A well-attended press conference took place at the National Press Club in Washington on April 8. Experts shared the essential learning points on how Taiwan conducted a successful presidential election in the face of a concerted, malign influence campaign waged by communist China through online methods enabled by collaborators inside Taiwan.
Russell Hsiao, executive director of the Global Taiwan Institute, led a panel of experts that included Yang Shun-Ching of Doublethink Labs, Yu Chihhao of Taiwan Information Environment Research Center, Eve Chiu of Taiwan Fact Check Center, Billion Lee of Cofacts, and Liu Wen-Ping of the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau.
TikTok Played a Key Role
Social media, laced with artificial intelligence-enabled manipulations of media, were the tip of the spear of the Chinese efforts. TikTok was the most malign of the Chinese social media campaigns, but often, there was strong synchronization of messaging across YouTube, Douyin (China’s domestic version of TikTok), and TikTok itself.Ms. Chiu showed examples of this messaging. U.S. political figures such as presumptive GOP nominee and former President Donald Trump and Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) had their English language and Mandarin-translated voice tracks altered.
One of the AI-altered TikTok videos with Mr. Wittman showed him voicing support for Democratic Progressive Party candidate William Lai, while the original video clip showed the congressman talking about Ukraine—meaning that the altered video had been manipulated from a totally different topic.
Influencers also played a key role on TikTok and repeated the same talking points between the different influencer personalities. Mr. Yang presented an example of a TikTok influencer who had previously focused on fashion and started sharing messages questioning the integrity of the Taiwanese election process and alleging electoral fraud.
Fear, Doubt, and Divisiveness to Throw the Election Fell Short
The psychological operation and cognitive warfare campaign objective of the Chinese flow of messages was primarily intended to favor the Kuomintang party through a focus on fear, doubt, and divisiveness.One of the ugliest and most pernicious themes pushed were smears of the growing Indian population doing high-tech work in the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. chip factories and other labor categories such as construction. The messages were intentionally designed to create fear that Taiwanese women would be targeted in sexual assaults by this imported labor that has become necessary because of labor shortages and low birth rates in Taiwan.
One curious theme was the planted messages that U.S. pork was contaminated, low quality, or had other negative attributes. This theme was perhaps a double-edged sword or not fully thought out. The Chinese population depends heavily on U.S.-imported pork. Should the Chinese not trust U.S. pork or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?
One semi-comical attempted smear was aimed at Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen and looked like a typical American political attack ad, in which her picture in color would be reshown in black and white with vague intimations that some sinister secret double life was being led, yet with scant detail behind the allegation.
Freedom of Speech and Simultaneous Mitigation of Election Interference Are Possible
What was common among the presenters was respect for the difference between political dissent and willful malign Chinese interference. One important observation from Mr. Liu was the key role that on-the-ground collaborators played. They helped focus, clarify, distribute, and adjust the messaging. The money trail seemed to be the primary evidence for identifying Chinese collaborators.During the press conferences before the January Taiwanese election, Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu cited multiple arrests for violating Taiwanese laws forbidding the acceptance of foreign money for political activities.
The Taiwanese showed a remarkable ability to discriminate their activities and allow political discourse to occur while successfully identifying and interdicting malign CCP influence operations.
The Taiwan experience is rich with lessons learned that can be applied to the upcoming U.S. presidential election. In Taiwan, there appears to be a healthy respect for and appreciation of the vital necessity for an election process that is as clean as possible.
The comments on how highly the Chinese valued on-the-ground collaborators to refine the effectiveness of their cognitive warfare campaign bring even more concern, focus, and action that should be applied to the relentless surge of Chinese nationals who appear to be military operators streaming across the southern border into the United States.
