Authorities have detained 40 people on charges of interfering with voting rights, the Ministry of Justice said yesterday, adding that nine are suspected of helping a foreign power to meddle in next month’s presidential and legislative elections.
The Supreme Prosecutors’ Office launched an investigation amid a sweep targeting election fraud across the nation, Department of Prosecutorial Affairs official Kuo Yung-fa (郭永發) told a Cabinet meeting in Taipei.
The ministry conducted the operation in collaboration with the Central Election Commission and the Ministry of the Interior, Kuo said.
Photo: CNA
As of Tuesday, prosecutors had issued 15 indictments for alleged election interference and 17 for alleged contraventions of the Anti-Infiltration Act (反滲透法), with nine people named as suspects, a justice ministry report showed.
The indictments might be linked to reports that Beijing organized trips to China for local officials.
Other indictments were issued in two cases of alleged vote-buying, two cases of election-related disinformation, 37 cases of illicit foreign campaign financing and eight cases of gambling on vote outcomes, the report said, adding that NT$27.5 million (US$877,753) had been confiscated in the gambling cases.
Prosecutors have also detained 35 people and confiscated NT$2.35 million and a NT$3.5 million car in an alleged case of cash for petition signatures, the report said.
The act forbids conducting electoral activities on behalf of a hostile foreign power, Deputy Minister of Justice Huang Mou-hsin (黃謀信) told a news conference following the Cabinet meeting.
The law also mandates enhanced sentencing for breaking election laws if they are for a foreign power, Huang said.
In other news, a report by cyberintelligence company Graphika said that an online public opinion manipulation scheme favored the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
Graphika said in the report published yesterday that it detected “a sustained and coordinated effort to manipulate online conversations about Taiwanese politics” that began as early as May last year.
The team did not attribute the campaign to a specific actor, but the tactics, techniques and procedures used were characteristic of an online influence operation, it said.
The operation used more than 800 Facebook accounts, 13 Facebook groups, one YouTube channel and one TikTok account to spread political memes and videos targeting the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate, Vice President William Lai (賴清德), and others, it said.
The operation revolved around material generated by an online persona called “Agitate Taiwan” (鼓動台灣) on TikTok and a now-defunct YouTube channel, it said.
The inauthentic accounts used stolen or digitally manipulated images in their profiles, generated content with nearly the same timestamp, it said, adding that metadata showed their TikTok links were generated during a single browser session.
Additionally, several of the Facebook accounts posted check-ins at identical coordinates in Taichung, Graphika said.
The operation generated and amplified content that focused on debunked allegations that children were drugged at a kindergarten, reports of egg shortages and compaints about Medigen’s COVID-19 vaccines in a bid to depict the DPP as corrupt or incompetent, it said.
However, authentic engagement with the content was scant, it added.
Additional reporting by Chung Li-hua
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