Taipei, Taiwan – As China beefed up its muscles with large-scale military exercises off the coast of Taiwan last month, Billion Lee was busy fending off an ongoing onslaught of attacks on her home online.
False stories claiming that the US is preparing for war with China, that China is evacuating its citizens from Taiwan, or that Taiwan has paid millions of dollars to lobby US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit to the island spread across the popular social media platforms Facebook and LINE.
A fabricated photo of a People’s Liberation Army soldier watching a Taiwanese navy ship through binoculars was circulated by Chinese state media Xinhua before being published by international newspapers such as the Financial Times and Deutsche Welle published and circulated.
While government agencies rushed to provide explanations, urging people to be careful to avoid falling victim to the information wars of “foreign hostile forces”, much of the work against false stories fall into the hands of amateur fake news vandals like Lee, who co-founded the fact-checking chatbot Cofacts in 2016 with the open-source g0v community.
“We have a saying: Don’t ask, why isn’t anyone doing this? Because you are nobody. If nobody has done this before, you are the one setting something up,” Lee told Al Jazeera.
Cofacts automatically responds to fake or misleading messages circulating on the LINE messaging app with a sourced report. Fact Verification is written and reviewed by a team of over 2,000 volunteers, including teachers, doctors, students, engineers and retirees – anyone who wants to be a fact checker can become a person.
According to Lee, the idea is to make reliable information accessible to everyone, in part by giving fact-checking power to Taiwan’s civil society rather than handing it over to the government. Cofacts is just one of a number of Taiwanese civil society organizations that believe the primary responsibility for combating misinformation rests with its citizens.
Puma Shen, director of DoubleThink Lab, a research group focused on Chinese influence campaigns in Taiwan and around the world, told Al Jazeera: “All of our civil society groups, We have division of labor.
“Some focus on fact-checking, some focus on seminars, and we focus on account operations.”
For Shen, Taiwan’s democratic values, including freedom of expression, are an important part of the solution to state-backed disinformation.
“If you really want to convince the public, I think the best way is for the government to say to the public: ‘Hey, we have a huge problem of fake news and misinformation.’ But then let the nonprofits take over,” he said.
Disinformation campaigns, often in the form of conspiracy theories, propaganda, and disinformation distributed by content farms, bots, and fake accounts are considered by the Taiwanese government to be a “recognized war tactic” awake”.
Many special operations are aimed at fostering distrust of the United States – one of the island’s strongest diplomatic and military backers despite not officially recognizing Taipei – a tactic that may be developing. effective when the Taiwanese are dwindling confidence that the US will support them in this case. Shen said.
In March, the Digital Society Project identified Taiwan as the number one target of foreign governments for the spread of disinformation over the past nine years. According to a report released by the National Bureau of Asian Studies last year, Taiwan serves as a testing ground for Chinese information campaigns before they are carried out elsewhere, and is an important node in disseminating information to regions such as Southeast Asia.
The information war is as old as the cross-strait tension between Beijing and Taipei, but the actual consequences of the uncontrolled spread of disinformation in 2018 are a wake-up call to the government and society. civil society.
That year, Su Chii-Cherng, a Taiwanese diplomat in Japan, died by suicide after the Chinese media published a fake story claiming that he had failed to help. help Taiwanese citizens escape the storm there. Many also believe that Chinese propaganda and misinformation heavily influenced the outcome of Taiwan’s midterm elections that year.
Concern about the spread of misinformation was also heightened that year as a series of referendums on controversial topics, including nuclear power and LGBTQ rights, deeply divided society. festival.
“There have been parents who kicked their children, couples who broke up because they had different views on life. And then we started thinking about what we missed? We thought about the filter bubble and how the algorithm got us into the echo chamber,” said Melody Hsieh, co-founder of Fakenews Cleaner, an NGO that leads media literacy workshops with Taiwanese civilians, told Al Jazeera.
The events of 2018 prompted the launch of Fakenews Cleaner, among other disinformation organizations. Since its founding, the group has accumulated 160 volunteers and organized nearly 500 activities across Taiwan, from lectures in classrooms and nursing homes to outreach in parks and at ceremonies. festival.
Its primary audience is Taiwanese aged 60 and over, a demographic considered particularly vulnerable to health-related misinformation and phishing scams.
“Sometimes we have some classes with the elders and some people will get very angry and stand up and say, ‘Why isn’t the government doing anything? They should have an organization to prevent content farms’. The older generation went through the White Terror,” Hsieh said, referring to the repression of civilians on the island during the military-authoritarian era before democratization in the 1990s.
“I told them if we made the law or [government] organization, if different parties are in power, maybe they can put pressure on you like the White Terror… We say the most important thing is to learn how to protect yourself”.
The government’s efforts to crack down on the spread of fake news have been unpopular because of Taiwan’s democratic values but also because of its authoritarian past. One of the most common – and controversial – laws used today to punish individuals or groups for disseminating false information, the Social Order Maintenance Act, is a relic of the martial era. Law of Taiwan.
The Taiwanese government continues to enact bills to strengthen information control, most of which do not become law. In June, Taiwan’s National Communications Commission enacted the Digital Intermediary Service Act, which will establish obligations and terms for certain platforms with large and legitimate audiences. streamline the process of removing illegal content.
The proposed law was hotly debated; A poll put out on Facebook by Taiwan’s opposition party, the Kuomintang, showed a majority of people opposed the bill, which has since been suspended.
However, many Taiwanese believe that the government does indeed have an important role to play in the information war as long as it restrains the content of its policy – especially given the workforce and funding constraints imposed by the government. All-volunteer non-profit organizations face.
Some experts say the government should focus on improving media literacy education in schools, preventing phishing schemes and improving data privacy.
According to TH Schee, who has worked in Taiwan’s internet sector for 20 years, as cross-strait relations become increasingly strained, China’s information warfare tactics could outgrow those of China. traditional methods of dissection or verification of information used by governments and NGOs.
Footage of Taiwanese soldiers hurling rocks at a Chinese civilian drone last month is real but has been disseminated “not only to test our response, but also to generate information.” misinformation by editing video clips [and] disseminate them on online communities” in order to create division and discredit the Taiwanese military, the Chinese Ministry of National Defense wrote in a statement.
“Information warfare is all about disinformation over the past four years. But now you are seeing real information with different interpretations that can harm or distrust your government,” Schee told Al Jazeera.
“That’s going to keep growing and growing, and I don’t think the government hasn’t figured out how to deal with the information that’s really damaging.”
Schee believes that getting ahead of the information war must be a society-wide effort with a containment rather than reactionary approach. For non-governmental groups, that means working directly with journalists to create a better media environment, he said, while the government may have to consider the privacy of civilians. more seriously.
“By introducing stronger privacy and protecting users from their online behavior or data being manipulated or monetized, that would be a very good start,” he said. “This may not sound direct, but it’s about protecting your citizens from the harmful effects of misinformation without moderating content.”
