China will continue to play up conflicts in Taiwan with more diverse tactics of information manipulation, Taipei-based think tank Doublethink Lab said in a report published yesterday.
The think tank analyzed the strategies and impact of the Chinese disinformation campaign on Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections on Saturday last week and pointed out possible manipulation methods in the future.
Before last month, news outlets and social media accounts controlled by or affiliated with Chinese authorities focused on amplifying controversial issues in Taiwan to intensify social conflicts, a strategy they have adopted since 2022, the report said.
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
These foreign actors select certain narratives by Taiwanese politicians or pundits to spread US skepticism and defamatory information about the ruling party or its leaders, it said.
Leading up to the elections, Chinese actors began to create fake news, such as accusing the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of starting rumors about China pressurizing Taiwanese rock band Mayday to make pro-China comments, it said.
Beijing actively fueled rumors that Lai had illegitimate children and spread the content of a book titled “[President] Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) secret history,” which is filled with false statements about Tsai, it said.
Compared with the local elections in 2022, China used a large number of false accounts and generative artificial intelligence (AI) rather than its state media to disseminate disinformation, it said.
Doing so gave China more opportunities to spread slander and outrageous information, it said, adding that it also made the sources of disinformation more difficult to trace.
After the elections, Beijing is likely to continue playing up domestic conflicts in Taiwan rather than drawing Taiwanese attention to foreign actors, it said.
It might also focus on local issues to “better integrate into discussions in Taiwanese society,” and make it difficult for Taiwanese authorities and researchers to identify the source of information, it said.
Generative AI technology has significantly reduced the time and labor costs of content production, making it difficult to separate fake accounts from real users, and to detect fake accounts that originate from the same source, it said.
A survey conducted by the think tank before the elections showed that 37.6 percent of Taiwanese have never looked up or confirmed information they received online, despite a growing proportion of people receiving political information from online video creators and key opinion leaders, it said.
“Information manipulation in Taiwan has shifted toward conspiracy types of narrative,” which is more challenging to debunk, it said.
About half of the respondents agreed with US-skepticism narratives, such as “the US only wants to exploit Taiwan” and “the US uses Taiwan to provoke China,” it said.
While 40.4 percent of respondents declined to answer their perceived source of false information related to the elections, 26.6 percent of respondents attributed it to the DPP, followed by 15.2 percent who believed it originated from China, it said.
The survey was conducted via landlines and mobile phones from Jan. 1 to Wednesday last week.
It collected 1,504 valid samples and had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.53 percent.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
INTENSIFYING THREATS: Beijing’s tactics include massive attacks on the government service network, aircraft and naval vessel incursions and damaging undersea cables China is prepared to interfere in November’s nine-in-one local elections by launching massive attacks on the Taiwanese government’s service network (GSN), a report published by the National Security Bureau showed. The report was submitted to the Legislative Yuan ahead of the bureau’s scheduled briefing at the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee tomorrow. The national security team has identified about 13,000 suspicious Internet accounts and 860,000 disputed messages, the bureau said of China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan. The disputed messages focus on major foreign affairs, national defense and economic issues, which were produced using generative artificial intelligence (AI) and distributed through Chinese
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
RSS