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)

Making the proposal, Trieu Minh Long, Director General of the Ministry of Information and Communications’ Department of International Cooperation, reviewed a number of fake news prevention measures conducted by bloc 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-private partnerships between governments and social network providers to remove fake news and false information, especially those related to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

He recommended that ASEAN countries increase the provision of information from official government channels and enhance the education of communications and information skills to help users distinguish and evaluate information.

The seminar on fake news and the handling of false information in ASEAN was co-organised by the ASEAN Secretariat and the Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and 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 of January 2020, 66 % of ASEAN's population, or 439 million people, used the internet, up 8.2 % year-on-year. The bloc's rate of people using social networks stood at 63%, an annual increase of 7.7 %.