Homo Digitalis 02 | What can we learn from elections in Taiwan

Hello,

Welcome to the second issue of my newsletter, HOMO DIGITALIS . As I mentioned in the last issue, over this year, we will see over 80 elections in 78 countries, some of which have already been done and dusted. In this issue, we will focus on the elections in Taiwan in January, and the interesting case study it presents for governments worldwide dealing with disinformation and foreign interference.

In Focus: Elections in Taiwan

In the first month of 2024, national elections were held in Taiwan, where the incumbent party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), returned to power, with the Lai Ching-te elected as President. The last few elections in Taiwan have been the subject of significant interest and study, even outside the country. This is largely due to the geopolitical prominence that the small island country has attained in global politics.

The Curious Case of Taiwanese Sovereignty

For the uninitiated, Taiwan presents a unique study in the analysis of disinformation and sovereignty. Since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek left the Chinese mainland for Taiwan, its sovereign status has remained ambiguous. In the seventy years since, Taiwan has seen martial law (until 1987), the loss of its UN membership (in 1971), a period of political reforms (starting in the late 1970s) and a multi-party democratic polity (since the early 1990s). In fact, in its relatively short democratic life, Taiwan has done exceedingly well. To wit, in the latest Freedom House global freedom and internet freedom rankings in 2023, it ranked higher than any other Asian country and scored above countries such as France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. In most functional ways, it is an independent and highly vibrant democracy. It has a working constitution, a transparent government, and a free and fair judiciary. It has its own currency and military and maintains diplomatic relations with several states.

However, its sovereign status remains complicated. Beijing’s position is that there is one China, which includes Taiwan, with the PRC as the sole legitimate government, widely known as the One-China principle. More specifically, it claims that Taiwan is bound by something called the 1992 consensus agreed between China and Kuomintang (KMT) which then ruled over Taiwan. Neither the PRC, nor the KMT, which now is opposition in Taiwan, nor the DPP, the current ruling party can agree on the contents of the supposed consensus. For a comprehensive yet succinct account of the complicated China-Taiwan relationship, please see this handy backgrounder by the Council on Foreign Relations.

Election Disinformation in Taiwan

As one would expect, the PRC has taken a keen interest in the democratic politics of Taiwan, and in recent years this interest has translated into disinformation campaigns. The murky nature of claims over statehood allows China to adopt a bullish attitude towards what are essentially classic examples of foreign interference in the Taiwanese elections.

In late 2018, in the run-up towards the mayoral and county elections in Taiwan, reports emerged from the Taiwanese government that trolls and content farms with “unequivocal” links to the Chinese military had been spreading disinformation. The suicide of Su Chii-cherng, Taiwanese envoy to Osaka was reported to have been caused by misinformation about the failure to rescue Taiwanese citizens during Typhoon Jebi. the nature of disinformation ranged from exaggeration of the scale of military exercises in the strait to overproduction of bananas in the island. A probe by the Ministry of Justice’s Investigation Bureau was reported to have found “unequivocal evidence” of Chinese involvement. In November, both BBC and the New York Times reported on this, bringing global attention to local elections in Taiwan. These elections, while small in scale, were widely seen as a mid-term referendum on the performance of the DPP, with implications for the 2020 elections. Notably, after the elections, KMT claimed that the DPP was using ‘fake news’ as an excuse for its poor performance in the election and blamed President Tsai’s administration for suppressing ‘freedom of speech in the name of curbing disinformation.

The efficacy of the disinformation campaign in the subsequent years has been a subject of scholarship. A study at the Graduate Institute of Journalism, Taiwan conducted an online survey to interview 1068 randomly selected voters after the 2018 elections. They found that disinformation played a role in creating a sense of uncertainty in the political discourse. Over half the participants felt they were voting without access to correct news. Even more significantly, the undecideds unable to discern the disinformation tended to vote for KMT, which is widely seen as more favorable to China. Michael J. Cole identifies some of the channels used by China in disseminating disinformation in Taiwan which included a wide variety of sources from state-run media to government-linked Weibo accounts, and content farms to media associated with the PLA Base 311. Wikipedia has also been a battleground where entries on Taiwan were edited and reversed multiple times. Overall, the use of manual propaganda is seen as more significant, even though the use of bots was seen on occasion.

Sunflower Movement and the evolution of Taiwanese politics

Any contemporary analysis of Taiwanese politics would be deficient without a close look at the impact of the Sunflower movement of 2014. For a thriving democracy, three essential components are generally necessary—free and fair elections, working forms of deliberation and the ability of its people to organize themselves for protest. The last two decades have seen a wave of protests in different parts of the world with ICT technologies allowing better domestic and transnational coordination, and ‘occupy movements’ and ‘public square politics’ emerging as a popular mode of bargaining with governments.

East Asia had largely been an outlier from this global trend and the movements in Taiwan (and in Hong Kong) were the first big examples of contemporary protest politics. Ming-sho Ho find roots for this in the conservatism that continues to mark East Asian societies which frown on ‘illegal’ protests. In his book, Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, Ho succinctly differentiates these movements from the global trend.

First, they were emphatically not so-called leaderless movements, and the grassroots participants readily recognized some youthful faces as their figurehead leaders. In varying degrees, the decisions made by a small and closed circle of student activists shaped the movement outcomes. Second, although there had been a prevalent sense of economic deprivation among Taiwanese and Hongkonger youth, neoliberalism did not become a prominent issue in their protests. Even in the Sunflower Movement, which was triggered by trade liberalization with China, principled opposition to free trade remained a marginal voice. This reduced emphasis on economic demands was accompanied by a more salient role for geopolitical factors, as both the Sunflower Movement and the Umbrella Movement were inextricably opposed to an increasingly hegemonic China. Here, these two movements were more akin to the Color Revolutions, and more removed from the global justice movement. Last, unlike the European autonomous leftists and the American anarchists who shared an ideological aversion to institutional politics, Sunflower and Umbrella activists eagerly embraced party and electoral politics after the conclusion of their intensive mobilization. There was a rather smooth transition from street occupation to electioneering.

