NEW YORK—The world at large isn’t prepared for the pervasive disinformation operations coming from adversaries such as China that aim to swing votes, a research analyst warns.
“Calculate how much those people—[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Xi Jinping—how much money and effort they are investing in those information operations, do the math, and then calculate how much money you’re putting into defense in a society,” Wu Min-hsuan, CEO of Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab, told The Epoch Times.
“You are not prepared. ... Nobody’s prepared for that.”
Mr. Wu, whose firm focuses on digital defense, describes the campaign as one of the Chinese regime’s “war tactics.”
Mr. Wu was one of the panelists at an event on Feb. 28 highlighting the threat of Chinese election-meddling in a year when about half of the world’s people are set to cast a vote.
At the event held at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Taipei’s ambassador to the United States, James K.J. Lee, said that Beijing has used Taiwan as a “test ground” for election interference in other democracies.
Ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election in January, China-linked malicious cyberattacks shot up more than two-fold, targeting government offices, police reports, and financial institutions, a U.S. cybersecurity firm found. Close to Election Day, Beijing-backed actors also spread fake news on social media to create the impression of food shortages and incite societal panic. A high volume of artificial intelligence-generated YouTube “hosts” also made false claims in Mandarin and Cantonese about Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s personal life.
With its own elections drawing near, the United States should be on high alert, the experts said.
Kenton Thibaut, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, noted that the Chinese Communist Party considers its rivalry with the United States “an existential issue.”
It highlights part of the regime’s strategy—to win a “smokeless war” by “weakening the enemy from within,” she said.
Artificial intelligence represents a key new tool of Beijing’s disinformation warfare strategy to cover its tracks.
At the panel, Ms. Thibaut cited the Chinese regime’s efforts to shift the blame for the COVID-19 pandemic onto the United States by first generating a fake think-tank report purporting to show that the virus originated in Fort Detrick, a U.S. military base. The regime then promoted that misinformation through its other channels.
In the summer of 2022, a Chinese state-linked entity hired a Baltimore musician to stage a Black Lives Matter protest in front of the International Religious Freedom Summit, and later, a mock protest against the U.S. ban on goods from Xinjiang. Both were recorded and circulated on social media with the aim of inflaming social tensions within the United States.
The regime is betting on such pro-Beijing narratives taking on a life of their own, said Jacques deLisle, the Asia program chair at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“Once the idea gets in and starts circulating, in democratic societies, it’s very hard to contain it—it is now a view held, for whatever good or bad reasons, by people who have a right, in the system, to have expressed opinions and vote on it,” he told The Epoch Times.
For the United States, the stakes are “very, very high” when it comes to mitigating election interference attempts by foreign entities, he said.
Even though the effects of such efforts are hard to quantify, he said, “our elections are so close in this country now” that “even a modest impact—well under 1 percent in a few constituencies—can have significant outcomes.”
