｜ Fighting Information Manipulation— Facebook and Twitter’s Trump Card Take the coordinated inauthentic behavior identified by Facebook and Twitter during the Hong Kong protests, for example. We can see that, of the deleted accounts, some have been around since 2009, but many were inactive for a long time and only surfaced after the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill movement began. Many accounts even had the exact same number of followers. It is also intriguing how, although it is well known that Facebook and Twitter cannot be accessed in China without a VPN, some of the deleted accounts operated from specific IP addresses that were not blocked in China. For democratic countries, overseas information manipulation is particularly difficult to detect but must be carefully guarded against. This is because state-launched information warfare is often wellorganized and operates meticulously, making it hard to identify and expose. Even more seriously, such manipulations are focused on not only isolated political events or social conflicts, but have the ultimate goal of destabilizing the operation and values of democratic institutions. In early 2016, a Russian-German girl who ran away from home lied about being sexually assaulted by Arab immigrants. The Russian cyber warriors seized the opportunity to launch an information campaign, triggering a high degree of controversy in German society. The goal of the campaign was to make it hard for the German government, which was facing serious immigration and refugee issues, to balance democracy and humanitarian causes. In much the same way, the aim behind Russian cyber warriors’ active involvement in several racial disputes in the US in recent years has been to deepen 158 racial tensions and expose the “falseness” of US democracy. The fact that Taiwan has been the target of overseas disinformation campaigns has been confirmed in various studies and reports. According to a report published by the V-Dem Institute of the Gothenburg University in Sweden in April 2019, Taiwan was the country most severely hit by overseas disinformation campaigns in 2018. Additionally, an investigation done by the Oxford Internet Institute of Oxford University in 2019 found that organized social media manipulation campaigns were conducted by the governments or political parties of 70 countries in the world. Countries like China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela all used computational propaganda in overseas manipulation campaigns. China has become a major player of such operations. Estimates show that there are anywhere between 300 thousand to 2 million Chinese cyber warriors working from local and regional offices. Going Too Far The EU Openly Named China Take disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, for example. China has led a very aggressive information warfare campaign regarding information about the virus. In June 2020, the European Commission publicly accused Russia and China of being major players in spreading online disinformation about COVID-19 in the EU and worldwide. This was the first instance of top EU officials directly naming China for their involvement in information warfare. According to experts, China’s main goals for the COVID-19 information warfare included highlighting and distorting the failures of democratic countries, arguing over the origin of the virus, attacking countries Chapter 5 like the UK, France, and Australia along with their leaders, and promoting China as a model for fighting the pandemic. Additionally, China uses similar information warfare tactics to Russia’s, combining fake social media accounts, trolls, bots, Chinese diplomats, and staterun media to achieve its goals. Taiwan is a focus of China’s information warfare operations. A lot of the disinformation regarding COVID-19 identified by the non-profit organization Taiwan FactCheck Center originated from China. The most obvious false claims included that the epidemic in Taiwan was out of control and that many people had been infected, including senior government officials, military personnel, and students, but the government had deliberately covered it all up. These are some of the most widely circulated pieces of false information from late February to March 2020. Many of these messages, featuring simplified Chinese characters and fake images misappropriated from other sources, circulated in Taiwan’s social media and instant messaging apps, with the intention of inciting social panic and undermining the government’s authority. Thankfully, these false messages, mainly propagated by Chinese nationalists, also known as “Little Pink”, did not have much effect thanks to the active fact-checking and refutations from fact-checking agencies, the media, and the government. It is worth noting that many of the rumors circulating in Taiwan regarding the pandemic were about how COVID-19 was out of control in the US and Europe. For example, one fake message showed a video with the text: “In Louisiana, supermarkets are in chaos. No one is at the counter, and it is a free-for-all. The armed soldiers are only there to prevent bloodshed, so customers can come and go freely.” ｜ Continual Improvement: Keeping Up with International Trends The truth is, the video was from an old news story of Mexican citizens robbing a supermarket in January 2017. The video was not taken in the US, nor did it have anything to do with COVID-19. Why would people with bad intentions spread information about the pandemic being out-of-control in the West and how incompetent their governments are? Their motive is not hard to understand. They want to show incompetence of democratic systems to make Taiwanese people lose faith in democracy. The most concerning part about disinformation lies in its influence over society. Not only are there obvious “external damages” but also hard-to-detect “internal harm”. Out-of-Control Free Marketplace of Speech The most basic principle of a democratic system is self-governance by the people. The people are in charge, and public affairs must be decided through civic engagement or voting. But how do the people self-govern? The most important basis for self-governance is authentic, reliable information, which can inform discussions and public opinions, thereby deciding the direction of national policies. If information possessed by the public is unclear, distorted, and full of falsehoods, then not only will the people be unable to make correct judgments regarding public affairs, but the entire society might devolve into accusations and hate. Conflicts and controversies are inevitable in a democratic country, but a country will never be able to operate stably in a society with serious divide and fractures. This is precisely the serious “internal harm” that false information can cause to a democratic society. 159