This month the government ordered a one-year block of Xiaohongshu (小紅書) or Rednote, a Chinese social media platform with more than 3 million users in Taiwan. The government pointed to widespread fraud activity on the platform, along with cybersecurity failures. Officials said that they had reached out to the company and asked it to change. However, they received no response.
The pro-China parties, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), immediately swung into action, denouncing the ban as an attack on free speech. This “free speech” claim was then echoed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), again displaying the now common and chilling pattern in which the KMT/TPP and PRC uptake and distribute each other’s propaganda claims. The PRC said that the government had “trampled on democracy and undermined the freedom” of Taiwanese.
The fact is that the government had documented hundreds of fraud cases on the platform, costing users millions. The government also has a duty to protect. If Rednote will not act, the government has to.
Photo: CNA
Certainly scammers abound on everything from Facebook to dating apps, as many in the public complained. But note the second issue the government had with Rednote: cybersecurity. The Ministry of Digital Affairs (MODA) said that Xiaohongshu failed every one of its 15 cybersecurity inspection indicators, including “collection of sensitive data or biometric information, access to storage, unauthorized intrusions, data sharing with servers and information interception,” Focus Taiwan reported.
Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) was interviewed by Formosa Magazine on Dec. 5 on the Rednote closure. Responding to complaints that other platforms, such as Line or Facebook, have much larger fraud issues, Cho observed that platforms such as Meta, Line, Google and Threads are already established in Taiwan. Users on those programs can request the removal of scam appeals, and failure to remove them is penalized. The premier thus highlighted a key issue: the government has established precedents for invoking its right and authority to penalize platforms that let scammers function.
Moreover, the government said that since Rednote does not maintain a presence in Taiwan, it cannot be regulated domestically, forcing an either/or choice on the regulatory authorities. Other platforms have offices in Taiwan, which subjects them to local regulation. If the government did not act, it would be tantamount to declaring that all platforms could avoid local regulations simply by not setting up shop here.
Photo: AFP
SECURITY RISK
Amusing as it is to hear the PRC and the KMT/TPP bleating about free speech, it is important to give weight to that second factor. Under PRC law all organizations and individuals are required to supply user data on request. That is why all PRC apps, from Rednote and Wechat to popular shopping apps, are potential security risks. A digital ministry circular last week identified the PRC apps Xiaohongshu, Douyin, Weibo, WeChat and Baidu Wangpan as security risks.
Further, this is not a permanent ban. Rednote has been given a year to address its security issues. Premier Cho said earlier in the month that the government may consider permanently blocking the app if it doesn’t change.
Photo: Reuters
The digital ministry based its shutdown of Rednote on Article 47 of the Fraud and Crime Hazard Prevention Act (詐欺犯罪危害防制條例). The New Power Party (NPP), a DPP ally, argued more sensibly that this is a case of government overreach. That law was intended to target fraud Web sites, not social media platforms in their entirety.
The NPP said the Rednote ban shows how Taiwan needs better legal frameworks. That problem applies across myriad domains. One of the remarkable aspects of the Rednote fracas is that the government actually held a company accountable for its (non-) actions.
DISINFORMATION
Premier Cho also said that Rednote originates from the PRC, a state that heavily controls speech. Allowing unfree speech to circulate in Taiwan actually harms speech, he contended. The PRC itself forwarded this position. According to a spokesman cited in China Daily, RedNote allows people in Taiwan, especially young users, to learn about the PRC and interact positively with Chinese — or, as we say in English, consume PRC disinformation.
“The risk level of disinformation on a platform comes from its popularity,” observed Billion Lee (李比鄰), cofounder of the Taiwanese fact-checking platform Cofacts, during the run-up to the presidential election last year. He was talking about TikTok, another disinformation platform from the PRC. Essentially, PRC laws make all PRC social media platforms vectors for the PRC’s disinformation programs in Taiwan’s media ecology, and sources of information on users. This latter function is generally underappreciated — PRC apps (not just social media platforms) often sneakily record, access phones and cameras, and of course, collect information from backgrounds, audio and visual.
Premier Cho is not wrong. The disinformation threat to free speech and democracy has many dimensions. Promotion of specific politicians or policies, as TikTok was accused of during the election last year, is only a tiny sliver of the problem. For the government, resources that could otherwise be devoted to disseminating valid and useful information have to be expended on combating disinformation. Individual politicians must constantly refute disinformation that targets them, again expending energy that could be used in the service of something positive. It occupies recipients’ time and cognitive faculties.
Most disturbingly, it creates an environment where nothing is true and facts are slippery, an environment in which things are constantly asserted that smart people know are false. Such an environment is inherently authoritarian: it destroys social trust and drains the ability of people to care. As Hannah Arendt put it in On Lying and Politics: “the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”
Now, with AI, disinformation can be produced in infinite quantity, at near-zero marginal cost, as many bad actors are already realizing. The effect of flooding social media platforms with AI slop will be a kind of censorship created by the way bad information chases away or destroys good, constantly raising the cost of evaluating it. There is no need to suppress information, novelist Hans Kunzru described in a recent piece on AI slop: “You just have to make the cost of sorting fact from fiction, in terms of time and effort, too high to pay for the ordinary person.”
Given this, the major problem with the Rednote ban is that it doesn’t go far enough: all PRC social media platforms should be banned (and not just in Taiwan, but everywhere). The nation, as the NPP observed above, urgently needs to construct the legal frameworks that it needs to block those apps island-wide.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
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