Beijing is mass-posting videos featuring a false “secret history” of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on hundreds of social media accounts in a disinformation push ahead of Saturday’s presidential election, sources said.
The Secret History of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文秘史) is a 300-page document containing rumors and negative content first published last month on the online open repository Zenodo.
The material is being turned into hastily produced videos with artificial intelligence (AI)-generated voiceovers and fake hosts, and being posted on YouTube, Instagram, X and other platforms, a national security official familiar with the matter said on condition of anonymity.
Photo: Screen grab from Austin Wang’s Facebook page
The content’s creation and spread bore the characteristic traits of an informational operation by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, the official said.
The videos, which were being shared about 100 times per minute, were promptly replaced if deleted by platforms or the accounts were banned and had been edited using Capcut, software developed by Chinese firm ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動), which owns Douyin, they said.
The videos used virtual hosts, including characters that resembled Chinese-speaking newscasters, foreigners, and in at least one instance, Santa Claus, they said.
However, the content did not generate high rates of engagement due to the low production quality, including the artificial appearance and voice of the virtual hosts, and the use of Chinese-language terms not commonly used by Taiwanese, the official said.
The campaign used more social media platforms than usual, including a manga subforum of the online bulletin board Professional Technology Temple, Mirror Literature and a Facebook group for real-estate listings, they said.
China is known to wage disinformation campaigns against leaders of democratic states, including one last year targeting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but the recent operation exceeded it in scale and resources, the official said.
Beijing is likely using Taiwan as a test bed for information warfare techniques that could be deployed against other countries while still damaging the Democratic Progressive Party at the ballot box on Saturday, the official said.
Austin Wang (王宏恩), an associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, echoed the official’s assessment.
As of Tuesday, more than 100 nearly identical videos had been uploaded to YouTube since Sunday, Wang said.
The videos were mostly a recital by an AI-created virtual host of the same document and pictures chosen by an algorithm, he said, adding that all of the uploads had single-digit view counts.
The flood of videos suggests that Beijing has the ability to create the impression that the material is generating public interest, he said.
“There is no doubt this activity is coordinated and a show of force,” Wang said. “Its scale far exceeded anything we tracked before.”
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