference between disinformation and facts. in other words, it's
fundamentally a critical-thinking based system.

~~~
Barrin92
>notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the
government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think
that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship

This is kind of how I see it too. I think if your goal is to combat
disinformation or propaganda you should just come out straight up and say it
because it's a perfectly defensible position to hold, but creating a
government counter-narrative isn't any more harmless than just censoring
something, it's just sounds nicer than having to use the word "censor" which
tends to make people in some parts of the word jump up in panic.

------
komali2
> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the
> Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on
> people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for
> that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says
> it's already fact-checked as false.

That'd be very interesting if the Taiwanese government was in direct
communication with Facebook over something like this. CPJ wasn't able to get a
hold of Facebook, I wonder if anyone here has visibility into something like
that? Given that the US government took a more "combative" approach (dragging
executives in front of Congress) I'd be curious how more tame approaches like
this were being received.

~~~
gdhbcc
It is censorship though. Part of the job of the censor is to determine whether
the likelyhood some information will be seen, justifies the censorship in
question.

You can read the censor reports from the estado novo for example, and in many
of them the censor declined to ban the book because even though it was
objectively illegal, it would naturally be a book that wouldn't be sought
after by the general public, and so only those who knew about it would look
for it.

I'd say this is an even more pernicious form of censorship because you dont
know what you dont know.

------
NicoJuicy
I can't wait to go to Taiwan, the country seems to be amazing and this
confirms it.

I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it
gets resolved one day.

~~~
vehementi
Just imagining how disappointing it must have been for Taiwan when democracy
failed, again, in China (on my mind due to the Tiannamen Square massacre 30
year anniversary)

~~~
throaway5533
Just a nitpick, Taiwan wasn’t yet a democracy in 1989. It was close, but they
had to wait until 1996 before having their first democratic elections.

------
zachguo
Isn't this sort of media manipulation? How is it philosophically different
from censorship?

> We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other
> instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a
> bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for
> collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core
> functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap,
> and then you can flag it as disinformation.

Is it making the whole system more vulnerable to manipulation? Trolls only
need to click twice now instead of drafting a comment. In the end, it would be
a race of who has the biggest troll farm.

------
eric_khun
is anyone interested in an hn meetup in taipei? found it hard to like-minded
tech focused people, talking English, that dont mind a beer from time to time,
and would like to talk about the last google cloud downtime or it's current
side project

~~~
komali2
We're moving there soon so I'll preemptively put my hand up. Feel free to
email me, or pop a link to some means of communication and I'll hop in!

------
wazoox
Wow, that's Audrey Tang, of Perl6 (pugs) fame. A serious hacker.

~~~
jdonaldson
Yeah, my impression of Taiwan just went up again.

------
MVf4l

        China is making an effort to influence public opinion in Taiwan through the media.
    

Take a look at this post I saw a few days ago.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551)

While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it.

What people saw is disinformation that _looks like_ from China, or China
_looks like_ is the most beneficial one from the disinformation. But it
doesn't necessarily mean it's from China. There might be third parties faking
it to sabotage the relationship between China and Taiwan. Aka false flag.

Or simply put, I could create disinformation about me, then I crack it. That
will probably discredit my competitor, even though he/she did nothing.

Of course, people could call this conspiracy theory, because lack of evidence.
Similarly, people shouldn't consider that so-called China's effort is true. At
least to me, I won't be so sure before I see some solid evidence.

~~~
komali2
Taiwan is a critical democratic ally off the coast of communist China - why
would US intelligence agencies attack the public perception of the sovereignty
of the nation?

------
Isamu
Audrey Tang's github profile:
[https://github.com/audreyt](https://github.com/audreyt)

------
dominicl
Great approach, and a smart minister. Living in Taipei I can only congratulate
the country for this lively and young democracy. If you consider moving to
Asia, Taiwan is the most forward, fair and open society.

~~~
komali2
I'll second that.

