With a presidential campaign underway, the island democracy is struggling to deal with a Russian-style disinformation campaign coming from the mainland.
Yet Taiwanese society remains undecided on whether Chinese disinformation is a threat, or even real.
It doesn’t help that Taiwan’s media landscape is severely polarized, with poor fact-checking standards and a high emphasis on entertainment over factual, neutrally presented news. Politicians from both of Taiwan’s major parties have also used trolls and cyber armies to influence voters as elections approach, Wang said.
Johnson Liang, the founder of CoFacts, acknowledged that it was hard to change the minds of people deceived by disinformation, but he said that the chatbot at least provided alternative viewpoints to consider.It’s a philosophy in line with how Liang and many Taiwanese people believe the internet should operate: open source, based on exchange and dialogue, not on censorship and top-down control.
Yisuo Tzeng, acting director of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-backed think tank, said that China’s Communist Party lacked sufficient understanding of democratic societies to change how people outside mainland China think. Shen, of DoubleThink Labs, is less optimistic. He says that civil society needs physical protection from Chinese agents, especially when they move beyond fact-checking to exposing influence networks.
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