CHarless Yeh’s fight against disinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law started removing the scallions from his dish. When he asked her what she was doing, she explained that scallions were bad for the liver. She said she knew this because she had received a text message informing her.
Mr. Ye was confused by this, as his family had always enjoyed eating leeks, so he decided to reveal the truth.
He posted the truth on his blog and spread it through the messaging app Line to his family and friends. They shared it further, and soon he was getting requests from strangers wanting to connect to his personal Line account.
“At the time, the concept of fact-checking was not very common in Taiwan, but I realized there was a demand for it. It could also help people solve their problems,” said Ye. He continued his work, and in 2015 launched the website “MyGoPen,” which means “Don’t be fooled again” in Taiwanese.
Within two years, MyGoPen had 50,000 subscribers and now has more than 400,000. In 2023, it received 1.3 million fact-check requests, debunking everything from carcinogens in bananas to the false claim that Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, had fathered a child out of wedlock.
Other fact-checking organisations have also emerged, including the Taiwan Fact-Checking Centre, Cofacts and DoubleThink Lab.
But as fact-checking organisations grow, so does the threat of disinformation.
The growing and changing threat from China
The Diversity of Democracy Project, University of Gothenburg list Taiwan is targeted by foreign disinformation more than any other democracy, ahead of Latvia and the United States. The greatest threat comes from across the Taiwan Strait and is most intense during election season.
Doublethink Lab, a Taiwanese civic group, tracks China’s influence in 82 countries in areas including academia, media and domestic politics. Taiwan ranks first in China’s influence on society and media11th place overall.
In February this year, two Chinese fishermen were killed in a collision with a speedboat being pursued by Taiwan’s coast guard, leading to Beijing’s subsequent criticism of Taiwan. A video went viral online claiming that 100 Chinese fishing boats were surrounding Taiwan’s Kinmen island in retaliation.
However, MyGoPen It pointed out The footage was reportedly taken in 2023 in waters near China’s eastern provinces of Shandong and Zhejiang, as a boat was returning to port after the fishing season.
Huang Zhaonian, an associate professor at Taiwan’s National Chengchi University, said Beijing has evolved its strategy from a more direct to an indirect approach, such as spreading false allegations in 2020 that Tsai Ing-wen, then running for re-election as president, had faked her doctorate. For example, Beijing has used the Israel-Gaza war to call into question the US’s approach to international politics and, by extension, to Taiwan.
These “misleading narratives” can be difficult to counter, he said, because they are based on opinion and perspective. “Points of view are no longer right or wrong,” he said. “It’s no longer a question of true or false.”
One key way to counter these narratives, he says, is to ensure a diverse media environment and for citizens to get in the habit of getting information from multiple sources.
From China’s perspective, in 2023 a US State Department report claimed Beijing was increasing the spread of disinformation, to which the Chinese Foreign Ministry responded: The claim itself is false information“The State Department report misrepresents facts and truth and is in itself disinformation. In fact, it was the United States that originated the idea of weaponizing the global information space,” the spokesman said when asked about the report.
AI: “Systematic manipulation is at work”
Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a big challenge for fact-checkers. report A Thomson Foundation study of AI disinformation attacks during the 2024 presidential election concluded that the attacks “continue unabated” and are evolving.
Eve Chiu, executive director of the nonprofit Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, said the development of AI is “unstoppable.” Deepfakes, which use AI-generated voices of celebrities superimposed over them, were widely used in January’s election, Chiu said.
“The large amount of disinformation about election manipulation spread through TikTok around the time of election day with the aim of subverting the results of Taiwan’s democratic elections indicates a coordinated operation underway,” she said.
MyGoPen’s Ye fears the challenges of AI-generated and spread misinformation, but says there are also benefits: For example, AI can be used to create verbatim transcripts, improving the efficiency of checking video and audio material.
And MyGopen already uses bots to respond to many of the requests the platform receives. The bots use the MyGopen database to receive and respond to around 3,000 inquiries every day. But it also has a Line account that offers one-on-one fact-checking services with live fact-checkers. And AI “speeds up the checking process. It helps with comparison, identification, translation. We use AI in some situations,” but verification is still done manually.
Ye stressed that educating people about China’s changing disinformation tactics is also crucial, comparing those who spread it to con artists who come up with new ways to scam people out of their money.
“Just like with scams, the methods are constantly changing, but the goal remains the same – to get you out of your money.”
