Vietnam highlights ASEAN’s need for task force against fake news
ASEAN needs to set up an anti-fake news task force, while developing a regional guideline and shared platform for prompt information sharing, proposed a Vietnamese official at a seminar held in Jakarta, Indonesia on January 20.
Trieu Minh Long, Director General of the Ministry of Information and Communications’ Department of International Cooperation (Photo: VNA)
Hanoi (VNA)– ASEAN needs to set up an anti-fake news task force, while developing a regionalguideline and shared platform for prompt information sharing, proposed aVietnamese official at a seminar held in Jakarta, Indonesia on January 20.
Making the proposal, Trieu Minh Long, Director General ofthe Ministry of Information and Communications’ Department of InternationalCooperation, reviewed a number of fake news prevention measures conducted bybloc members.
The measures included issuing related regulations,establishing agencies in charge of online news or anti-fake news centres,setting up hotlines, and using digital technologies to verify information.
He also mentioned the promotion of public-privatepartnerships between governments and social network providers to remove fakenews and false information, especially those related to the COVID19 pandemic.
He recommended that ASEAN countries increase the provisionof information from official government channels and enhance the education ofcommunications and information skills to help users distinguish and evaluate information.
The seminar on fake news and the handling of falseinformation in ASEAN was co-organised by the ASEAN Secretariat and the Economic Research Institute for ASEANand East Asia, inviting speakers from Vietnam, the Philippines and the technology giant ByteDance – the owner of TikTok.
We Are Social's global 2020 digital report showed that as ofJanuary 2020, 66 percent of ASEAN's population, or 439 million people, used theinternet, up 8.2 percent year-on-year. The bloc's rate of people using social networksstood at 63 percent, an annual increase of 7.7 percent./.
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Trieu Minh Long, Director General of the Ministry of Information and Communications’ Department of International Cooperation (Photo: VNA) 
