Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Alex Tsai (蔡正元) yesterday accused the pan-green camp of establishing an “Internet army” that suppresses discussion online and “hurts Internet democracy.” He made the remarks at a press conference he held to dismiss an online rumor that a picture he posted on Facebook is fake.
The rumor is about a photograph that Tsai, the campaign director for KMT Taipei mayoral candidate Sean Lien (連勝文), posted on the social networking site on Monday, showing independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) giving the thumbs up while posing with a group of students a day after the Greater Kaohsiung explosions that killed 30 people and injured 310.
The legislator said a participant in the “Gossip Forum” on the Professional Technology Temple (PTT) — the nation’s largest academic online bulletin board — started the rumor by falsely claiming that the photo was from an event held last year on June 22, not from Friday last week.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The post was then disseminated by “a large number of netizens who copied and pasted” it to other Web sites, Tsai said.
“It is OK for them [netizens] to come to my Facebook page to irrationally shout their criticisms, since that is my personal page. However, now a malicious machination [of online public opinion] is emerging and that is not OK,” he said.
The KMT lawmaker said one netizen told him that he posted the Ko picture on the PTT forum on Sunday, but the image had been quickly flagged as “false” by the forum moderator, who then punished the user by restricting his posts on the forum for a year.
“This shows that someone has been trying to mislead netizens with false smears and direct public opinion online to influence the electoral process and outcome,” Tsai said.
He added that there are “a lot of netizens who pretend to be politically neutral or use ‘sock puppets’ to attack Lien on Facebook or on the PTT,” adding that although the Gossip Forum moderator does not “dare admit that he is a pan-green camp lackey, he still behaves like one.”
Tsai has a history of generating controversy with his online remarks, which have included his likening Sunflower movement participants to “pigs” and calling students who passed by his office to protest “garbage.”
In April, several foreign photographers on Facebook said Tsai infringed on their copyrights by posting their images without permission.
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