Elections proof of Taiwan's democratic resilience: Foreign Minister Wu

Taipei, Jan. 20 (CNA) Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) said Saturday that Taiwan has shown the world its democratic resilience despite China's attempts to intervene in the country's national elections.

Speaking at the 2024 Democratic Resilience Forum in Taipei, Wu noted that Taiwan had successfully held legislative and presidential elections last week despite Beijing's attempts to manipulate the outcome.

Wu added that Taiwan's mature response to Chinese machinations was evidence of the country's democratic resilience.

With the development of informational technologies, cognitive warfare is no longer just news content, but what people encounter in their daily lives, Wu said.

The techniques used will only be further upgraded in the future, the foreign minister said, noting that authoritarian regimes and their local collaborators will employ more tools of intimidation.

Saturday's event was hosted by the Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a civil data science research organization that seeks to spread public awareness of information manipulation.

Addressing the forum, IORG co-Director Yu Chih-hao (游知澔) said that information manipulation in Taiwan has the following characteristics: sabotaging democratic operations, denying democratic values, and negating Taiwan's sovereignty.

Yu added that information manipulation tended to target more "professional and classified" topics, such as vaccines, semiconductors and national defense.

According to Yu, much of this misinformation is spread in video format or generated by artificial intelligence, making research more difficult.

He said in the months before the elections, even polls became a manipulative tool, including outright fake poll numbers, street surveys claiming to reflect the majority view, or politicians and online opinion leaders citing questionable surveys to frame their narratives among the supporters.

In particular, Yu said that vote-rigging rumors could "seriously harm Taiwanese people's trust toward the democratic system."

During the seven days before and after the election day, there were 15.6 million views on YouTube and 16.6 million views on TikTok of videos that mentioned vote rigging, Yu said, citing IORG research.

However, while the top 10 most viewed YouTube videos were about different opinions on the alleged vote-rigging, the top 10 TikTok channels that had the most viewed videos on the topic were all making accusations about vote-rigging, Yu said.

Yu added that the TikTok account with the most viewed videos on vote-rigging was set up only two weeks before the elections, while the channel with the second most viewed videos on rigging had been featuring anime but released vote-rigging videos after the elections "out of the blue."

Eight of the 10 most viewed videos have been taken down after the Central Election Commission on Wednesday announced that it had collected related materials as evidence and handed them over to the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office and the Criminal Investigation Bureau, Yu said.

Ku Ming-chun (古明君), an associate professor at National Tsing-Hua University's Institute of Sociology, said the cross-strait religious exchanges have originated in Taiwanese religious groups' expectation to revive religious activities in China.

But under China's framework, these kinds of exchanges have been interpreted as "fraternal" based on the fact that the two sides are "connected by the same culture and race," said Ku, who has spent the last few years researching the role religion plays in China's tactics to incorporate Taiwan.

Other than the existing religious visits and even virtual interactions following the pandemic, Ku said she and her team have also found that certain Taiwanese politicians had weak links with temples in Taiwan but later on developed wide connections with them to intervene and participate in the cross-strait religious activities.