Worries that China would use disinformation to undermine the integrity of Taiwan’s vote dogged the Jan. 13 elections.
In repelling disinformation, Chinese and domestic, Taiwan offers an example to other democracies holding elections this year.
This year, more than 50 countries that are home to half the planet’s population are due to hold national elections. From India to Mexico, the UK to Russia, the outcomes of the elections would test the strengths of democracies and countries with authoritarian leaders.
Photo: Reuters
In Taiwan, the response to disinformation was swift. Fact-checking groups debunked rumors, while the Central Election Commission held a news conference to push back on claims of electoral discrepancies.
Influencers such as @FroggyChiu with more than 600,000 subscribers also put out explainers on YouTube explaining how votes are tallied.
In a widely shared video, a woman recording votes mistakenly enters one in the column for the wrong candidate. The message was clear: The election could not be trusted. The results were faked.
However, the video had been selectively edited, fact-checkers found.
Voters at the polling station spotted the woman’s error and election workers quickly corrected the count, according to MyGoPen, an independent Taiwanese fact-checking chatbot.
It was just one of dozens of videos that fact-checkers had to debunk.
“I believe some people genuinely believed this, and when the election results came out, they thought something was up,” said Eve Chiu (邱家宜), the editor-in-chief of Taiwan’s FactCheck Center, a nonprofit journalism organization.
Supporters of the Taiwan People’s Party Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), many of whom are young, had shared the videos widely on TikTok, which were then shared on Facebook.
Prior to the election results, many thought there was a chance of a Ko upset in the race given that he had drawn a lot of online attention.
Taiwan’s FactCheck Center debunked multiple videos of alleged voter fraud, including another one in which voting officials make a human error caught on camera. The source of these videos is unclear.
Notably, Taiwanese have resisted calls for tougher laws that would require social media platforms to police sites. A proposal to institute such rules was withdrawn in 2022 after free speech concerns were raised.
China targeted Taiwan with a stream of disinformation ahead of its election, research from DoubleThink Lab showed.
Much of it sought to undermine faith in the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party and cast it as belligerent and likely to start a war that Taiwan cannot win. Other narratives targeted Washington’s support for Taipei, saying that the US was an untrustworthy partner only interested in Taiwan’s semiconductor exports that would not support it if it came to war with China.
Taiwan has been able to effectively respond to Chinese disinformation in part because of how seriously the threat is perceived there, said Kenton Thibaut, a senior resident fellow and expert on Chinese disinformation at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Instead of a piecemeal approach — focusing solely on media literacy, for instance, or relying only on the government to fact-check false rumors — Taiwan adopted a multifaceted approach, what Thibaut called a “whole of society response” that relied on government, independent fact-check groups and even private citizens to call out disinformation and propaganda.
Representative to the US Alexander Yui said that the government has learned it must identify and debunk false information as quickly as possible to counter false narratives.
“Find it early, like a tumor or cancer. Cut it before it spreads,” Yui said of foreign disinformation.
Civil society groups like MyGoPen and the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which received US$1 million in funding from Google, have focused on raising public awareness through debunking rumors that members of the public report.
Media literacy on fake news and the digital environment is growing, but slowly, those on the front lines say.
“It’s like in the past when everyone dumped bottles and cans in the garbage and now they sort them, that was done through a period of societal education,” Chiu said. “Everyone needs to slowly develop this awareness, and this needs time.”
Although the election passed without a major crisis, the challenge continues to evolve.
Chinese efforts at disinformation have become increasingly localized and sophisticated, DoubleThink Lab’s post-election analysis showed.
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