Suspicious videos that began circulating in Taiwan this month appeared to show the country’s leader announcing cryptocurrency investments.
President Tsai Ing-wen, who has repeatedly risked Beijing’s wrath by asserting her island’s autonomy, appeared to claim in the clips that the government helped develop investment software for digital currencies, using a common term in China but rarely used in Taiwan. Her mouth appeared blurry and her voice unfamiliar, leading Taiwan’s Criminal Investigation Bureau to consider the video to be almost certainly a deepfake (an artificially generated parody) and potentially created by Chinese agents.
For years, China has battered the Taiwanese information ecosystem with inaccurate narratives and conspiracy theories, seeking to undermine its democracy and divide its people in an effort to assert control over its neighbor. Now, as fears grow over Beijing’s growing aggression, a new wave of disinformation is crossing the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland ahead of crucial January elections.
Yet perhaps as much as any other place, the tiny island is primed for the misinformation onslaught.
Taiwan has built a resilience to foreign meddling that could serve as a model for the dozens of other democracies holding elections in 2024. Its defenses include one of the world’s most mature communities of fact-checkers, government investments, international media literacy associations and, after years of warnings about Chinese intrusion, a public sense of skepticism.
The challenge now is to sustain the effort.
“That’s the main battlefield: Fear, uncertainty and doubt are designed to keep us up at night so we don’t respond to new threats with new defenses,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s inaugural digital minister, who works in strengthening cybersecurity defenses. against threats such as disinformation. “The main idea here is just to stay agile.”
Taiwan, a highly online society, has repeatedly been found to be the world’s top target of foreign government disinformation, according to the Digital Society Project, a research initiative exploring the Internet and politics. China was accused of spreading rumors during the pandemic about the Taiwanese government’s handling of Covid-19. the researchers said. Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the island as Speaker of the House last year triggered a series of high-profile cyberattacks, as well as a wave of attacks discredited online messages and images that fact-checkers link to China.
However, despite all of Beijing’s efforts, it has struggled to influence public opinion.
In recent years, Taiwan voters have elected a president, Ms. Tsai, of the Democratic Progressive Party, who the Communist Party sees as an obstacle to its goal of unification. Local experts and fact-checkers said Chinese disinformation campaigns were a major concern in the 2018 local elections; The efforts appeared less effective in 2020, when Tsai regained the presidency in a landslide. Her vice president, Lai Ching-te, has maintained a lead in polls in the race to succeed her.
Tsai has repeatedly addressed pressure from her government to combat Beijing’s disinformation campaign, as well as criticism that her strategy aims to suppress the speech of her political opponents. At an advocacy conference this month, he said: “We let the public have knowledge and tools that refute and report false or misleading information, and we maintain a cautious balance between keeping the information free and rejecting its manipulation.”
Many Taiwanese have developed internal “warning bells” for suspicious narratives, said Melody Hsieh, co-founder of Fake News Cleaner, a group focused on information literacy education. Her group has 22 lecturers and 160 volunteers who teach anti-misinformation tactics at universities, temples, fishing villages and other places in Taiwan, sometimes using gifts like handmade soap to motivate participants.
The group is part of a strong collective of similar Taiwanese operations. There’s Cofacts, whose fact-checking service is built into a popular social media app called Line. The doublethink laboratory was directed until this month by Puma Shen, a teacher who testified this year before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, an independent agency of the US government. MyGoPen is named after a homophone in the Taiwanese dialect meaning “don’t fool me again.”
Citizens have sought help to verify the facts, such as when a recent scandal on imported eggs raised questions about the videos showing black and green yolks, Ms. Hsieh said. Such a lawsuit would have been unthinkable in 2018, when heated emotions and damaging rumors surrounding a contentious referendum inspired the founders of Fake News Cleaner.
“Now everyone will stop and think, ‘This seems strange. Can you help me check this? We suspect something,’” Ms. Hsieh said. “I think this is an improvement.”
