Chinese Disinformation Attacks in the 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Election

And the final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Chen-ling Hung, whose focus is on Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan during the presidential election on 13 January 2024. Given its exposed position at the frontier between democracy and autocracy, Taiwan is most targetted by foreign disinformation attacks, yet remains a democratic country with the highest level of press freedom in Asia; there is considerable social awareness of disinformation challenges.

This study examined the means and themes of Chinese disinformation attacks on Taiwan, and the responses to this from Taiwanese society. It centrally builds on the concept of democratic resilience: the ability to respond to threats and adapt to external challenges and internal stressors. This is necessarily an ongoing process that requires ongoing adjustments and transformations without straying from the democratic path.

Key means of attack in Chinese disinformation operations that this identified were AI-generated threats, coordinated behaviours, and false issue and misleading narratives. AI-generated disinformation sought to push fake content relating to key parties and candidates, including deepfakes of the candidates’ voices and of statements by Chinese president Xi, as well as an AI news anchor presenting disinformation about a candidate’s supposed illegitimate child.

Coordinated behaviour occurred on Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and PTT, and nearly 3% of Taiwanese social media accounts were identified as troll and sockpuppet accounts affiliated with the Chinese regime. These made a substantial number of posts, and uploaded various AI-generated videos pushing the supposed illegitimate child scandal.

Facebook emerged as a particular battleground for such activities. Other narratives here included the threat of war and a lack of support for China from the US, and posting patterns by accounts pushing these narratives strongly suggested that their activities were conducted by nine-to-five cyberworkers. Other topics pushed disinformation about candidates and made claims about voter fraud.

Taiwanese citizen organisations such as the Taiwan FactCheck Center and MyGoPen responded to such claims with fact-checks; other organisations like IORG sought to track the sources of such disinformation.