Videos that started appearing in Taiwan this month raised eyebrows, as they seemed to feature the nation’s leader promoting cryptocurrency investments.
The videos featured President Tsai Ing-wen, known for her frequent clashes with Beijing over her island’s autonomy. In these clips, she seemingly states that the government contributed to the development of investment software for digital currencies. a statement more typical of China than Taiwan. The blurriness of her mouth and an unfamiliar voice led the Criminal Investigation Bureau in Taiwan to identify the video as very likely a deepfake — an artificially created parody — possibly produced by Chinese agents.
China has long attempted to destabilise the Taiwanese information landscape with false narratives and conspiracy theories, with the aim of undermining its democratic system and creating divisions among its citizens in an effort to gain control over its neighbouring territory. Now, as concerns about Beijing’s escalating aggression increase, a fresh wave of false information is crossing the strait that separates Taiwan from the mainland, ahead of the crucial January elections.
However, the small island appears more prepared than most to deal with the incoming flood of disinformation.
Taiwan has developed a level of resilience to foreign interference, which could be a template for the many other democracies heading to the polls in 2024. This includes a well-established community of fact-checkers, government investment, international media literacy partnerships, and a generally sceptical public, after repeated warnings about Chinese intrusion.
The challenge is to keep up this stamina.
“Fear, uncertainty, and doubt are the main battlegrounds, created to keep us awake at night so we don’t respond to emergent threats with new defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s first digital minister who focuses on strengthening cybersecurity defenses against threats like disinformation. “Our main goal is to remain agile.”
Taiwan, a notably digital society, has repeatedly been identified as the primary international target for disinformation originating from foreign governments, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative that looks at the internet and politics. Allegations have been made against China for spreading false rumours during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19, researchers have pointed out. The visit of the US House of Representatives speaker, Nancy Pelosi, to Taiwan last year sparked a string of major cyberattacks and a wave of debunked online content and images, which fact checkers have traced back to China.
Despite Beijing’s numerous attempts, however, it has struggled to shift public opinion.
In recent years, Taiwanese voters have elected President Tsai from the Democratic Progressive Party, a party the Communist Party considers an obstacle to their aim of unification. According to experts and local fact checkers, there was significant concern over the Chinese disinformation campaigns during local elections in 2018; however, they appeared less successful in 2020 when President Tsai was reelected by a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, holds the lead in polls for her successor.
President Tsai has repeatedly commented on her administration’s efforts to counter Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as responding to criticism that her strategy aims to suppress speech from her political adversaries. She stated at a defense conference this month, “Our objective is to equip the public with knowledge and tools that can refute and report false or misleading information, while maintaining a mindful balance between preserving the freedom of information and rejecting information manipulation”.
Many citizens of Taiwan have developed an internal alert system for questionable narratives, said Melody Hsieh, who co-founded Fake News Cleaner, a group that promotes information literacy education. The group has 22 speakers and 160 volunteers who provide anti-disinformation tuition at educational institutions, temples, fishing villages and elsewhere in Taiwan and offer incentives such as handmade soap to encourage participation.
This group is just one part of a robust network of similar initiatives in Taiwan. There are organisations like Cofacts, which offers a fact-checking service incorporated into the popular social media app, Line. Doublethink Lab was headed until recently by Puma Shen, a professor who gave testimony this year to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an autonomous U.S. governmental agency. MyGoPen is named after a phrase in the Taiwanese dialect that translates to “don’t fool me again.”
Residents have sought assistance from fact checkers when they encounter suspicious content, such as when questions arose about videos exhibiting black and green yolks in the midst of a recent controversy over imported eggs, according to Ms. Hsieh. This level of demand would have been unheard of in 2018; it was the passionate sentiments and damaging rumours during a contentious referendum that year that inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.
“Nowadays, people will pause and ponder: ‘This seems unusual. Can you confirm this? We suspect something,’” said Ms. Hsieh. “I consider this to be progress.”
However, fact-checking in Taiwan continues to be complex. Recently, there have been several false claims surrounding Mr. Lai, a vocal critic of Beijing, and his summer trip to Paraguay. Fact checkers revealed that a memo central to one claim had been tampered with, adjusting dates and monetary values. Another claim originated on an English-language forum before being cited in Mandarin by a new account in a post that would later be shared by a news site in Hong Kong and boosted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.
The disinformation efforts of China have had “measurable effects” such as increasing polarization in Taiwanese politics and society and exacerbating perceived generational divides, says a study from the RAND Corporation. The concern about fake news related to elections prompted the Taiwanese government to establish a task force dedicated to the issue last month.
Taiwan has historically been the testing ground for Beijing’s information warfare efforts, and China has been interfering in Taiwanese politics through social media since at least 2016, says RAND. In August, Meta shut down an extensive Chinese influence campaign, comprising 7,704 Facebook accounts and several hundred other accounts across various social media platforms, targeted at Taiwan and other regions.
Beijing continues to alter its disinformation strategies. Fact checkers have observed that Chinese agents have shifted their attention from pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong to using artificial intelligence to craft images, audio and video — a potential boon for Chinese propagandists, according to Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a RAND researcher.
A few months ago, an audio clip seeming to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai did the rounds in Taiwan. The excerpt was likely a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and A.I. detection company Reality Defender.
Chinese disinformation posts are becoming increasingly subtle and appear more natural instead of overhauling the arena with clear pro-Beijing propaganda, according to researchers. Some false narratives are produced by content farms controlled by China, and then disseminated by agents, bots or social media users who unknowingly share these posts. China has also attempted to purchase established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have employed Taiwanese influencers to endorse pro-Beijing narratives, says RAND.
The Taiwan Fact Check Center reported last month that disinformation directly speaking about Chinese-Taiwan relations grew less frequent from 2020 to 2022. Instead, Chinese agents seem to be concentrating more on fanning social discord within Taiwan by disseminating false information about local services and health-related issues. Some experts suggest that dubious posts about medical treatments and celebrity gossip might draw users towards conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.
The unrelenting danger, which the Taiwanese government dubs “cognitive warfare”, has led to numerous aggressive attempts to suppress it. A failed proposal last year — based on European regulations — sought to impose labelling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and obligate them to comply with court-mandated requests for content removal.
Critics have described the government’s campaign against misinformation as a political persecution, reminding some of the island’s recent authoritarian history. Some have argued that the diversity within Taiwan’s media landscape often leads to the generation of pro-Beijing content that can be mistook for Chinese manipulation.
President Tsai highlighted in June that well-funded, large-scale disinformation campaigns are one of the most formidable challenges facing the country, as they set Taiwanese citizens against each other and erode trust in democratic bodies. She emphasized that combating disinformation must be a collective societal endeavor.
Fact checkers and watchdog groups note that public apathy is a concern — research studies indicate limited usage of fact-checking resources by Taiwan’s citizens during prior elections — as is the danger of being overstretched.
“There’s a mountain of false information,” said Eve Chiu, the CEO of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which employs around 10 fact-checkers a day. “We can’t cover all of it.”
Efforts to promote interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor over rumor”, which leverages the amusing meme culture and a charismatic dog character to debunk false narratives. Last September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a virtual contest for young people that attracted participants like Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.
These three civics-classmates-turned-competitors, who attained third place, conceded that Taiwan’s boisterous political environment allows disinformation to generate confusion and chaos. Yet their fellow Taiwanese contemporaries have learnt to be wary.
“If you come across novel information and aren’t sure if it’s true or false, you have to verify it,” said 16-year-old Ms. Lee. “Getting to the truth is extremely important to me.”
Is Taiwan Able to Keep Resisting Chinese Disinformation?
