As next year’s presidential election gets closer, there are increasing concerns in Taiwan regarding the issue of election interference by China.
Short-video sharing apps on mobile devices have become all the rage recently, and one of the most popular of these is Douyin and its international version TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd.
TikTok has 4 million users in Taiwan alone, and people in the 18 to 24 age range account for 40 percent. These users regard TikTok as a source of news, information and entertainment, with other Chinese apps like Xiaohongshu becoming main amusement sources in people’s daily lives.
From a user’s perspective, TikTok can ensure that specific content can go viral and have a major impact in Taiwan, and this is primarily down to specific tricks it has up its sleeve: a recommendation algorithm catering to users’ preferences, short videos with abundant information that suit people living in modern societies and the weight of peer pressure, with the implication that if people are not using it, they are out of the loop.
TikTok is a double-edged sword in that users’ senses are quickly satisfied with short videos. It removes the patience and concentration required to analyze complicated public affairs, fragments users’ attention and diverts their minds over the long run, adversely affecting the young generation’s mental developlment.
TikTok and Douyin even pose a threat to national security and privacy due to loopholes in data security. ByteDance’s Beijing headquarters owns a golden share in the company: That is, it has more power than other shareholders over changes in its management. In addition, the Chinese Communist Party has a presence inside the company, meaning that it can have influence over business decisions and backdoor access to the data of users throughout the world, and it allows Beijing to have a say in TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, deciding what each user sees.
Recently, Beijing fabricated the meeting minutes of the South China Sea Conference, with the rumor that Taipei has agreed to develop biological weapons for the US, and streamed this disinformation on TikTok.
If Beijing is capable of doing this, who can ensure that it would not use TikTok as a tool, waging a larger scale of public opinion warfare against Taiwan?
When the government tried to address the problem of cognitive warfare in recent years it insisted on a policy of platform neutrality, so that it does not check on the vectors of cognitive warfare, concentrating solely on the content.
Furthermore, the controversy over the draft digital intermediary service act has meant that the government has had to shelve it, missing the opportunity of regulating Chinese apps such as TikTok.
If the government starts to control Chinese apps for the coming election, even with legitimately and with goodwill, it would be criticized by Beijing and its allies in Taiwan, opening it up to manipulation by opposition parties saying that the Democratic Progressive Party is “the enemy of the younger generation.”
Regulating TikTok and other Chinese social media apps would test the government’s wisdom on rapidly raising public awareness of the risk of Chinese apps and lowering its effect on Taiwanese.
Roger Wu works in the service industry and is a part-time freelance writer.
Translated by Polly Chiu
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