“Troll groups” attempting to shape online discourse about the Jan. 13 presidential and legislative elections appear to be taking cues from Chinese state-affiliated media, a research group said on Wednesday.
Troll groups — clusters of social media accounts acting with a suspicious degree of synchronization — have mirrored the narrative pivots taken by Beijing-controlled news outlets such as the People’s Daily, Haiwainet, Xinhua news agency, the Global Times and China Central Television, a report released by Taiwan AI Labs showed.
Taiwan AI Labs founder Ethan Tu (杜奕瑾) told a news conference in Taipei that between September and last month, China-affiliated media platforms focused on portraying the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as pushing Taiwan toward war.
Photo: Reuters
However, since this month, Chinese reporting has shifted to “the repercussions of terminating the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement,” as well as “Taiwan’s grim economic prospects,” with troll groups following suit, Tu said.
Taiwan AI Lab chief executive officer Hwang Chao-hwei (黃兆徽) said that the organization has been monitoring leading social media platforms along with a total of 31,278 online troll accounts exhibiting similar activation dates, content and comments since 2020.
Despite the correlation between some accounts and the messaging of Chinese state-affiliated media, not all troll activity aligned with Beijing’s narratives, Taiwan AI Lab’s research showed.
For example, the primary narratives pushed by “YouTube #71012” — the most active troll group on YouTube during the second week of this month — were either pro-DPP or critical of opposition parties, it found.
Excluding YouTube, where partisan attacks were roughly equal, negative comments aimed at the DPP outranked those targeting the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) on all other social media platforms, including Facebook at 14 percent versus 3.1 percent, TikTok at 22.6 percent versus 19.4 percent and the local online bulletin board system Professional Technology Temple at 15.1 percent versus 6.4 percent, it said.
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