From the Professional Technology Temple

January 11: Taiwan Presidential Election
Tsai Ing-wen, Democratic Progressive Party: 57.13%
Han Kuo-yu, Kuomintang: 38.61%

Ten days before Taiwan holds an election, the country lurches into a collective state of anxiety. Laws mandate that media outlets refrain from reporting on polling data during the home stretch before voters cast their ballots. Observers must rely on alternative methods—attendance at campaign rallies, posters on the street, coffee shop gossip—to feel out which way voters might be leaning.

Last month, incumbent President Tsai Ing-wen, a champion of Taiwan’s sovereignty from China, easily won reelection against her Beijing-friendly populist challenger, Han Kuo-yu. She had led in the polls for months, galvanized by her strong support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Still, many voters felt that anything could happen—especially with its powerful neighbor across the Taiwan Strait eager to seize those last ten days and steer the results in the direction favored by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.    

The days prior to the election were full of concern about Chinese influence on social media through online disinformation campaigns. Still relatively little is known about how these campaigns function and the effect that they have. But these campaigns may have had less of an effect so far than the efforts of the two major and very polarized Taiwanese parties to combat it. Fears of Chinese influence and a chaotic media environment have made even the idea of "fake news" political.

Taiwan’s presidential elections are always about China. Han’s Chinese Nationalist Party, Kuomintang (KMT), favors warmer economic and cultural ties with China, including trade pacts and a proposed cross-strait peace treaty. By contrast, Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is deeply skeptical of the PRC, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan despite never having ruled it. To the PRC, Tsai’s refusal to engage with Beijing unless it guarantees Taiwan’s autonomy is tantamount to a declaration of independence. China has therefore taken a number of measures—poaching diplomatic allies, sending military aircraft near Taiwan’s airspace, forcing international corporations and airlines to list Taiwan as part of China—to weaken Tsai’s DPP and strengthen the position of the KMT.

The day before the polling blackout began, Tsai and the DPP passed a law targeting Chinese infiltration in Taiwan’s politics, including activities geared toward influencing elections such as lobbying and participating in campaigns. Nobody yet knows exactly what effect the law has had. But its intent was clear: As the election neared, Tsai entrenched herself as the candidate ready to defend Taiwan from hostile forces. When the KMT opposed the law, the DPP easily cast the party as being uncomfortably close to Beijing. Tsai assured the public that the law would not target innocuous cross-strait exchanges and insisted that it would not act as a censor on Taiwan’s media—assuming that the outlet in question was not receiving financial support from the Communist Party of China (CCP).

That’s exactly why those ten days were so pivotal. Last summer, The Financial Times reported that several Taiwanese media outlets owned by a notoriously Beijing-friendly businessman had received direct instructions from Chinese officials about how to orient their coverage. The outlets in question had fawned over Han Kuo-yu and his promises to shower Taiwan with economic prosperity through unbridled trade with China. Reuters later reported that several unnamed Taiwan media outlets had accepted cash payments from the Chinese government’s Taiwan Affairs Office.

At the same time, Taiwan was awash with worries that China was plotting to destabilize Tsai’s re-election bid through a Russia-style campaign of political influence operations, including widespread online disinformation efforts. During those ten days of polling silence, as audiences at Han’s rallies swelled and Tsai’s campaign officials made unforced errors, both domestic and international headlines alleged that the CCP was plotting to flood Taiwan’s information ecosystem with false rumors and swing the vote. DPP officials, at campaign rallies and press conferences, eagerly fanned the flames. Both parties used the threat of Chinese disinformation to discredit what the other party was saying: The DPP warned that Chinese cyber-operatives were threatening the nation’s democracy (one official accused China of “trying to confuse the perception of the people”), while the KMT claimed that the DPP was itself guilty of waging cyber warfare and clamping down on free speech. Han’s campaign spokeswoman accused the ruling party of “trying to smear [the KMT] red” by associating it with the CCP.

Researchers have warned of China-backed content farms spreading disinformation in Taiwan. The New York Times reported before the election that a host of a Chinese state broadcaster had posed on Youtube as a Taiwanese opponent of Tsai Ing-wen. People with potential state connections to China have also tried to buy and control Taiwanese political fan pages on Facebook, although Facebook now polices such behavior, rendering it largely ineffective.

However, as the election neared, Taiwan’s public discourse around online disinformation was often not grounded in tangible evidence. Both DPP claims of Chinese malfeasance and KMT claims of DPP propaganda warfare were amplified loudly without being proven.

Media commentators and politicians spoke as if Beijing could rely on the repeatedly disproven hypodermic needle model of direct influence—that passive audiences can be injected with propaganda. From what little we know about China’s masterminds of state-sponsored disinformation, they have a different strategy: amplifying positive news about the party to distract from and drown out negative attention. And, as the Times story also noted, overt attempts to influence voters risked offending Taiwanese viewers and ultimately backfiring.

