The recent indictment of a high-profile lawyer and her associates in Taiwan has sent shockwaves through the public, revealing a dark chapter of exploitation during one of the most vulnerable moments in recent history. Chen Yu-hsuan, formerly the chairwoman of the Changhua Bar Association, stands accused alongside a self-proclaimed vaccine broker named Lee of orchestrating a brazen $30 million fraud scheme. By preying on the urgent need for COVID-19 vaccines in 2021, these individuals allegedly manipulated the goodwill of the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, a group dedicated to humanitarian aid, turning a desperate global health crisis into a…

The pervasive worry that social media is a hotbed of toxic misinformation—and that cleaning up our feeds is the magic bullet for a healthier society—might be based on a misunderstanding of how we actually consume information. A major collaborative study, involving researchers from prestigious institutions like Stanford, Princeton, and NYU, recently challenged these assumptions. Over a three-month period during the intense 2020 US election, researchers cut exposure to content from untrustworthy sources by roughly 70% for over 15,000 users. Surprisingly, the data showed that this massive reduction had virtually no impact on people’s actual beliefs, their trust in mainstream media,…