An online public opinion war has been raging since it first peaked during the controversy over Taiwan’s handling of passengers stranded at Kansai Airport near Osaka in 2018, and we are now totally immersed in it, making escape increasingly difficult. 

“From observing and tracking the data, the growth in cyber army phenomenon from the beginning of the year to year-end has been clear. The most common method is to connect to a VPN server that is more than likely overseas and create one or more new “identities” to manipulate the direction of public opinion,” says Max, a public opinion researcher.

Of the more popular social media sites Line, Facebook, YouTube and PTT, which one has seen the most attacks? 

“Every platform has been hit hard,” said Johnson Liang, the founder of fact-checking platform Cofact. He said his website receives more than 100 messages a day to check statements that are then researched by his team of fact checkers and answered through a chatbot.  

In April, a CommonWealth Magazine team took an in-depth look into the public opinion war playing out in cyberspace, going undercover in a fan club of Kaohsiung Mayor Han Kuo-yu and interviewing cyber warriors from different platforms. We also used data analytic tools to uncover the models used by cyber armies to influence public opinion on PTT, one of Taiwan’s most popular bulletin board systems.

                               

One of the main tactics observed by our reporters involved “systematically disseminating large volumes of messages to influence the direction of public opinion.” 

In the eight months after our special report on Taiwan’s online opinion war was published, this model has been recognized by national judicial authorities and played a role in the tragedy that followed the Kansai Airport controversy in September 2018.   

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About the Kansai Airport and Yang Hui-ju case: On Sept. 4, 2018, Typhoon Jebi struck Japan and flooded Kansai Airport, leaving thousands of travelers, including Taiwanese, stranded at the airport. In the next two days, posts (which later were found to be inaccurate) appeared online indicating that China’s consulate in Osaka sent buses to the airport to evacuate Chinese travelers. Some mainstream media and pundits reported the posts without verifying their accuracy and harshly condemned Taiwan’s office in Osaka for doing nothing, and Taiwan’s government even reprimanded the people involved. Frank Hsieh, Taiwan’s top representative to Japan (stationed in Tokyo) and a former Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate, was also bashed by Taiwanese netizens. One PTT account with the user name “idcc” defended Hsieh, insisting it was the Osaka office that should take responsibility for the situation and branding diplomats in the office as “evil remnants of the party-state” (a reference to the KMT authoritarian period). On Sept. 14, the head of the Osaka office, Su Chii-cherng, committed suicide, with some suggesting that the harsh online criticism was partly to blame. Later, prosecutors found that the account of Yang Hui-ju with the username “slow” and the “idcc” account used the same IP address. Yang gained fame in Taiwan in 2006 as the “credit card goddess” after generating more than NT$1 million in benefits by manipulating reward points, and she was an aide in Hsieh’s unsuccessful 2008 campaign for the presidency.  

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PTT Cyber Armies Rear their Ugly Heads

In December 2019, the Taipei District Prosecutors Office handed down indictments 19151 and 10242 against Yang Hui-ju, a former presidential campaign aide to Frank Hsieh, related to the Kansai Airport case.

The indictments said Yang Hui-ju instructed several people to get on PTT and other social media sites to “post articles and support and criticize specific articles or increase the number of comments to heighten the articles’ exposure” and paid each person a salary of NT$10,000 a month. 

The posts “fanned the flames of the messages they were meant to express and spread quickly on the internet, influencing and leading the direction of public opinion,” the indictments said.

Prosecutors ended up charging Yang with violating Article 140 of the Criminal Code for insulting a public official during the discharge of their duties. They did not charge her for offenses related to disseminating fake news or rumors because Yang and her cohorts were not the ones who originated the stories about China sending buses to the airport to evacuate its stranded nationals there, which triggered the controversy.

Lawyer Huang Di-ying said there have been cases where people have been prosecuted for violating the Social Order Maintenance Act by spreading disinformation, but none of the violators have been as well-known as Yang. 

“This probably gave many people a glimpse for the first time of how information is manipulated and teams are set up online,” Huang said. 