I was there during the sunflower protests. Student activist sat in the
parliament building for a couple days. The entire country rallied to their
cause. Restaurants sent food, small shops (Taiwanese equivalent of Bodega)
donated water, businesses sent pillows and blankets.

If you tried that in China,you'd be sent to a xinjiang reeducation camp. At
the very least.

A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese
history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply
incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a shining
and obvious example otherwise.

Not to mention the absurdly low cost of living, one of the best public transit
systems in the world, socialized healthcare, strong education system churning
out competent professionals, and mountains... My partner and I are preparing a
semi permanent move in the next few years.

Edit: if anyone is curious, I documented my cost of living there back in 2014.
Fair warning, I did so as a much younger, relatively naive dude, but the
data's there anyway: [http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-
live...](http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live-in-
asia.html?m=1)

~~~
pcwalton
> A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese
> history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply
> incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a
> shining and obvious example otherwise.

Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely
annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.

~~~
jhedwards
Having lived in China though the scale issue does seem to be a problem. A
brief Google shows that Taiwan has a population of a little over 23mil whereas
Hunan province alone has around 67mil and Sichuan has 87mil people. Add to
this that because of lack of development and the legacy of Mao many of these
people either have no education or live in remote mountains or both.

I'm not saying this means democracy is impossible, but if you work in tech I'd
hope you'd be able to at least recognize that doing democracy in Taiwan is not
even remotely comparable to doing it in China because of scale issues alone.

~~~
i_am_proteus
What would prevent a federal system from working in China?

~~~
pishpash
For one, you'll get the same problems as all the homeless pouring into
California, or poorer Central Americans pouring over the border, and the
subsequent backlash. Democracies will not support the sort of development
model that China has pursued of massive wealth transfer and development of the
hinterlands. Developed areas will want to wall themselves off but less
developed areas will want populist policies. Add on top of that ethnic issues
that would be easily exploitable by demagogues. More likely than not the
country falls apart.

Don't be so smug, the US and EU are only getting a small taste of the sort of
problems that China has been facing for several thousand years as a diverse
centralized state, and are already resorting to the sort of things that China
ended up having to do with respect to social control and stability.

~~~
komali2
Why doesn't India have this problem?

~~~
pishpash
Well yes, the other model is India where they tolerate certain problems and
let them go on forever, but people can bitch about it. Analogous to the
phenomenon of adults peeing and doing drugs on the streets of downtown SF.

Not saying it's better or worse in the end but at the least, the experiment
goes on.

~~~
komali2
India is trying very hard to solve their problems, I'm curious where you get
the idea that they're letting them "go on forever."

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/world/asia/india-
toilet-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/world/asia/india-toilet-
movie.html)

Regarding peeing specifically, India has a Nationwide push for increasing
toilet infrastructure. The change over the past five years, let alone ten, is
dramatic. Possibly faster than anything in human history.

I also don't understand why you think nobody is doing anything about people
using the restroom on the streets of SF - new bathroom trailers are being
added. It's not much but it's something, and more are coming.

If you have other ideas, would you like to join me tomorrow at 2pm for the
next board of supervisors meeting to present them to the city?

------
nabla9
EU has also project that tries to combat disinformation

EU vs Disinformation campaign

[https://euvsdisinfo.eu/](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/)

~~~
mleonhard
From their About page, they are focused on disinformation coming from the
government of Russia. Do you know if they do anything like Taiwan's 60-min
response goal with accountability?

[https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/)

------
vincvinc
The real nugget in here is their solution for dealing with fake news spreading
on private social networks: it needs a centralized list just like with email’s
spam problem!

> Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every
> mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag
> that as spam you're essentially donating the signature of this message. It's
> not involuntary. It's a voluntary donation to a global system called the
> Spamhaus, the Domain Block List, and so on.

> There's a whole system for that. It's like the email's immune system so that
> after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated
> the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach
> the recipient, it's not censorship, but it goes to the junk mail folder so
> it doesn't waste people's time by default.

> We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other
> instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a
> bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for
> collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core
> functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap,
> and then you can flag it as disinformation.

