The prosecutors should be commended for tracking down the primary suspects responsible for spreading the rumors. Hopefully, they will take advantage of the public mood to intensify their efforts to investigate and prosecute other people who spread disinformation. However, rarely do the authorities discover where these fake news stories originate and seldom are the culprits punished. In doing so, they are clearly guilty of using a slippery slope fallacy, by which they posit a string of supposed causes and effects, and then intentionally exaggerating the extent of causation between each link in the chain, leading to a dubious conclusion. If a pundit swears to stand up for a political party and employs a slippery slope argument based on little or no evidence to criticize and attack an opposing party, then that pundit is either ignorant about logical inference or an incompetent commentator who makes false accusations about other people.

Source: Taipei Times December 11, 2019 15:56 UTC