Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) yesterday said that Taiwan has shown the world its democratic resilience despite Beijing’s attempts to intervene in the nation’s legislative and presidential elections.
Speaking at this year’s Forum for Democratic Resilience in Taipei, Wu said Taiwan successfully held elections on Saturday last week despite Beijing’s attempts to manipulate the outcome, adding that Taiwan’s mature response to Chinese machinations was evidence of the country’s democratic resilience.
With the development of information technologies, cognitive warfare is no longer just news content, but what people encounter in their daily lives, Wu said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
The techniques used would only be further upgraded, Wu said, adding that authoritarian regimes and their local collaborators would employ more intimidation tools.
Yesterday’s event was hosted by the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center, a civil data-science research organization seeking to spread public awareness of information manipulation.
Addressing the forum, center codirector Yu Chih-hao (游知澔) said that information manipulation in Taiwan has the following characteristics: sabotaging democratic operations, denying democratic values and negating Taiwan’s sovereignty.
Yu added that information manipulation tended to target more “professional and classified” topics, such as vaccines, semiconductors and national defense.
Much of this misinformation is spread in video format or generated by artificial intelligence, making research more difficult, Yu said.
He said that in the months before the elections, even polls became a manipulative tool, including fake poll numbers, street surveys falsely claiming to reflect the majority view, and politicians and online opinion leaders citing questionable surveys to frame their narratives.
Vote-rigging rumors could “seriously harm Taiwanese people’s trust in the democratic system,” Yu said.
Ku Ming-chun (古明君), an associate professor at National Tsing-Hua University’s Institute of Sociology, said that Taiwanese religious groups expect to revive religious activities in China.
However, under China’s framework, these types of exchanges have been interpreted as “fraternal” based on the idea that the two sides are “connected by the same culture and race,” said Ku, who has spent the past few years researching the role religion plays in China’s tactics regarding Taiwan.
Ku said her team have found that some Taiwanese politicians had had weak links with temples in Taiwan, but later became deeply involved with religion to get communities of temples participate in cross-strait religious activities.
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