Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) was exceedingly popular in China this week, if the tens of thousands of messages that were left on her official Facebook page on Tuesday night are anything to go by, even if the vast majority of the comments were negative toward her, her party and this nation.
She struck the right note with her response, welcoming Chinese netizens and telling them that Facebook is a valuable forum in Taiwan’s vibrant democracy.
However, Minister of the Interior Chen Wei-zen (陳威仁) on Thursday sounded off-key, saying the outpouring was not a cyberattack or breach of Internet security, but rather simply netizens expressing their own opinions, so there was no need for the authorities to investigate the matter.
His flip-flop from the day before, when he said the Criminal Investigation Bureau was looking into the posts, is puzzling even given the political color divide that governs this nation.
Chen apparently sees nothing strange about tens of thousands of messages written in simplified Chinese characters suddenly flooding Tsai’s page over the course of just a few hours, even though Beijing has blocked Facebook since 2009.
Respecting the freedom of speech that this nation enjoys, but China does not, the DPP said it would not delete any message or take legal action unless there were clear violations of the law.
Yet even if there is no legal case, one would hope that Chen and the ministry — if not others in the government — would still be concerned about such a barrage of messages and their source, given the tight control Beijing exerts over Internet access and the myriad examples of concentrated Chinese cyberattacks on institutions and companies in this nation and many others.
Tens of thousands of posts might be hardly a ripple compared with a concerted denial-of-service attack and other malicious hacks, but it stretches the imagination that so many Chinese netizens just happened to be sitting at their computers on Tuesday night at a time when the Great Firewall of China suddenly sprung a leak, allowing access to Facebook, and they all decided to do a search of Tsai’s name and then post a message excoriating her and the DPP.
Defense analysts on Thursday said that a Shanghai-based unit of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s electronic warfare division responsible for maintaining China’s firewall was behind the onslaught, creating an opening in the defense as it was testing its cyberwarfare operations on Wednesday.
Others theorized that Beijing’s barriers were temporarily overloaded by the millions of Chinese seeking online bargains on “Singles Day” on Wednesday.
Neither explanation answers why all the messages appeared on Tuesday night, so per Occam’s razor, one must suspect the barrage of posts was an example of a mobilized trolling effort by individuals in the pay of the Chinese government.
Just a few weeks ago, the DPP warned that a September meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Seattle could lead to Beijing unblocking Facebook and using the platform to launch “united front” propaganda campaigns targeting Taiwanese. A top DPP official said the government needed to come up with strategies to deal with social media Web sites being used in the cross-strait arena.
The Ministry of National Defense has for years warned about the complex nature and severity of Chinese cyberthreats to Taiwan. While there was no apparent harm done by the flooding of Tsai’s Facebook page, the incident was an anomaly, which is why officialdom should be taking it seriously.
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