------
iamnothere
> First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually
> observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited
> testing or A/B testing, and that's before it became really popular. It's
> just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so
> to speak.

I have definitely seen this happen in real time. Suggest it publicly and
you'll be accused of being Alex Jones, but it happens. Glad to see a public
official acknowledging this.

> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach
> this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and
> so that protects like a vaccination.

Strange that I've just come across a paper related to this notion:
[https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268](https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268)

An interesting approach, might be an oversimplification of real-world dynamics
though.

> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the
> Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on
> people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for
> that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says
> it's already fact-checked as false.

This is much better than removing the post, but it still makes me nervous.
Just imagine that we're in the early 2000s, and you can envision a banner
saying "The claims in this article are FALSE. As confirmed by the intelligence
community and the New York Times, Iraq is actively working on its nuclear
weapons program." Perhaps they should have a policy limiting the use of this
tool when it comes to issues that may lead to war.

~~~
turk73
I can tell you all about how the propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq
invasion was pulled off. They had agents on message boards and all over the
Internet even back then. They even drafted the comedian, Dennis Miller, to go
on late night tv shows multiple times and push the propaganda there. I was
astounded that very few people were talking about what a sell job it all was.

Just to refresh everyone's memory: Saddam didn't have WMDs. It was a total put
up.

We need to somehow get these intelligence agencies and their deep state
buddies put back in a box.

~~~
frenchy
IIRC didn't they get bad intel from Iraqies who wanted an invasion (because
they didn't like Sadam)? I think they might have known the intel was suspect,
but didn't ask too many questions.

I grew up among conservative US expats who didn't have message boards and
mostly didn't watch television. I think you underestimate the desire of some
Americans to relive their glory days and "liberate" other countries.

Edit: I think most of them didn't really even care about WMDs, they just knew
Sadam was an evil person (and to be fair, he was).

------
new4thaccount
For those that don't know, Audrey Tang was involved or wrote one of the early
Perl6 VMs in Haskell iirc. I can't remember if it was Pugs or Parrot. The
language still has Haskell roots.

~~~
audreyt
It was Pugs. :-)

~~~
new4thaccount
Haha. Always good to be corrected by the subject in question :)

Thanks for the hard work in helping to get that project off the ground btw. As
a language user and not an implementor, I sometimes feel bad that I use so
much open source software without giving anything back except word of mouth
approval.

I haven't read the full article yet, but I'm sure it is an immensely
complicated situation balancing individual freedoms versus the spread of
"disinformation". That is what I got from skimming last night. In the US we
have so much of this right now with anti-vaxxers and people turning against
medical science in favor of fraudulent cures like "essential oils".

------
pellaeon
This is the transcript of the original interview:
[https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-
stev...](https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-steve-butler)

In the interview concerns of government over-control did turn up, but it
wasn't well addressed I think. The journalist skipped this part in the
published article.

------
AnthonyWnC
Hard to take the article seriously given it's not even remotely objectively
written. I guess it's another political org mouthpiece.

------
trhway
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect
that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the
masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more
convincing narrative.

why wait? In many situations/events it is very predictable what fake news and
disinformation will appear in say the next hours, so it is possible to do
totally preventive Truth "injections" well before the disinformation appears
(sometimes even before the originating situation/event happens itself).

One of the most important aspects in fake news and disinformation spread is
the receptivity of the given populace to the fake news and information. That
receptivity is based on many factors, like education, prejudices, economic and
social situation, etc. For example, by systematically performing daily "ground
Truth" disinformation "vaccinations" government can work on decreasing the
prejudices and thus decreasing the disinformation receptivity of the populace.

~~~
gunnm
I believe the 60 minutes is the 'max' time to respond, not the 'min' time.

------
tareqak
The comparison of disinformation to a virus and proactive counter-messaging to
a vaccine understandable. It's also interesting because the words "virus" and
"vaccine" only make sense in relationship to the host. In this case, are the
people of a country the "host" or just the government in charge?