Despite the perceived conservatism in Taiwanese society, the Sunflower Movement was far more disruptive than most protests in this century in that it was not limited to public squares, but in a radical act chose to occupy the national legislature. This radical nature of the movement did not lead to any loss in public support. Another interesting feature of the movement was the leading role that student activists took, even eclipsing the traditional civil society actors. To quickly summarise what happened, in mid-March 2014, hundreds of student protestors occupied the Taiwanese national legislature for about three weeks to oppose a free trade agreement with China. A week later, then-President Ma stated he had not wavered his intent to continue with the trade pact. In response, the protestors briefly occupied the office of the executive branch and were evacuated from there through the use of excessive force by the government. On March 30th, after failed negotiations, the protestors held a rally from the Presidential Office to the legislature where 500,000 people participated. Eventually, the speaker of the Legislature was forced to postpone the review of the trade pact until legislation monitoring all cross-strait agreements had been passed.

The key aspect of the movement was the continued involvement of the student activists, and it mushroomed the rise of several groups which focussed on direct democracy and social justice. The emergence of a stronger Taiwanese identity in the last decade, particularly for its younger generation was a key factor behind the sustainability of the movement. The movement also managed a smooth transition from street protesters to electoral politics, eventually leading DPP to come to power in 2016.

Preserving Public Trust

Despite Chinese influence, two national elections on in 2020 and 2024, the DPP has continued to prevail over the KMT. While disinformation campaigns and responses to them are extremely complex phenomena with multiple social, economic and cognitive factors at play, the case of Taiwan presents an interesting study in public trust. Rorry Daniels has convincingly argued that in Taiwan, the public and government both now view the threats to trust posed by disinformation as existential threats from China. Taiwan has responded with a ‘whole of society’ approach. One prong of this strategy is to increase transparency with a host of initiatives including the seeking the participation of the innovative g0v (gov-zero) project. Members of project joined the government to form a new team, called the Public Digital Innovation Space (PDIS), and launched the consensus-building project, vTaiwan and its graphic avatar, Polis, which found a structured way for public forum discussions to inform policy decisions.

This digital infrastructure was vital in responding to disinformation, where an unconventional team including graphic designers and comedy writers inside the government would create memes directly responding to fake news. This also allowed a dedicated channel to craft very quick responses with specified timelines of sixty minutes for responses to suspected cases of misinformation.

This model of response is in direct contrast to more authoritarian responses which involve censorship and takedown of content, something that a country which only thirty years ago emerged from four decades of martial law is, with good reason, uncomfortable with. In an interview in 2019, Taiwan’s inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs spoke of the government’s commitment to counter-narrative as a mode of addressing disinformation, famously calling it the ‘humour-over-rumour’ approach.

Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they’re in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could be a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream.

This is not the only form of response to disinformation. Taiwan has also instituted new laws which impose heavy penalties for spreading disinformation. Some of the penalties are quite harsh, such as a five-year imprisonment term for causing the public at large to suffer losses by disseminating false information, and for spreading rumours to influence the election or affect the prospects of a particular candidate. Such laws may have some deterrent impact on individual actors but will have limited effect on a concerted campaign. I was unable to find examples of misuse of these laws, but the broadly worded language and high penalty underscore the risks of misapplication.

The Central Election Commission (CEC) in Taiwan modified the Civil Servants Election and Recall Act to address issues such as fake opinion polls and to prohibit local media and Internet service providers from hosting campaign advertisements financed by foreign entities. It's now mandatory for all election ads to disclose the name of the advertiser, going beyond the existing requirement of only mentioning the media organization. These changes aim to combat the manipulation of voter opinions through deceptive polls and to prevent Chinese agencies from using Taiwan-based businesses to wield influence.

An effective response has been close collaboration with civil society in Taiwan. The Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) is a not-for-profit which selects various items to fact-check daily. The popular Line app, for example, hosts a fact-checking bot called Cofact, developed by g0v, which provides users a place to report and check on spam and misinformation. Line also collaborates with TFC to verify information and in September 2019 launched a global campaign to educate users on how to better identify misinformation. These concerted efforts can work only in an environment of high levels of public trust, and by involving more people, it only further reinforces that trust.

These successes in each election in the last few years in Taiwan have been accompanied by calls for studying the Taiwan model further and the lessons the small island country might have for other nations. The practices in Taiwan may not be replicable perfectly in a larger, multi-ethnic and more complex economy, however, its lessons on building public trust are instructive for most circumstances.

Recommended Readings

Ming-sho Ho’s Challenging Beijing's Mandate of Heaven: Taiwan's Sunflower Movement and Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement, referenced above, **is essential reading for anyone interested in Taiwanese politics, China’s hustle for hegemony in the region and social movements of protests in the 21st century. I found the book’s explanations of how such disruptive movements flourished in a Confucian culture marked by obedience particularly intriguing.

If you would like to learn more about the ‘whole of society’ approach adopted by the Taiwanese state in response to Chinese interference, this note by Sean Quirk is an excellent place to start. Quirk looks at the participation of civil society, industry and government in detail. I have compiled a list of resources I referred to while working on this issue on Notion, and it can be accessed publicly here.

Thanks for reading. That is all for this issue. Until next time,

Amber