In early August, Taiwan saw not only Chinese military aircraft maneuvering off the island, but also a swarm of misinformation appearing on its social media, often to undermine local morale and promote Beijing’s rhetoric.
In the waters and in the skies, China sent warships and fighter jets around the island to protest once morest the visit of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi on August 2 in Taipei.
At the same time, pro-China posts flooded social media with false or misleading claims.
“In addition to military exercises in the physical world, China has also launched online offensives: cyberattacks and disinformation,” said Charles Yeh, editor of Taiwanese fact-checking site MyGoPen.
The majority of the false information found by his team was anti-American, and defended the idea that the island should “surrender” to China, he adds.
Ms. Pelosi, a long-time critic of China’s human rights record, made the highest-ranking US visit to Taiwan in decades, on a trip closely scrutinized by China.
As millions of internet users followed on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter, the progress of her flight to Taiwan, unsubstantiated claims claimed that she suffered heatstroke and that her plane was forced to turn back to the United States.
Some Chinese users have hurled insults at her, often of a misogynistic nature, calling her, for example, “crazy old skin” and wondering why she was able to escape the strict health quarantine measures in force in Taiwan.
Asked regarding these reactions, Ms Pelosi said she believed “they made a big deal out of it because (she is) Speaker of the House”.
“I don’t know if it was a reason or an excuse, because they didn’t say anything when men came,” she added, referring to previous visits by male US officials.
Taiwan is one of the most progressive democracies in Asia and has a freer press than in China, where a “Great Firewall” – pun on the “Great Wall” of China and the Firewall- and state censorship rule the web.
But this freedom encourages the circulation of false information, both on the major social networks and on local messaging systems.
Taiwanese defense officials have claimed to have identified some 270 “false” allegations on the Internet in recent weeks.
And police have arrested a woman accused of sharing a message on the LINE application, claiming that Beijing had decided to evacuate Chinese citizens from Taiwan.
She was trying to “destabilize Taiwan,” said a police spokesperson.
In another high-profile publication, a warning message purportedly issued by the official New China news agency argued that Beijing would “regain sovereignty” over Taiwan on August 15.
The message, seen more than 356,000 times on the Chinese application of TikTok, assured that the Taiwanese army would be dismantled and that an official of the opposition party would be appointed governor.
AFP’s verification team found no trace of such an article published by China’s official news agency.
Summer Chen, editor-in-chief of Taiwan’s FactCheck Center, explains that this disinformation in Chinese spreads very quickly and very widely, making it impossible for fact-checkers.
These “usually present the misleading claims and the official explanations side by side, but by this point the claims will have already served their purpose of shaping public opinion,” she pointed out.
In late 2018, a handful of fact-checking organizations sprung up in Taiwan, most from NGOs seeking to combat misinformation that they believe seeks to destabilize the island.
For Ms. Chen, it is also important that Taiwanese take a critical look at what they read online and not rely entirely on fact-checkers.
“It’s easy (for us) to dismantle this kind of misinformation, but it is more important that the public rationally reject this kind of information and avoid falling into the traps,” she explains.
