Disinformation: The Invisible Sword Dividing Society

Supermarkets have finally restocked their toilet paper in Hong Kong after weeks of panic buying when a rumor about toilet paper shortage due to closure of factories in China went viral. The toilet paper shortage did happen, but it was because of panic buying, not because of factory closure in China. How did the rumor spread? Was disinformation one of the culprits?

On February 25th, the Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter organized a Hong Kong Internet Governance Forum Roundtable on disinformation. On the panel was Eric Wishart, News Management Member at Agence France-Presse (AFP); Masato Kajimoto from the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the University of Hong Kong; George Chen, Head of Public Policy (Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mongolia) at Facebook; and Charles Mok, a local Legislative Councillor.

Did someone spread “disinformation” about toilet paper shortage?

While a lot of people think that the rumor on toilet paper shortage is a piece of disinformation or fake news, Masato reminded us that it actually is not. Disinformation is information that is deliberately created to deceive people, which is different from “misleading information.” In the case of panic buying toilet paper, some people made an opinion about toilet paper production Continue reading

Hong Kong Chapter: Why Aren’t There More Women in Tech?

The tech industry in Hong Kong and across the world remains male dominated. Why aren’t there more women and what can be done to fix this?

To mark International Girls in ICT Day, which aims to encourage girls and young women to work in information and communications technology, the Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter organized an event to tackle these questions. Ladies X Tech X Gents: How Are the Three Compatible? brought together four successful developers to lead the dialogue:

• Ivy Luk, Sales Engineer at Clare.AI (an Artificial Intelligence digital assistant solutions provider)
• Emma Wong, Organiser of Google Developer Group and Women Techmakers Hong Kong
• May Yeung, Director of Internet Society Hong Kong Chapter
• Rick Mak, Co-Founder of Oursky (a web and mobile application development company)

Why are there so few women in the tech industry?

A common observation among the speakers was the high dropout rate of women developers in the tech industry – amid the already low women to men ratio. The speakers noted that it drops from roughly 3:7 at school to 1:10 at work.

One of the main reasons women leave the tech industry is the gender stereotype that it is a masculine profession. Continue reading