Verification Challenge Staged for Youth by Google and Taiwan FactCheck Center to Enhance Awareness

The Google News Initiative APAC Youth Verification Challenge 2022, an event spanning from April to September, saw its culmination on September 20 in a final battle among young aspiring fact-checkers during this year’s APAC Trusted Media Summit. 

The Taiwan FactCheck Center co-hosted with Google for the Challenge’s tutorials and regional contest in the Mandarin Chinese zone and the regional meeting of the Summit in Taiwan.

The Youth Verification Challenge Contest was a continued and expanded effort to raise awareness and increase verification knowledge among the youth since the first launch of 2021 GNI University Verification Challenge. 

This year’s verification contest was open to individuals aged 15 to 24 from the Asia-Pacific region, who joined first individually and then as teams to go through three “chapters” to obtain and build up fact-checking skills through tutorials and quizzes before the winners finally battled in the fourth and final APAC-region-wide live verification battle.

A total of 27 teams from Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore took part in the final battle of the Verification Challenge which took place on September 20, where five challenges were posed for the participants to solve in 30 minutes. (Screenshot)

Sharpening Fact-checking Skills and Teaming up for Contest

The first and second chapters, conducted in different languages for participants from different language zones, involved fact-checking tutorials and the sharing of fact-checking and misinformation-busting experiences and examples from seasoned professionals. 

In the Mandarin-Chinese zone, the experts included Taiwan FactCheck Center Deputy Editor-in-Chief Chaire Chen, Taiwan Cofacts Co-founder Billion Lee, Taiwan MyGoPen Editor-in-Chief Charles Yen, and Hong Kong FactCheck Lab fact-checker Gemini Chang.

The third chapter, dubbed “A Detective’s Test,” was a prelude to the final contest at the APAC summit, with participants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Malaysia participating in the detective’s test conducted in Mandarin Chinese. The teams were given time-based fact-checking challenges to utilize the skills they had learned during the tutorials. The teams could exchange their scores, accumulated from the quizzes in the first two chapters, for a “lifeline” or help from a professional fact-checking reporter. The winners were judged based on accuracy and speed.

The top three teams with the highest scores emerging from the Chapter 3 test in every language zone earned the chance to compete with other winning teams across APAC in “Chapter 4: Battle of the Finest” at the APAC Trusted Media Summit on September 20.

The Final Uphill Battle

At the APAC Trusted Media Summit 2022, a total of 27 teams from Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore took part in the final battle, where five challenges were posed for the participants to solve in 30 minutes. None of the five questions had straightforward answers, with the participants having to use multiple fact-checking skills – for example, Google Reverse Image Research would not have been sufficient for a mirror image – to reach the right answer.

The quizzes from the final Chapter of the GNI Youth Verification challenge are designed by OSINT guru Eoghan Sweeney. (Taiwan FactCheck Center/ Summer Chen)

The regional meeting of the Summit in Taiwan that the TFC co-hosted with Google also had a live verification contest-watching party, cheering for the three representative teams from the Mandarin-Chinese zone, which were Si-sen Group, AppleSucks (ASOP S2), and C3H80. 

Taipei session of APAC Trusted Media Summit 2022. The screen shows the keynote address, The Battle For Facts, by 2021 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Rappler CEO and founder Maria Ressa. (Taiwan FactCheck Center/ Summer Chen)

The guests invited to watch the contest included fact-checking reporters and high school civil education teachers, the latter of whom had encouraged their students to participate and were stunned by how the young generation had mastered the digital tools after learning the basics from the teachers.

The top trio of the 2022 APAC Youth Verification Challenge were respectively from India, Thailand, and Singapore. Each participant from the champion team had been awarded a Google Pixel 6. The TFC also awarded a total of NT$30,000 reward to the top three teams from the Mandarin-Chinese zone.