Taiwanese election officials detail China’s efforts to skew electoral campaign

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

The Taiwanese government is warning that the success of China’s malicious information operations is dependent upon “local collaborators” capable of reaching individual audiences beyond the grasp of new tech tools.

Taiwan’s government and civil society organizations say they faced a digital onslaught from China aimed at manipulating voters before the island democracy’s hard-fought January elections.

A coalition of government officials and independent researchers traveled to Washington this week to share their findings and lessons learned from what they say was Beijing’s attempted meddling in Taiwan’s elections before America votes in November.

In the end, the candidate for the independence-leaning party most disliked by China’s Communist regime convincingly won the presidency, although parties more sympathetic to Beijing gained a majority in the national legislature.

Taiwan Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s Wen-Ping Liu told reporters on Monday that China’s influence operations required the presence of key people inside Taiwan to assist efforts to disrupt public affairs.

“The enemy needs local collaborators,” Mr. Liu said at the National Press Club. “The local collaborators are very important element of cognitive warfare practice.”

Mr. Liu suggested in a presentation that the best ways to combat China’s pressure campaign included immediate clarifications to debunk disinformation, proactively attacking China’s own credibility, and targeting locals who work with China by enforcing the country’s laws.

Taiwan’s government intervenes against Beijing sympathizers if they break laws but their conduct is otherwise legally protected, according to Mr. Liu, who has served with the bureau for more than 40 years.

The U.S. intelligence community is aware of the foreign collaborator problem that acts as an accelerant for influence operations. It is not just China that concerns American officials.

The intelligence community’s assessment of foreign threats to the 2022 midterm elections showed Iran was experimenting with new influence operations targeting collaborators at media outlets.

Iranian elements in mid-2022 “considered distributing propaganda, developing and employing ’troll teams’ on social media platforms, and establishing front news agencies to interact with undisclosed media outlets in the United States,” said the declassified assessment published in December 2023.

Cuba likewise looked for U.S. domestic allies in the media’s ranks for its efforts to influence American voters, according to the intelligence community report. The Cuban meddling was aimed at U.S. political candidates in Florida.

“Havana sought to identify and establish relationships with members of the U.S. media who held critical views of members of Congress,” the intelligence community report said.

While Cuba and Iran spotted and cultivated potential collaborators, Russia leaned less heavily on human proxies for disseminating its messages before the 2022 elections in contrast to 2020, according to the intelligence community report.

The intelligence community pointed to sanctions and reputational damage from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as potential explanations for the diminishing dependence on collaborators before November 2022.

New fears that Russian influence operations are working, however, are spreading among powerful Republican lawmakers. House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner each expressed concerns about Russian propaganda spreading within the Republican Party in separate public statements.

America’s adversaries are not the only foreign powers looking to interfere in democratic elections.

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mark Warner said earlier this month he had evidence he could not share that some of America’s “quasi-allies” wanted to interfere in U.S. politics as they understood how easily and cheaply it could be done. Mr. Warner did not identify any of the individual countries.

India and Pakistan are facing fresh accusations of attempting to interfere in Canada’s elections, where Canada’s intelligence officers reportedly identified the two nations as attempting to influence voting in 2019 and 2021.

Unclassified documents from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed last week that Ottawa detected efforts by Pakistani officials to interfere in the 2019 elections and efforts by India to interfere in the 2021 elections, according to CBC News, the Canadian public broadcaster.

India subsequently called the Canadian spy agency’s allegations baseless.