China has ramped up its disinformation campaign against Taiwan, using a COVID-19 outbreak to provoke discontent against the government, an international newspaper said on Tuesday.
The Financial Times report said Chinese media claimed that “tens of thousands of Taiwanese people were flocking to China to get vaccinated,” and that “Taipei was planning to give jabs to its diplomatic allies although it did not have enough to vaccinate its own population” — claims denied by the government.
Such rumors are often then spread in Taiwan through social media such as the Line messaging app or the PTT online bulletin board, and are often picked up by Taiwanese media, the newspaper said, adding that the problem is perpetuated by a lack of “journalistic rigor” in the country.
The government certainly faces a dilemma in holding mainstream media accountable for what is reported, while also ensuring press freedom. One way the problem can be addressed — which the Financial Times says groups in Taiwan are working on — is to educate high-school students on how to critically assess the validity of information they encounter.
After President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) offered condolences on Twitter last week to people affected by a building collapse in Florida, a reply came from what was obviously a fake account. The user appeared to be a white man named “Rick Consens” and wrote: “Tsai’s heart goes around everywhere except for people living in Taiwan.” If the odd grammar were not indication enough, looking at the user’s bio, followers and other tweets made it obvious that this was a fake account, likely made by someone in China.
Even so, the reply was shared on anti-Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Facebook pages. One user named Yu Chun-sheng (余俊昇) — whose “cover photo” was an altered DPP logo showing someone begging and the words “vaccine beggar” — shared the reply on an ETtoday news post and wrote: “Vegetable bucket [Tsai] is grieving for foreigners, but even foreigners have had enough of it.”
It is largely irrelevant what foreigners think of Taiwan’s president, but the intention of the tweet from the fake account is the same as that of all misinformation produced by China — to provoke discontent and raise doubts about the government, and cause a rift in Taiwanese society.
The aims of these tactics are to influence policy and the outcomes of elections, and to foster politicians and legislation that are friendly toward or pliable by Beijing. This is a slow process, but as anti-vaccine campaigns and elections elsewhere in the world have demonstrated, people can be manipulated through such processes.
People consume information in “bite-sized” amounts through mobile devices, which makes tweets and Internet memes effective in manipulating voters over time. China’s favorite meme topic at present seems to be depicting Tsai as a despot.
If there is any comfort to be had from China’s misinformation campaign, it is that it demonstrates Beijing’s likely lack of confidence in its ability to succeed in a military invasion of Taiwan. Naturally, China’s Internet troll army and its propaganda rag Global Times would vehemently deny this, but why would China spend time and resources on information warfare if it could achieve its aims militarily?
China also regularly denies — through official press statements and through the numerous fake accounts of its troll army — that claims of false news reports produced by China are themselves “fake news,” but that is to be expected.
The government should ensure that students take mandatory media literacy courses to help them make informed decisions about what they see and read. It could also require news agencies and social media platforms to flag information determined by an independent body to be questionable.
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