Still, fact-checking in Taiwan remains complicated. False claims It recently revolved around Lai, an outspoken critic of Beijing, and his visit to Paraguay this summer. Fact checkers discovered that a memo in the a claim had been manipulated, with modified dates and dollar figures. another claim originated on an English forum before a new X account quoted it in Mandarin in a post shared by a news website in Hong Kong and promoted on Facebook by a Taiwanese politician.
China’s disinformation work has had “measurable effects,” including “worsening Taiwan’s political and social polarization and widening perceived generational divides,” according to research from the RAND Corporation. Concerns about election-related fake news led the Taiwanese government last month to create a dedicated task force.
Taiwan “has historically been Beijing’s testing ground for information warfare,” and China has used social media to interfere in Taiwanese politics since at least 2016, according to RAND. In August, Meta dismantled a Chinese influence campaign that it described as the largest such operation to date, with 7,704 Facebook accounts and hundreds of others on other social media platforms targeting Taiwan and other regions.
Beijing’s disinformation strategy continues to change. Fact checkers noted that Chinese agents were no longer distracted by pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, as they were during the last presidential election in Taiwan. They now have access to artificial intelligence that can generate images, audio and video — “potentially a dream come true for Chinese propagandists,” said RAND researcher Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga.
A few months ago, an audio file circulated in Taiwan that appeared to feature a rival politician criticizing Mr. Lai. The clip was almost certainly a deepfake, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Justice and artificial intelligence detection company Reality Defender.
Chinese disinformation posts appear increasingly subtle and organic, rather than flooding the area with obvious pro-Beijing messages, the researchers said. Some false narratives are created by Chinese-controlled content farms and then spread by agents, bots or unwitting social media users, researchers say. China has also attempted to purchase established Taiwanese social media accounts and may have paid Taiwanese influencers to promote pro-Beijing narratives, according to RAND.
Disinformation directly addressing China-Taiwan relations became increasingly rare between 2020 and 2022, according to the Taiwan Fact Check Center said last month. Instead, Chinese agents appeared to focus more on stoking social division within Taiwan by spreading lies about local services and health problems. At times, other experts said, questionable posts about medical remedies and celebrity gossip led viewers to conspiracy theories about Taiwanese politics.
The ever-present threat, which the Taiwanese government calls “cognitive warfare,” has led to several aggressive Attempts in a Campaign. A failed proposal Last year, modeled on regulations in Europe, it would have imposed labeling and transparency requirements on social media platforms and forced them to comply with court-ordered content takedown requests.
Critics denounced the government’s anti-disinformation campaign as a political witch hunt, raising the specter of the island’s not-so-distant authoritarian past. Some have noted that Taiwan’s media ecosystem, with its various political leaningsit often produces pro-Beijing content that can be wrongly attributed to Chinese manipulation.
In an event in June, President Tsai highlighted that “large-scale, well-funded disinformation campaigns” were “one of the most difficult challenges,” pitting Taiwanese citizens against each other and corroding trust in democratic institutions. Defending misinformation, she said, must be “a society-wide effort.”
Fact checkers and watchdog groups said public apathy was a concern. research suggests that the Taiwanese made limited use of fact-checking resources in past elections, as did the risk of them spreading themselves too thin.
“There are mountains of misinformation,” said Eve Chiu, executive director of Taiwan’s FactCheck Center, which has about 10 fact-checkers working each day. “We can’t do everything.”
Attempts to increase interest in media literacy have included a nationwide campaign, “humor about rumors”, which took advantage of the culture of humorous memes and a cute dog character to debunk false narratives. In September, the Taiwan FactCheck Center also held a national virtual youth competition that attracted students such as Lee Tzu-ying, Cheng Hsu-yu and Lu Hong-yu.
The three civics classmates, who finished in third place, acknowledged that Taiwan’s strident politics allowed misinformation to create confusion and chaos. Their Taiwanese peers, however, have learned to be cautious.
“If you see something new, but you don’t know if it’s true or false, you should check it,” said Ms. Lee, 16. “I just want to know the truth; that’s very important to me.”