Looking back at the Kansai Airport case that ended with the tragic suicide of a Taiwanese diplomat in Osaka, it wove together several elements, including China’s deliberate campaign to create strife and the failure of Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and mainstream media to verify the facts. Yang’s direction of cyber warriors was just one of the elements in this complex web, but because of Yang’s close ties with the governing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), her role inevitably sparked controversy.

“This has dealt a pretty big blow to the credibility of the government’s efforts to aggressively try to wipe out fake news over the past year through legislation and policy pronouncements,” said Ed Ming-hui Huang, an associate professor in the Department of Law at National Taiwan University. 

“In the future, whenever the government wants to take any steps to contain fake news, it will likely face heavy criticism questioning its motives no matter how genuine its efforts are and potentially exacerbate social divisions.”   

The Kansai Airport case has been seen as the prime example of the public opinion war raging in Taiwan, and Taiwanese and Japanese media have chronicled its impact in the year since through special reports and documentaries. Now, the indictment of Yang and others have seemingly brought the case to a close after it damaged the government’s credibility and eroded PTT’s popularity, but the opinion war continues unabated. 

Facebook also Cracking Down on Cyber Armies

Evidence of cyber army activity can also be seen on Facebook. In our report in April, we exposed the practices of using the same Facebook account to create similar social communities and fan pages with many different identities to drive public opinion. But this type of operation was not officially revealed publicly by Facebook until December when it took action against certain sites. 

In mid-December, Facebook said it removed 118 Taiwan-based fan pages, 99 social communities and 51 accounts for violating the company’s “Community Standards” by managing many types of accounts under these communities and using the tactic to increase the popularity of their posts.

The move sparked a major stir because nine of the fan pages deleted were related to Taiwan’s presidential election the following month, and all of them were directed at sites supporting Kaohsiung Mayor Han, the main opposition Kuomintang’s presidential candidate. 

They included: “Han Kuo-yu, Kaohsiung Mayor,” “2020 President Han Kuo-yu Fan Club (headquarters),” 2020 Han Kuo-yu Marching to the Presidential Office,” “Han Kuo-yu 2020 Veterans Fan Club,” “Han Kuo-yu Fan Club,” “Han Kuo-yu Fan Group,” and “KMT Three Principles of the People Youth Group.”

“Facebook probably wasn’t reacting directly to the fan pages’ content. Instead, it first observed the abnormal behavior of the accounts and then worked back to manage the web pages and social communities handling those accounts,” said Smile Chao, a data analyst at QSearch, a longtime provider of search and audience analytics to Facebook.   

Source: Press Photographers Association

The “abnormal behavior” he was referring to involved using one account to post the same article in every Han Kuo-yu community or fan club or on fan pages. According to QSearch data, the nine Han fan club sites issued identical posts at the same time 29 times in one week.

“Han fans said it was a case of green cyber armies maliciously tipping off Facebook. Taiwan’s blue and green camps are accustomed to accusing each other of using cyber armies, but it also could have been a case of someone just not accepting the inappropriate use of social communities,” said Taiwan Democracy Watch Chairman Sung Cheng-en.      

Sung said it was hard to determine whether these accounts were real cyber armies directed by a political party or run by volunteer groups with a common interest, but of greater concern, he said, was whether they were instigated by an overseas force.

The New Battleground: YouTube

In fact, the strength of the cyber armies had already started to become clear well before the Facebook move. Facebook began consciously responding to the public opinion war in October 2019, not only removing fan pages with accounts showing abnormal behavior but also working with third-party fact checking platforms, exposing election ads, and blocking fake accounts set up offshore. Because of those efforts, other social media platforms that have been slower to restrain cyber army activity have emerged as bigger battlegrounds for cyber warriors. 

“This year (2019), YouTube has been more in play, with Chinese channels growing in number,” said Puma Shen, an assistant professor in National Taipei University’s Graduate School of Criminology who studies disinformation strategies. 

He has seen a certain association under China’s United Front Work Department work with Taiwanese internet celebrities on advertisements. 

