The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) yesterday said it would pursue legal action against people who allegedly fabricated and disseminated a recording of TPP Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) commenting on Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) stopovers in the US.
Some media outlets on Wednesday evening received an e-mail with a 36-second audio recording purporting to show “Ko expose the inside story of Lai’s visits to the US.”
In the recording, someone who sounds like Ko, the TPP’s presidential candidate, criticizes Lai, the DPP’s presidential candidate, for his stopovers in New York and San Francisco this month, as he visited Paraguay, and alleges that each person could receive NT$800 for attending Lai’s events.
Photo courtesy of the Taiwan People’s Party
The e-mail said that the recording was made during an internal TPP meeting in the first week of this month.
At a news conference yesterday, TPP spokesman Adam Lee (李頂立) said the voice in the recording was “clearly not Ko.”
The TPP would pursue legal action, but is first investigating who made the recording, how it was made and who disseminated it, he said.
It is also hoped that campaigning would “go back to being clean and transparent,” as people are “sick of mud-slinging,” Lee added.
Lee said that the recording was clearly intended to defame Ko and mislead the public.
Asked about the recording, Ko yesterday, during a visit to Taiwan Cement Corp in Hualien County, said that strange stories are becoming more frequent as the election nears and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) that can imitate people’s voices and appearance makes things worse.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) deputy secretary-general Hung Sun-han (洪申翰) said the party hopes the recording was fabricated as the TPP claimed and urged Ko’s office to file a lawsuit against the perpetrators as soon as possible.
If investigated through legal channels, it would show that all political parties — not just the one in power — are affected by misinformation, he said.
By uniting against misinformation and Chinese aggression, the parties can protect the democracy and security that Taiwanese hold dear, he said.
This is not just a case of fake news, but “the beginning of cyberterrorism,” DPP caucus director Liu Shyh-fang (劉世芳) said.
AI-generated and altered media are to become more common, posing an enormous challenge to Taiwan’s democratic society, she said.
Everyone must work to counter misinformation to ensure the stability of elections, Liu added.
Additional reporting by Chen Cheng-yu and Hua Meng-ching
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