Taiwan Turns to Facebook and Viral Memes to Counter China’s Disinformation

Officials in Taipei say while they remain vigilant, they have been encouraged that China’s efforts appear to be having less impact on the current campaigns than they have on previous ones. The Taiwanese presidential candidate seen as Beijing’s preferred choice is lagging in the polls.

“Disinformation this year doesn’t seem to have the same effectiveness,” said Taiwan Foreign Minister

Joseph Wu.

That confidence stands in contrast to the consternation that followed Taiwanese elections in November 2018, when officials and experts said they were caught off-guard by a widespread campaign to sow disinformation ahead of polls to decide mayoralties and local council seats across this self-governed island that China claims as its territory.

During that election, officials say falsified news reports were spread by online accounts in an effort to boost candidates backed by the opposition Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which favors closer ties with Beijing. The Nationalists won a surprising number of those races.

Taiwan’s efforts to combat election-year disinformation could serve as an example for other Western-style democracies, including the U.S., Australia and Canada, which are increasingly concerned about election interference from authoritarian governments.

Taiwan is the liberal democracy most subject to foreign disinformation campaigns, according to researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg.

On Tuesday, Taiwan’s legislature passed legislation President Tsai Ing-wen says was needed to curb China’s perceived efforts to interfere with democratic process on the island. The law, fast-tracked by Ms. Tsai’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party, criminalizes political activities that facilitate “external hostile forces,” including by making political donations, staging campaign events or spreading disinformation.

The Nationalist Party and Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office say the legislation is designed to create political gain for Ms. Tsai, who is seeking re-election. Beijing denies that it seeks to interfere with elections in Taiwan or in politics elsewhere.

The Nationalist presidential candidate, Han Kuo-yu, said it is Ms. Tsai’s government that is promoting disinformation against opposition candidates, calling himself the victim of the dirtiest campaign in the history of the island’s democracy.

“They are comprehensively smearing Han on the internet,” Mr. Han said in an interview, referring to himself as he pointed to unfavorable news reports without offering evidence that the ruling party was responsible.

Mr. Wu, Taiwan’s foreign minister, credited what he sees as the success of the efforts to defend the integrity of its elections in part to the government’s cooperation with

Facebook Inc.

and

Naver Corp.

, the Korean-Japanese operator of Line, a mobile messaging app that has become dominant in Taiwan—and a key conduit of disinformation.

On Dec. 13, Facebook—which has established a “regional elections center” to counter disinformation ahead of Taiwan’s election—removed a fan page for Mr. Han that had amassed 150,000 followers. The action was part of a broader sweep of more than 260 groups, pages and accounts that Facebook said had violated the social-media platform’s “community standards,” such as by using fraudulent methods to boost the popularity of their posts.

“We uncovered this activity…as part of our work to protect the integrity of Taiwan’s elections on Facebook,” a company spokesperson said.

Taiwanese officials also credit two other efforts—one led by government and one by civil society—with successfully countering the spread of disinformation.

When government agencies find what they deem to be false or misleading claims, they are tasked with not only putting out a correction, but pushing out the message on social media in a meme-like format meant to give it the virality that is the currency of social media. But such clarifications don’t necessarily get as much attention as the rumors they seek to debunk, officials say.

In one example, Taiwan’s head of government, Premier Su Tseng-chang, debunked a rumor claiming that new government rules would penalize hairstylists who both dye and perm a person’s hair within a single week with fines of 1 million New Taiwan dollars (about $33,000).

In a Facebook post in June, depicting a young Mr. Su with a full head of hair, the now bald 72-year-old said, “Although I have no hair now, I wouldn’t punish people like this!” He also issued a mock caution, saying, “dyeing and perming within seven days really damages your hair, and in severe cases you’d end up like me.” The post received nearly 56,000 likes and was shared more than 6,500 times.

Such efforts are hit-and-miss. In response to another rumor alleging that the large number of companies being dissolved last year reflected an economic slowdown, the economic ministry put out a Facebook post with cartoon images of Chinese zombies to make the point that the companies were closed down as the result of a government effort to curb money-laundering activities through “zombie companies” with little or no business operations. The clarification meme got little traction online, being shared about 230 times and receiving around 1,400 likes.

After 2018’s local-election surprise, Puma Shen, an assistant professor at National Taipei University’s Graduate School of Criminology, set up DoubleThink Labs, an organization that tracks the spread of disinformation from Chinese “content farms”—online portals that generate large volumes of pro-Beijing news items.

Mr. Shen said that while the volume of online fake news has subsided compared with the flood that swept Taiwan in 2018, disinformation remains rampant on private chat groups on the Line messaging service.

Mr. Shen says his research team sorts through thousands of items reported by the public as suspicious content each day. DoubleThink also monitors some 1 million public accounts on Weibo and

WeChat,

two social-media services popular in mainland China, as well as 3,000 Chinese news sites, feeding their content into a machine-learning algorithm being trained to trace disinformation to its source.

Line Corp.

says it collaborates with advocacy groups like Taiwan FactCheck Center to help verify information. In September, it launched a global campaign aimed at educating users how to better identify fake news and how to share information more responsibly.

The government’s claims of success in combating online disinformation may simply reflect the broader political environment. Some observers say the Nationalists’ Mr. Han is a flawed candidate and that Beijing, recognizing the long odds of his victory and facing an arguably more pressing crisis in Hong Kong, is focusing its cyber efforts on the former British colony rather than on Taiwan.

Mr. Shen warned that vigilance is still needed and Chinese disinformation would likely extend well beyond next week’s elections.

“The main goal is to protect democracy, that’s it,” he said.

—William Kazer and Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.

Write to Chun Han Wong at [email protected] and Philip Wen at [email protected]