In 2014, the Daily Mail published a story about a dystopian Beijing in which the smog is so bad that residents flock to outdoor screens to watch digital sunrises. Time, CBS, and the Huffington Post picked up the story. Only, as a Tech in Asia reporter wrote several days later, the story wasn’t true.
Stories like these run rampant on Taiwanese social media, and in 2013 several members of the online-offline civic movement g0v.tw built a browser extension called News Helper for crowdsourcing the identification of fake news. As of December, more than 17,000 people currently have installed the extension on either Chrome or Firefox.
Jessica S. McKenzie 