Scroll through TikTok in Taiwan, and you would find a rolling stream of videos covering the heated campaign for next year’s presidential election.
The nation is the next battleground in the war over political disinformation and the debate over whether China can manipulate the popular app to its advantage — a concern shared in Washington ahead of next year’s US election.
TikTok is not the most used social media platform in Taiwan — Facebook and YouTube have more daily visitors — and disinformation cuts across social media apps, but TikTok’s Chinese ownership and its status as the fastest-growing app is drawing scrutiny as campaigning gets under way.
Photo: AP
“The risk level of disinformation on a platform comes from its popularity, and for TikTok, that’s only growing,” said Billion Lee (李比鄰), cofounder of the Taiwanese fact-checking platform Cofacts.
Sensing a potential threat, authorities in Taiwan already barred TikTok from government-issued devices, in line with moves by countries including the US.
Now they are weighing national security and free-speech concerns before deciding whether to go further.
In a statement to Bloomberg, TikTok said it complies with laws and regulations wherever it works and has policies to combat disinformation and “prevent misuse of the platform.”
“We are proactively reaching out to the relevant government agencies to share how TikTok protects user data and counters misinformation,” the company said.
That includes “confirming the authenticity of accounts of political figures and parties with the relevant individuals and organizations.”
Given its importance to China and its ties to the US, Taiwan “has long been used as a testing ground for disinformation,” said Robin Lee (李信誠), project manager of the fact-checking platform MyGoPen.
National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said this month that his agency reviewed more than 1,800 cases of online disinformation and disputed information across several platforms, including Facebook and YouTube.
That was 1,400 more than the same period last year and that he expected those figures to keep rising, Tsai said.
After TikTok was banned from government devices, some officials argued it should be barred from the nation entirely.
“Taiwan must be very cautious when we make this decision,” said Lo Ping-cheng (羅秉成), who is Minister Without Portfolio in charge of the government’s internal discussions on regulating TikTok. “There is no timetable set for a decision so far.”
TikTok has already been an influential platform in major elections. In Malaysia last year, conservative religious parties used the app to attract younger voters who helped them score some key upsets.
On the other end of the political spectrum, there is Thailand’s progressive Move Forward Party’s outperforming of all other parties in elections in May. The party used the app in their campaign.
In the US and Europe, TikTok faces an existential crisis over worries that its feed can be manipulated for political purposes and that user data can be accessed by its Beijing-based parent company, ByteDance Ltd, on behalf of the Chinese government.
The company has repeatedly denied it receives data requests from Beijing. In its statement to Bloomberg, it added that “Taiwanese user data is stored in the US, Singapore and Malaysia.”
With campaigning in Taiwan under way, one viral video, which garnered almost 900,000 views, highlights the challenge authorities face.
The clip accused Vice President William Lai (賴清德) — the Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate — of risking citizens’ lives in a potential war with China, while saying his children would be protected because they live in the US and they are US citizens.
The party has repeatedly said the clip is false.
“Taiwanese people, it’s time to wake up,” the narrator says in the video, hosted on an account run by a 32-year-old Taiwanese engineer who posts under the name “Citizen V.”
That is a nod to the film V For Vendetta and its message of protesting political tyranny.
The clip was flagged in May by contributors at Cofacts for containing misinformation. After that designation, it was taken down, but by then it had circulated for more than a month.
Officials are concerned that a rising tide of misleading information can confound the ability of organizations and the government to stop them all.
Cofacts and MyGoPen are part of a constellation of non-profits focusing on disinformation who say they are funded by individual donations and foundations, separate from any political party or group.
In an interview, “Citizen V” — who asked not to be identified by his real name — said he was frustrated that his video was singled out.
He said he does not see himself as peddling disinformation, but he does want to be an influencer in the election, and he found TikTok to be the best venue for getting his posts — many in support of former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) of the Taiwan People’s Party, the party’s presidential candidate — to a wider audience.
Now the blogger has more than 48,000 followers and he has had about 18 million views in the past two months on TikTok.
Citizen V’s case highlights the difficulty in separating heated rhetoric and misleading claims — part of elections everywhere — from state-sponsored disinformation.
Officials in Taipei have been warning since March about “large-scale” operations from China that seek to interfere with the election, an issue the government has a long history with.
Taiwanese agencies faced a record number of cyberattacks after then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in August last year.
“The most common tactic by China is to create greater confrontation between the major parties,” said Puma Shen (沈伯洋), chairperson of Doublethink Lab, which tracks online disinformation. “Their main purpose is to undermine trust in Taiwan.”
While false information is prevalent across Taiwanese social media, usage of TikTok significantly impacts whether people in Taiwan view China positively or negatively, Shen said.
Another combative and popular political TikTok account is “Taiwan Strait Number One Brother,” which posts videos promoting China’s People’s Liberation Army and criticizing the US.
The majority of its nearly 700 posts are dubbed or subtitled in simplified Chinese — a sign security experts say that the content might be generated in China.
A person involved in managing the account declined to comment beyond saying that they were based outside Taiwan.
Cybersecurity experts say it is not easy to identify whether TikTok accounts are run by real-life political supporters or they are backed by a state, but the threat of election-related disinformation campaigns would only grow.
“We’re seeing more conspiracy-type information that is a lot harder to fight back on,” Robin Lee said. “A potential invasion sounds very scary, but is also something that could happen in the future — that you cannot actually fact-check.”
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