“They rely on YouTube influencers to disseminate disinformation, writing scripts, training internet celebrities and posting live stream comments. It’s unlikely that the funding for that was raised privately,” Shen said. He believes China’s hands are all over these efforts, and he has locked on to a few “suspicious” Taiwanese influencers to study.

Shen said YouTube has also long promoted AI-generated videos that take news stories and turn them into a series of photos with accompanying text, and these have been even trendier recently. “We found several platforms featuring health videos interspersed with fake news criticizing a certain party.”

Wang Tai-li, a professor in the Graduate Institute of Journalism at National Taiwan University who studies correlations between fake news and elections, also pointed to YouTube as a platform where fake news grew more rampant in 2019. 

“That has been especially evident when the fake news focuses on agriculture, people’s lives, and health issues that are hard for people to resist but where the main force behind it is politics,” she said.

Impact of the Public Opinion War

Fake news continues to rage and is being repackaged into daily topics of interests; cyber armies are all over the place, disguising themselves as real people, making it hard to distinguish between reality and deception. What is clear is that the online opinion war phenomenon has affected Taiwan’s democracy.

Wang conducted a study in which she presented six pieces of fake news to voters to see if they knew it was fake news and found that their ability or inability to recognize fake news correlated with how they voted in nationwide elections for local offices in November 2018. 

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Conclusions of Wang’s research: Voters who couldn’t judge whether fake news was fake or not were more likely to vote for KMT (blue camp) candidates, a tendency especially evident among voters whose political inclinations were light-green (slightly pro-independent) or neutral. But voters leaning toward the KMT had higher levels of “fake news discernment.” Wang noted that in her study, the relationship between fake news and voting behavior was correlational rather than causal.  

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Another study based on a survey completed by Wang in December 2019 found that 54.1 percent of people believe Taiwan has a serious fake news problem but more than 60 percent have never used any form of news checking mechanism and 24 percent did not know such systems even existed.

When respondents were asked, “Do you believe China has interfered in this election?” more than half (52 percent) said they did not believe so, and 41.3 percent of the non-believers said they felt that way because they “believed it was impossible.”

At the same time, however, the V-Dem (Varieties of Democracy) research project led by the University of Gothenburg released data that found Taiwan to be exposed to misleading viewpoints or false information disseminated by foreign governments and their agents more often than any of the 179 countries surveyed. 

Clearly, a large gap exists between the findings of an international research organization and the understanding of domestic voters. That also explains why fake news is so prevalent in Taiwan and why the public either overlooks it or may know about it but doesn’t know how to deal with it.

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Solution: Education, Better Media Literacy

After the Kansai Airport case and the November 2018 elections, the government forged seven pieces of legislation to combat fake news, including a highly controversial Anti-infiltration Act that the DPP pushed through the Legislature on Dec. 31 and is aimed at blocking China’s influence in elections and media. 

“Beyond that, it really comes down to self-discipline by third-party platforms,” Shen said. As other legislation designed to combat fake news may take a long time to conceive and pass, the only short-term solution that could make a difference is self-management by internet platforms.

Because of the high costs of managing content and concerns of infringing on freedom of speech, however, platforms have generally focused on “behavior” to counter the problem, which can leave them virtually powerless.

Smile Chao cites the example, for instance, of an English-teaching fans page on Facebook that suddenly morphed into a page involving politics that criticized a specific political party.

“That’s hard to manage. You have to rely on improving the media literacy of readers and listeners to help solve the problem,” he said.

“Use education to improve everybody’s media literacy” was the refrain heard from experts of different backgrounds as the way to solve the problem at its core, but they also acknowledged with some frustration that the education solution would take a long time to deliver tangible results. Yet, if a country is constantly chasing fake news, and limits its tool box to checking facts, dismissing rumors, passing laws and punishing offenses rather than pushing education reform, it will never catch up with rumormongering.

“In this era, public opinion wars will continue. They will not disappear and will not stay out of our lives,” Taiwan Democracy Watch’s Sung said with a sigh. 

Media literacy is the most important weapon of this generation, the only weapon that provides a strong enough armor to help people survive the daily gunfire. 

Translated by Luke Sabatier
Edited by Sharon Tseng