TAIPEI, Taiwan — Taiwan might be the fiercest battleground of a worldwide information/disinformation war as it prepares to elect a new president and parliament on Saturday.
The “infodemic” infecting the island democracy reflects global technology trends and mainline China’s deliberate strategy to amplify its message and expand its influence online.
In political and military hot spots as far-flung as the high Himalayas and the South China Sea, Beijing is increasingly deploying “gray zone” tactics, including gradual expansionism, military intimidation, diplomatic muscle-flexing, economic pressure and cognitive warfare.
So far, Taiwan appears to have resisted the pressure from its vast neighbor, which vows one day to claim sovereignty over this nation of nearly 24 million. Polls suggest that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party will capture the presidency — a third consecutive term for the island’s most anti-Beijing political force.
“I think the Chinese Communist Party realizes their information operations are not hitting the mark,” said Alex Neill, a Chinese security expert with Pacific Forum. “Taiwan seems remarkably resilient.”
The idea that altering Saturday’s vote is Beijing’s ultimate goal is simplistic. Experts at a forum in Taipei on Wednesday said China’s information war strategy is subtler and far more ambitious than one election cycle.
With Beijing’s global image and “soft power” in question, Chinese officials now showcase what they say are the benefits of their authoritarian form of governance, especially social stability. Forum participants said the ruling Chinese Communist Party is making the argument by taking advantage of the greater freedoms and looser controls implicit in Taiwan’s open, democratic system to generate distrust, fear and chaos — even if no smoking gun directly linking Beijing to the alleged campaign has emerged.
“For the CCP, what is the best strategy to promote communism?” asked Jung-chin Shen, who teaches at Fu Jen Catholic University. “It is to destroy confidence in democracy, in institutional trust, in the government, in the police.”
New tools of persuasion
The booming field of artificial intelligence also gives bad actors more avenues to “manipulate information,” said Tu Yi-jia, also known as Ethan Tu. “We look at all news media and social media — how we interact with the news and how we interact with each other.”
Mr. Tu spoke at a Taipei seminar hosted by AI Labs, the Taiwanese nongovernmental organization he founded. The group deploys AI to study health care and online interaction. It is monitoring web-based information manipulation campaigns targeting the Taiwanese vote and the Israel-Hamas war.
Generative AI’s ability to create “deepfake” videos — in which falsified subjects may be nearly indistinguishable from real people’s voices and looks — presents obvious possibilities for influence operators. Yet as social media platforms move to police false content more rigorously, deepfakes are not emerging as the tool of choice.
More central to “information manipulation” operations is the mass dissemination of specific news stories, social media messaging and video clips. “Troll account groups,” many AI-generated, then disseminate the false content, Mr. Tu said.
Troll accounts’ use of deepfake images in profile pictures and information posted at preset, regular intervals often betray their AI origins, AI Labs has found.
Mass information dumps can be effective despite their limitations, Mr. Tu said.
“If you can control social media, you influence how other parties make decisions,” he said.
Such campaigns’ aims are varied, generating alarm and fear through disinformation as a leading motivation. A classic tactic raises Taiwanese concerns about the risk of war with China. Other warnings suggest dire commercial consequences if the Taiwanese election results in further damage to trade and investment with the mainland.
The private Taiwan FactCheck Center said this week that it has tracked false election reports back to the mainland, including fabricated quotes and deepfake videos of senior members of the current government.
“The creators of false information have their own motives,” center head Eve Chiu told The Associated Press. “They are all false accusations related to politics.”
Sowing distrust
Domestic issues big and small have been leveraged to sow distrust, analysts said.
Mr. Tu said a flood of messaging during an egg shortage last year urged Taiwanese to buy eggs, sending prices even higher and bringing the government’s economic competence into question.
More recently, information manipulation tactics have targeted campaign issues such as the safety of the Taiwan-produced COVID-19 vaccine, the stabbing of a schoolboy late last month and the disruptions caused by a string of power outages. Dubious rumors about the academic credentials of outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen and the state of the marriage of Vice President William Lai, the DPP’s candidate to succeed Ms. Tsai, have circulated online.
Taiwan is not the only government facing such tactics, Mr. Tu said.
Just before Russia invaded Ukraine, stories about Nazi sympathies among Kyiv’s leaders spiked online. Likewise, a wave of online content has blamed Israel for the Gaza conflict with Hamas.
“We see a clear pattern,” Mr. Tu said. “An attack is preceded by information manipulation.”
China’s role
Mr. Tu acknowledged that the way Beijing organizes and manages its information manipulation efforts is unclear. He said his NGO lacks the cross-border reach and investigative firepower of the CIA or FBI, but he has few doubts about China’s role.
“From my point of view, it is pretty obvious,” he said. “Who stands to benefit?”
Suspected Chinese actors include state agencies, state media and a nationalistic, digital militia of citizen volunteers. The People’s Liberation Army is likely a player, said Mr. Shen, given that it maintains Base 311, which focuses on political warfare across the Taiwan Strait in Fujian province.
AI Labs also points to the heavier traffic by troll accounts on PTT, a Chinese-language Taiwanese platform, than on its global equivalent, Facebook.
Mr. Tu said many troll accounts push identical narratives to Beijing state media. Sheer volume also points to China, with its huge population and national focus on AI.
Numbers matter.
“We can identify collaborative behaviors,” said Mr. Tu, “and every time you debunk, there is a debunking of the debunk.”
Authoritarian advantages
Systemic differences also grant China advantages in information warfare, said Stanford University political science and sociology professor Larry Diamond, who attended the Taiwan forum. China’s “Great Firewall” bans Western platforms such as Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Facebook for domestic netizens.
“They can use all our freedoms on the other side but don’t allow them to their own people,” Mr. Diamond said.
Taiwanese officials warn that China will be emboldened only if its pressure/disinformation campaign succeeds.
China’s “global objective is that they want to use Taiwan as a test ground,” Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told reporters in Taipei. “If they are able to successfully shape the results of the Taiwan elections, they will try to apply their tactics on other countries.”
That explains why some analysts support banning the globally popular China-founded site TikTok. They warn that the video-sharing site is a Trojan horse subtly influencing international youths. Some argue that a ban would go too far in breaching free expression on the internet, but Mr. Tu sees a difference.
“Freedom of speech is not freedom of information manipulation,” he said. “In the past, I thought the internet would bring more freedoms, but it is [also used] for profit and for countries that want to control.”
In such an environment, Taiwan is “fighting for survival,” he said.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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