TARGET: TAIWAN
A Taiwanese diplomat’s death in Japan has become a symbol of the consequences of disinformation.
Su Chii-cherng’s name has become synonymous with disinformation in Taiwan. The grey-haired, bespectacled 61-year-old was not a master of the dark art. He has been identified as a victim of disinformation. And he is dead. Su was the director-general of the Osaka branch of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (in effect, Taiwan’s consulate in the Japanese city) when nearby Kansai Airport was inundated during Typhoon Jebi in September last year.
Thousands of travellers needed to be evacuated from the airport and social media reported that Beijing had sent buses to evacuate its citizens and had assisted Taiwanese if they identified themselves as Chinese – effectively renouncing the independence of their island nation. Taiwanese social media ran hot with outrage, accusing the Osaka office of being indifferent to the plight of its stranded citizens.
The story of the Chinese rescue was false. All of the evacuees from Kansai Airport travelled on buses organised by the Japanese authorities, irrespective of nationality. The original social-media posts were traced back to mainland China.
Amid the storm of criticism, however, Su committed suicide.
There is widespread belief in the community that public pressure fuelled by the falsehood drove him to do this, although his wife said in December that he had not mentioned disinformation in his suicide note. A student charged with spreading the false information was acquitted by a Taiwan court. Whether disinformation was a direct or indirect cause of Su’s death may be debatable, but the targeting of Taiwan by the Chinese government is irrefutable in spite of blank denials from Beijing.
Moscow and the Russian troll factories may preoccupy the governments of Europe and North America, but Taiwanese officials leave no doubt that attacks emanate from the Chinese mainland. Su has become a symbol of the consequences of disinformation.
The republic’s Foreign Minister, Jauhsieh Wu, told an Asia-Pacific workshop on disinformation in Taipei that his country was on the frontline when it came to coordinated disinformation attacks and his ministry dealt with such attacks daily.
Taiwan may be an ideal target. It has the highest ranking in Asia on the World Media Freedom Index, a multiplicity of media outlets – some with poor editorial standards that turn them into “repeater stations” for disinformation – and one of the highest internet and social-media penetrations in the world. Both Facebook and the local encrypted social-media platform, Line, claim 19 million users out of a total population of 23.5 million.
Perhaps that is why researchers estimate that Facebook is hit by 2400 fake posts a day from mainland China.
Beijing regards Taiwan as part of China and is intent on reclaiming it. Taipei accuses it of a concerted campaign to destabilise the island’s government. However, there also may be a broader strategic reason behind its disinformation onslaught.
In an article in Japan’s Nikkei Asian Review in late December, Yisuo Tzeng, acting director of the cyber warfare and information security division at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defence and Security Research, claimed Beijing was using Taiwan as a propaganda laboratory to test systems – including disinformation – that could be used against other countries.
“As they accumulate knowledge and test their algorithms, I think within two
it as Russia’s foremost troll factory. The Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has named its funder as Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch known as “Putin’s chef”, not only because one of his companies provides catering at Kremlin functions, but also because Prigozhin is believed to have cooked up a number of clandestine missions for the Russian leader.
The Mueller investigation issued an indictment against Prigozhin and his Concord company. It identified him as chief architect of the agency. Late last month, the US Justice Department accused Russia of leaking Mueller investigation documents to discredit the case against Prigozhin and Concord. The leaks alleged the documents were the sum total of the case against Concord when, in fact, a US federal judge has
The US is storing sensitive information on a server disconnected from the internet to keep it from the Russians.
allowed sensitive information – so sensitive it is kept on a server disconnected from the internet – to be kept from the Russians.
RUSSIAN ROULETTE
Last July, a British House of Commons interim report on disinformation and “fake news” pulled no punches in accusing the Russian government of a concerted campaign to undermine not only US but also European democratic processes. It followed Prime Minister Theresa May accusing Russia of meddling in elections and planting “fake news” in an attempt to “weaponise information” and sow discord in the West.
In addition to the activities of the Internet Research Agency, disinformation is spread through news agencies Russia Today and Sputnik News. The US Government estimates that 126 million people were exposed to Facebook pages linked to Russian interests in the presidential campaign. A joint study by Berkeley and Swansea universities identified more than 156,000 Russian Twitter accounts related to Brexit. That study also found that in the final 48 hours of the campaign, more than 45,000 tweets were posted.
Disinformation campaigns are not solely aimed at ballot boxes. Britain was also a
target in the wake of the Novichok nerveagent attack in Salisbury. Security services detected at least 38 “false information narratives” promulgated by Russia.
Following allegations of chemical weapons attacks in Syria, one Twitter account – claiming that the chemical weapons attack on Douma had been falsified – sent 100 posts a day over a 12-day period and reached 23 million users before it was suspended. Another account reached 61 million users with 2300 posts over the same 12-day period. Both were linked to Russia. The accounts were also used to discredit the White Helmets humanitarian group in Syria. By last December, the Internet Research Agency’s role had been firmly established.
In the first major analysis of the agency’s operations in the US, Oxford University’s computational propaganda research project drew three main conclusions:
More than 30 million US users, between 2015 and 2017, shared the agency’s Facebook and Instagram malicious posts. This total was boosted by multiplatform strategies involving a range of social media.
Its activity was specifically designed to polarise the US public and interfere in elections. It encouraged extreme rightwing groups to be more confrontational. Its activity did not stop once it was exposed. In fact, its activity and engagement increased and covered a wider range of policy issues.
The Kremlin is seen as the disinformation bogeyman by US and European officials and by the media. However, they are aided, if not abetted, by Western social-media plat- forms whose washing-of-hands makes them appear to be modern incarnations of a certain Roman Governor of Judea.
SOCIAL MEDIA’S COMPLICITY
The House of Commons report noted the connection between the social media spread of disinformation and the unwillingness of operators like Facebook and Google to accept responsibility for providing the pipelines through which it was transported. The committee that produced the report expressed carefully couched fury at the concerted efforts of the social-media companies to protect their own interests at the expense
Data is accessed and algorithms used to identify groups into which disinformation can be seeded and sent on its merry viral way.