Amid specious stories and rumors regarding the possibility that Tuvalu might switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, reports have emerged that a Chinese state-run broadcaster has asked a news outlet in the Pacific nation to post articles promoting the idea that Funafuti would cut ties with Taipei after its legislative elections last week.
In an e-mail allegedly from China Global Television Network, the sender offered to pay someone at Tuvalu Broadcasting Corp to find a “senior person” at the broadcaster to write an 800-word opinion article “on Tuvalu election and it’s [sic] potential to cut ties with Taiwan.” The e-mail offers to pay the recipient US$450 “tax free,” which they could share with the writer.
The e-mail confirms Taiwanese diplomats’ suspicions that China is paying media to spread misinformation to induce a diplomatic shift away from Taiwan, and to sow distrust in the government and its allies.
Photo: grab from DPP Legislator Wang Ding-yu FB
China has long deployed cognitive warfare tactics aiming to undermine Taiwan’s democracy and sovereignty. However, those efforts have escalated with artificial intelligence technology, and extended beyond domestic issues and cross-strait relations to foreign affairs, to incite skepticism about Washington’s commitment to Taipei and generate tension between Taiwan and its allies to further isolate it from the international community.
The Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau has said that during the lead-up to the Jan. 13 presidential and legislative elections, the quality and quantity of foreign hostile forces’ information warfare significantly improved, with social media accounts that are much harder to track and “deepfake” videos that are more difficult to spot.
Although Taiwan mostly shrugged off China’s electoral meddling, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, said afterward that information manipulation would only worsen, and it is not only a problem for Taiwan, but the whole world. He said his research indicates that social media is one of the crucial factors leading to a global democratic recession.
The Investigation Bureau this month inaugurated its Cognitive Warfare Research Center dedicated to studying disinformation threats to Taiwan’s democracy and security. In addition to research, Taiwan needs more ways to prevent, confront and eliminate computer-based cognitive warfare attempts. The government should work more with fact-checking groups to promptly clarify rumors and promote public awareness to repel disinformation. More legislative support and funding are also needed.
A lot of election-related disinformation has been traced to Chinese-based content farms and social media platforms, such Douyin and its international version, TikTok. In addition to communicating with major platforms to remove disinformation, the government should pass legislation on the usage of Chinese apps and social media.
Many democratic countries are considering bans on TikTok. Besides a ban on government use of TikTok and similar platforms, the government could limit usage of them by young people, or within private sectors that are susceptible to information leaking or have higher requirements for information security. However, such restrictions would require convincing the public that their freedom of speech would be protected.
Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said that Taiwan is documenting its efforts to counter China’s unprecedented interference in the elections, and would publish the findings to help the international community combat disinformation campaigns.
Taiwan also needs to ramp up international collaborations to share know-how and form alliances to combat information manipulation, turning the nation’s experience into a positive contribution to help the world fight against authoritarian powers bent on eroding democratic systems.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS