Checking Facts by a Bot: Crowdsourced Facts and Intergenerational Care in Posttruth Taiwan

• Published in: Current anthropology 2024-08, Vol.65 (4), p.653-673
• Main Author: Lee, Mei-chun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chat rooms; Crowdsourcing; Embodiment; Gossip; Life experiences; Objectivity; Openness; Quality of life; Rumors; Volunteers
• ISSN: 0011-3204; 1537-5382
• DOI: 10.1086/730621

From the discussion of “posttruth” in 2016 to the “infodemic” in 2020, online rumors seem to have become more rampant, harmful, and harder to be debunked. This article examines Cofacts, a Taiwan-based fact-checking service that combines a chatbot and a database of fact-checked responses provided by volunteers to help debunk rumors circulated on the messaging app LINE. I argue that Cofacts’s crowdsourcing approach joins what Donna Haraway calls embodied objectivity that insists on “the particularity and embodiment of all vision” to challenge the conventional fact-checking practice that presumes singularity, disembodied objectivity, and authority. Underpinning Cofacts’s fight against online rumors is the intergenerational conflicts that are ingrained in different life experiences, beliefs and values, and expectations of what a good life is. By taking up a technological solution that emphasizes openness, Cofacts opens a space for digital natives to contest what fact is and claim the power of speaking from their parents and the patriarchal society on the one hand and to forge new connections of care and reinitiate conversations that have been barred by the invisible walls of chat rooms and the widening gap of values and beliefs between generations on the other hand.