Made-in-China fake news overwhelms Taiwan · Global Voices
<PERSON>, Taiwan's first female president. Photo by Taiwan Presidential Office via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
Since 2016, when <PERSON> of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected as Taiwan's president after the pro-independent Sunflower Movement, waves of disinformation have engulfed traditional and social media platforms in Taiwan — and much of it can be traced back to China.
Taiwan has been ruled independently for decades, and <PERSON> decided to reject the “One China, different interpretation”, an agreement signed in 1992 between the former ruling Kuomingtang and Beijing that helped improve the strained relationship between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China.
Since <PERSON>'s decision, that relationship has taken a turn for the worse. Beijing has suspended diplomatic contact with Taiwan, imposed economic sanctions, forced other countries to cut ties with Taiwan and has bolstered its military presence in the Taiwan Strait.
In parallel, a series of fake news campaigns have captured Taiwanese media, with experts tracing several of these stories back to China.
Last year, Taiwan’s National Security Bureau revealed that a significant volume of disinformation that had circulated on Taiwan social media networks came from “content farms” with China's Communist Party. This was confirmed a few months ago by the Investigative Bureau of Taiwan's Ministry of Justice.
Various media outlets, including Chinese dissident media outlet Mingjing, referred to a leaked document from Chinese authorities affirming that Beijing had launched an information war, using disinformation, online harassment and trolling campaigns to manipulate public opinions in Taiwan.
Taiwanese media outlet Mirror Media also referred to the leaked document, concluding that Beijing's objective is to divide Taiwanese society.
Technical research has also supported these reports. Programmers who run a fact-checking bot in an application called the LINE app, a messaging platform hugely popular in Taiwan, told Taiwanese online magazine Business Weekly that at least 20 percent of the disinformation sent to them comes from China.
Rumors target the president
Many of these rumors and fake news target the personal life of <PERSON>. Soon after her 2016 election victory, a fabricated story was posted on Reddit and quickly became one of the hottest topics in Taiwanese media. 871
The story falsely claims that when <PERSON> was asked why she never married, she replied: “I wouldn’t buy a whole pig just so I could have a sausage.”
Eventually, Reddit users found out that the image came from various Chinese online forums like Tianya and had first appeared in 2011 when <PERSON> first ran for president. Around 2016, a journalist from Gizmodo reached out to the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office who confirmed this quote was false.
<PERSON>, the Taiwanese president, is the subject of a viral fake news campaign, identified as fake by Gizmodo.
Although this fabricated story had circulated widely in China and became a hot topic on Reddit, it was never really taken seriously in Taiwan as it cuts against Taiwanese mainstream values.
But others have gained more ground. Also in 2016, a rumor that <PERSON> was of Japanese descent circulated on Facebook. This piece of disinformation first appeared on Tianya in 2015 and it reappeared on Taiwan's social media in 2016. The rumor triggers memories of the Japanese 1885-1945 colonial era — those Taiwanese who were educated to recognize themselves as Chinese see Japan, and its once-colonized Taiwan, as an enemy from World War II.
A similar example is a piece of fabricated news that 2,000 important art pieces in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan will be sent to Japan for a 50-year exhibition contract, which circulated in July 2018.
In addition to President <PERSON>, other DPP politicians have also become targets of disinformation.
Fake news takes a fatal turn
Screenshot from a viral video showing a Chinese representative from the Chinese consulate in Osaka, Japan, explaining evacuation efforts to stranded Chinese tourists during Typhoon Jebi in September 2018.
In September, when Typhoon Jebi struck Japan's Kansai region, a story that undermined senior DPP member and Taiwan’s ambassador in Japan, <PERSON>, triggered a chaotic chain of events that culminated in the death by suicide of a Taiwanese diplomat stationed in Osaka.
Propaganda from several state-affiliated media outlets in China claimed that the Chinese consulate in Osaka had arranged evacuation buses from Kansai airport exclusively for stranded Chinese tourists. Some reports claimed that Taiwanese people were required to identify themselves as Chinese in order to get on the buses.
In fact, the buses had been arranged by Japanese authorities. As this clarification traveled much slower than the fake story itself, Taiwanese traditional media, along with internet celebrities, had time to cook the story and made the impression that many people demanded <PERSON> to step down for not providing adequate assistance to Taiwanese tourists during the disaster. 871