In the days after the election, several disinformation researchers made clear that much remains to be known about Chinese interference in Taiwanese elections. The Stanford Cyber Policy Center released a post-election report saying that while it did not reach larger conclusions on Chinese disinformation campaigns, in this election it had found no cases of social media disinformation attributable to the PRC. Instead, the report linked suspicious activity to “hyper-partisan fan groups.” Disinformation, it continued, had become a sharply partisan issue, with both sides eager to use allegations of Chinese meddling to score political points without verifying them. Questioning the veracity of DPP claims of Chinese disinformation often meant being branded a KMT or CCP cadre, and vice versa.

The report also questioned whether China needs to launch a wide-ranging online disinformation apparatus in Taiwan, when it has sway over many traditional media outlets. “Taiwan is a special case, where the media environment is heavily and overtly influenced by the PRC without any need for covert social media manipulation,” Alex Stamos, one of the Stanford researchers, said on Twitter. Taiwanese media barons such as Tsai Eng-meng, the owner of Taiwan’s massive Want Want China Times media conglomerate, enjoy close ties to CCP officials and have significant business interests in China, as the Financial Times report revealed. Last spring, delegates from Want Want China Times led dozens of Taiwanese journalists to a media summit in Beijing, where they were reportedly told to promote “peaceful reunification” between Taiwan and China. Beijing has also long used more traditional methods of disinformation, such as influencing politicians and temples.

When I spoke with Taiwanese fact-checkers and media monitors ahead of the country’s 2018 regional elections, many stated that  most false information online comes from domestic sources. While Taiwanese citizens may be paid by Chinese actors to spread disinformation, they are also often hired by politicians from all parties to conduct online astroturfing campaigns, which attempt to replicate grassroots movements. The most commonly manipulated topic is public health: internet users spread disinformation about HIV in the lead up to Taiwan’s 2019 legalization of gay marriage and have recently filled Taiwan’s internet with false reports about the coronavirus.      

The country’s online ecosystem lends itself to the rampant spread of falsehoods. Taiwan has a high level of social media use. Its domestic media focuses heavily on quick, often unverified content designed for online engagement. Fact-checking standards are low. This has led to the creation of non-government groups like the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which publishes corrections and clarifications of viral stories and rumors. 

The influential Professional Technology Temple (PTT)—a Reddit-like forum largely populated by young men—was the source of Taiwan’s most notorious case of “fake news” in 2018, when an anonymous poster claimed that Taiwanese travelers stranded at an airport in Osaka during a typhoon had been rescued by the Chinese embassy. Soon after, Taiwan’s representative in Osaka committed suicide, leading to accusations that he had been pushed to kill himself because of fake news. The initial rumor was later allegedly traced to a Taiwanese internet user, while subsequent internet posts were traced to a Taiwanese influencer who had been an outspoken supporter of the DPP, as I have discussed elsewhere.

YouTube influencers, such as the Chinese broadcaster mentioned in the Times report, also retain broad popularity among Taiwanese voters. Older voters gravitate toward Facebook and LINE, a WhatsApp-like platform where disinformation rapidly circulates in closed groups, often created in support of a political candidate or a civic cause.

Researchers have long clamored for Taiwan to aggressively promote media literacy as an antidote to disinformation both external and domestic. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister and an advocate for media literacy programs, told me before Taiwan’s 2018 election that new curricula introduced in grade schools would “mold minds … [to] become less susceptible to the top-down broadcast messaging era.”

Many legislators, however, appear to want quicker solutions. Last year, Taiwanese police began serving summons to private citizens who had posted false information online, leaving them liable to a fine for violating Taiwan’s Social Order Maintenance Act, which authorizes the punishment of citizens who commit certain acts deemed to threaten the public order. In one case, a KMT-leaning professor posted a video on Facebook claiming that the ruling DPP government wanted to destroy Taiwan’s National Palace Museum—which contains Chinese artifacts brought to Taiwan from China by Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT forces—in an effort to replace Chinese culture with a Taiwanese identity. Days before the election, the professor received a police summons for a social order violation. 

Others received summons in the months prior to the vote as well, including a man who was referred to police in July after sharing a meme on Facebook claiming that Tsai had ordered costly renovations to her official home. The series of summons, directed exclusively (so far as we know) at those with views countering that of the ruling government, are the most tangible result produced thus far in Taiwan’s fight against disinformation. 

This was fodder for more partisanship. Han, the losing candidate, whipped his supporters into a frenzy prior to the vote by making grandiose, often unsubstantiated claims saying that a DPP “cyber army” was attacking his party’s free speech. Han and other KMT candidates even found a colorful term for the DPP’s alleged activities—“green terror,” a callback to Taiwan’s deadly, decades-long “white terror” period of martial law. (Green is the DPP’s color.) While the KMT’s anger may have been rooted in DPP moves to fine media properties and summon private citizens for spreading disinformation, the KMT alluded to a vast, nonexistent DPP conspiracy to suppress its speech, leaving no room for a nuanced discussion of Taiwan’s information environment.

The fear of information warfare can often spark a second wave of disinformation: claims and denunciations that are not verified.  When accusations of CCP disinformation spread without being proven, they leave ample room for politicization and rumor. In Taiwan, this has meant a country vulnerable not only to “fake news” itself, but also to a growing fear that all information is suspect.