The Chinese government is using TikTok and other social media platforms to sow discontent among Taiwanese over policy issues, and to sway young voters toward pro-China candidates, an official said on Sunday. Videos from Chinese content farms produced under the instruction of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aim to vilify Taiwan’s conscription policy and create a sense that war would be imminent if the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is re-elected, they said.
The Executive Yuan last year rejected calls to ban public use of TikTok, saying there is no legal basis for doing so. In the US, several states have banned government agencies, and their employees and contractors, from using TikTok on government-issued devices. However, in the US there is also no legal basis for banning civilians from using TikTok or any other platform on their personal devices. China is aware of such legal limitations, and it uses free speech and other democratic freedoms against the countries that protect those freedoms. Meanwhile, Chinese social media companies are free to operate unrestricted in democracies, openly facilitating China’s cognitive warfare efforts.
Exacerbating the situation is the tendency of the CCP to insert itself in discourse on China-related concerns by infiltrating university campuses, paying off politicians and using fake accounts on social media. The situation leaves governments scrambling to find ways to prevent China from exporting its dystopian ideology. Governments must find ways to combat disinformation and mitigate efforts to influence young voters without treading on press and speech freedoms. The best option is empowering the public through media literacy campaigns. Courses that teach young students to identify potential disinformation and how to verify the authenticity of questionable information should be a required part of school curricula.
However, artificial intelligence (AI) is making it harder to distinguish real news sources from disinformation. A recent CNN report said Chinese content farms are using AI to make deepfake videos, including a recent one that depicts Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the DPP’s presidential candidate, making comments favorable toward China. To fight this trend, national security officials might need to use AI to defend against the technology. For example, the government could employ AI-powered fact-checking at the Internet service provider level. Content suspected of containing disinformation could be flagged for fact-checking by an independent body and confirmed disinformation could be watermarked with a warning before it reaches users.
Another aim of China’s cognitive warfare efforts has been to foster pro-China sentiment among young Taiwanese, partly by inviting students to China to attend exchange events. While this might not seem inherently worrisome, the issue is that China regularly detains foreigners including Taiwanese. There has been a growing number of reports over the past year of students, professors and researchers being arbitrarily detained upon entering China, and in some cases facing arrest over past comments or actions seen as supporting Taiwanese independence.
Taiwanese who are lured by a false sense that visiting China is safe are at great risk, particularly because there are no channels through which Taiwan can provide assistance to citizens who find themselves detained in China. The channels that did exist through the Straits Exchange Foundation and the Mainland Affairs Council have broken down, because the CCP hopes to pressure voters into electing pro-China opposition candidates.
With the presidential and legislative elections just around the corner, the government must ensure it is on top of efforts to combat Chinese disinformation and influence campaigns. Pro-China forces in Taiwan that collaborate on Chinese efforts will add to the challenge, but authorities must remain vigilant, and work to counter them.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS