Madeleine Daepp and Robert Osazuwa Ness share lessons from Taiwan for fighting disinformation
) is rewriting the disinformation playbook. There is no better place to study this than Taiwan, which, the Swedish Varieties of Democracy Project finds, is subject to more disinformation from abroad than any other democracy. China has greatly increased the scope and sophistication of its influence operations on the island using cutting-edge. We conducted fieldwork during the elections in Taiwan in January, meeting organisations on disinformation’s front lines.
AI also makes it easier to pump out media about events as soon as they occur. A few days before the election every Taiwan-registered phone buzzed simultaneously with an air-raid alert triggered by a Chinese satellite crossing Taiwanese airspace. Within 24 hours TaiwanLabs, a research outfit, observed over 1,500 co-ordinated social-media posts promoting conspiracy theories about the alert and sowing distrust. At one point as many as five a minute were appearing.
Worse, technology companies lack effective technical countermeasures against disinformation distributed by states. They are increasingly using “watermarks”, digital branding of content asfrom being abused by others. But well-resourced states can build their ownthat is unimpeded by watermarking and content-policy constraints. Tech firms are also focused on building tools for detecting-generated content, but Taiwanese disinformation-fighters say these provide conflicting and inaccurate results.
Taiwanese civil-society organisations avoid TikTok because they doubt they would be treated fairly on a Chinese-owned platform. Taiwan’s government has concluded that there is no legal basis for a blanket ban on TikTok and that it lacks the power to require Chinese disinvestment from the platform—a move being considered by lawmakers in America, where, unlike in Taiwan, TikTok has a subsidiary. That means Taiwan, and others in a similar situation, will have to find ways to better monitor TikTok.
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