“A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” And to make matters worse, their effect on the electorate when an election enters the home stretch can be enormous — providing the undecided a defense, in Taipei’s case, to fall back on for not voting for a certain candidate. Lies are “lies” only when they have been proven wrong; until then, they are called allegations, or simply “rumors.”
An interesting example can show how people are easily duped, maybe willingly, by rumors citing neutral data, but accompanied by political aspersions.
A message has recently been passed around via Line, a communication app widely used in the nation, with a link attached in which legislators’ votes on a proposal in November last year are recorded. The crux of the message is the introductory comment to the link, which explicitly says that the vote was on an amendment to the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) to raise the penalties for violations.
“You can see from this who is colluding with black-hearted manufacturers,” the message says.
The linked Web page showed that the opposition parties were “against” the proposal. The truth is, while the Web site provided neutral data on how the lawmakers had voted that day, it was not in fact a vote on the food safety law amendment, but on the legislative agenda proposed by the ruling party, which had placed the motion concerning food safety at the very end of the agenda (and blocked the amendments to the act proposed by the opposition parties).
Although the rumor was quickly exposed on the social network, it could easily sway those who are not in the social networks of people who cared enough to find out the facts.
There is no evidence that the rumor was spread by the ruling party or its affiliates, but there is no shortage of examples of similar tactics used on behalf of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the local election campaign. The MG149 account hubbub and allegations of tax evasion on earnings from speeches targeting independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) are aimed at spreading rumors rather than gaining a conviction.
The use of personal bank accounts for the management of the MG149 account is controversial indeed, despite all the justifications, as the team concerned is playing in a gray zone where clear established rules are wanting. However, to accuse Ko of corruption seems to be an overreach, especially when the money was not used to line his pocket.
The tax evasion allegation about Ko’s earnings from speeches was a greater travesty, which ended not only in people finding out Ko has been donating his speech earnings back to the groups that had invited him, but also in a revelation of the ruling party’s blatant abuse of state power.
It has been said that insofar as Taipei has a predominantly pan-blue constituency, the only thing the KMT needs to do is to cajole this majority of pan-blue voters, who have been unwilling to openly voice their support for KMT candidate Sean Lien (連勝文) or remain “undecided” over their dissatisfaction with Lien, into going to the polling stations on election day. What they need according to this vein of thought might simply be a push, or a reason to vote against Ko, who, without official party affiliation, could be their tentative pick.
Confirmation bias is a problem that bedevils everyone, but it could come in degrees. After all, it is not difficult to determine the degree of veracity between a former physician’s “corruption” and the sincerity of a candidate with second-generation wealth, who is from a billionaire family, with his father and grandfather having served as public officials, when he said that his still-prominent father once warned him that going into politics leads to either jail or starvation.
There has been much catastrophizing in Taiwan recently about America becoming more unreliable as a bulwark against Chinese pressure. Some of this has been sparked by debates in Washington about whether the United States should defend Taiwan in event of conflict. There also were understandable anxieties about whether President Trump would sacrifice Taiwan’s interests for a trade deal when he sat down with President Xi (習近平) in late October. On top of that, Taiwan’s opposition political leaders have sought to score political points by attacking the Lai (賴清德) administration for mishandling relations with the United States. Part of this budding anxiety
The diplomatic dispute between China and Japan over Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comments in the Japanese Diet continues to escalate. In a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, China’s UN Ambassador Fu Cong (傅聰) wrote that, “if Japan dares to attempt an armed intervention in the cross-Strait situation, it would be an act of aggression.” There was no indication that Fu was aware of the irony implicit in the complaint. Until this point, Beijing had limited its remonstrations to diplomatic summonses and weaponization of economic levers, such as banning Japanese seafood imports, discouraging Chinese from traveling to Japan or issuing
On Nov. 8, newly elected Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) and Vice Chairman Chi Lin-len (季麟連) attended a memorial for White Terror era victims, during which convicted Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spies such as Wu Shi (吳石) were also honored. Cheng’s participation in the ceremony, which she said was part of her efforts to promote cross-strait reconciliation, has trapped herself and her party into the KMT’s dark past, and risks putting the party back on its old disastrous road. Wu, a lieutenant general who was the Ministry of National Defense’s deputy chief of the general staff, was recruited
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Nov. 5 recalled more than 150,000 eggs found to contain three times the legal limit of the pesticide metabolite fipronil-sulfone. Nearly half of the 1,169 affected egg cartons, which had been distributed across 10 districts, had already been sold. Using the new traceability system, officials quickly urged the public to avoid consuming eggs with the traceability code “I47045,” while the remainder were successfully recalled. Changhua County’s Wenya Farm — the source of the tainted eggs — was fined NT$120,000, and the Ministry of Agriculture instructed the county’s Animal Disease Control Center to require that
RSS