FIGHTING DISINFORMATION WITH ‘HUMOUR OVER RUMOUR’
At a gathering in London, Taiwan’s top digital minds shared their experiences combatting cyberattacks and information disorder
Words by Neal Romanek
country under martial law as recently as the nineties, Taiwan now
ranks highly among the world’s top functioning democracies. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual Democracy Index noted a global collapse of democracy in 2021, but Taiwan ranked eighth overall in a tally across a variety of democratic indicators – beaten out only by the six Nordic countries, Ireland and New Zealand. The next Asian countries on the list were South Korea and Japan, ranking 16th and 17th respectively, with the US at 26th, Hong Kong at 85th and China at 148th. As the invasion of Ukraine has reminded us, there are people who will go to any lengths to destroy a burgeoning democracy, especially if it is one that could give their own citizens funny ideas about freedom and the future. Taiwan’s history has been intimately bound with imperialism; first by China, then Spain, the Netherlands, then China again, then Japan. When the Chinese Communist Party took control of the mainland in 1949, the nationalist government fled to Taiwan, declaring itself the legitimate Chinese government. The two states continued to diverge, with Taiwan becoming the flourishing democracy it is today. The split remains unresolved, with the CCP still claiming Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China.
This makes for some complex international relations. Only 14 states have officially recognised Taiwan – thus forswearing relations with China – including Guatemala, Vatican City and Tuvalu. All other countries comprise a spectrum of association, some maintaining a relationship with China only (Uruguay, Norway, Egypt, Pakistan), and others keeping ties with Taiwan in an unofficial capacity (USA, Brazil, UK, India) – which often involves tiptoeing around China. There is online combat going on all around us all the time, sometimes
state-sponsored, sometimes purely criminal, and sometimes through organisations operating on behalf of states, but kept at arm’s length for plausible deniability. The People’s Republic of China operates one of the world’s most aggressive cyberwarfare programmes – and odds are that you have been personally impacted, be it through election meddling, hacks of governments and businesses or disinformation on social media. Taiwan has been a particularly prominent target. A major attack in August of last year, apparently
REAL SOLUTION Audrey Tang is a proponent for improving media literacy to fight disinformation
@feedzinesocial
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