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21st Century Puppet Show in Taiwan | | | Fake news | |
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< | The premise is clear, the press, not only the newspapers but also cable news are not mutual neutral, they take side on an issue based on their patron. Sometimes it is already difficult for some Taiwaneses to recognize the political preference of each media, those Taiwaneses can be easily swayed to dislike certain politicians or to believe something that is not even real. The recent example will be a suicide of a Taiwan representative stationed in Osaka, Japan. | >
> | The premise is clear, the press, not only the newspapers but also cable news are not neutral, they take side on an issue based on their patron. Sometimes it is already difficult for some Taiwaneses to recognize the political preference of different media, those Taiwaneses can be easily swayed to dislike certain politicians or to believe something that is not even real. The recent example will be a suicide of a Taiwan representative stationed in Osaka, Japan. | | | On September 4, 2018, Typhoon Jebi stroke Osaka's Kansai International Airport, causing the flooding and broke the bridge that connected the airport to the Osaka city, leaving 3000 passengers stranded at the airport, and among them includes 500 Taiwanese tourists. On September 6, 2018, a user at the PTT (one of the biggest online forum in Taiwan) posted a thread depicting how he/she was stranded at the Kansai airport, and as everyone was eager to leave the airport, at that time, only the Chinese embassy has sent buses to transport its citizen to the city, and providing links to relevant news reports; moreover, Taiwanese tourists were forced to declare they are “Chinese” citizens to board the bus. Later, the PTT user claimed that he/she called the Taiwan embassy for further assistance and was rudely rejected by said embassy. The Taiwan embassy in Osaka surely became the target of heavy criticism. Although the foregoing has all been proven false after a few days, certain blood-lust media took this issue as a great chance to cripple the ruling party and stir up the anger of Taiwaneses who are already mad at the ruling party. This madness went on for weeks in Taiwan, until no one cares about what really happened that day at Kansai airport, but only the anger against the ruling party. On September 14, 2018, the head of Taiwan's representative office in Osaka commit suicide, stating in his testament that he would rather not live in the misery of being wrongly accused. | | | Cyber warriors | |
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< | As identified in the Cambridge Analytica case, there is a way to manipulate people to vote for certain candidates by using the information one gives out on social media; | >
> | As implied in the Cambridge Analytica case, there is a way to manipulate people to vote for certain candidates by using the information one gives out on social media; in Taiwan, there exist another way of manipulating people, which is the rise of cyber warriors, in an attempt to confuse other users the popularity of certain politician. One of the elected city mayor, Mr. Han, in Taiwan has proven the strength of cyber warriors: from a nobody to a city mayor and became the candidate to run for the 2020 presidency election. As his election of city mayor came as a big surprise for many, people started to examine how the candidate build up his popularity during the course. The answer is a certain Facebook fanpage supporting Mr. Han, which would regularly produce fake news to criticize other candidates, or encourage its fans to attack other news sources that report negative stories of Mr. Han. Strangely enough, according to their Internet Protocol, many of those “fans” do not seem to reside in Taiwan, but rather come from Mainland China. By mobilizing these fans, the people behind said fan page created an impression that Mr. Han is gaining popularity and will surely lead the city to a promising future. | | | | |
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Too strong. That's not proven. It would be good to be specific about what we know and what we don't know about the effects of targeted political advertising.
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> | Regarding why said Facebook fanpage is believed to be the source behind fake news, originated from the phenomenon that after a negative news (article or television show) regarding Mr. Han is published, said fanpage will generate images that contains rebutting sentences regarding said negative news and post it on the fanpage; and soon after, the message groups of Mr. Han's supporters on Line (a communication app in Taiwan, similar to Whatsapp) will be swarmed with these rebutting images to brainwash their supporters that the negative news piece is trying to diminish Mr. Han and not to be trusted. To be clear, most of the negative news against Mr. Han are true, while the rebutting images created by the suspicious fanpage are usually fake, where the fanpage will use photoshop to delete unwanted people or objects, or even misplace news clips which are discussing irrelevant matters in the subject matter and trying to mislead people that are viewing the rebutting images. | | | | |
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< | in Taiwan, there exist another way of manipulating people, which is the rise of cyber warriors, in an attempt to confuse other users the popularity of certain politician. One of the elected city mayor, Mr. Han, in Taiwan has proven the strength of cyber warriors: from a nobody to a city mayor and became the candidate to run for the 2020 presidency election. As his election of city mayor came as a big surprise for many, people started to examine how the candidate build up his popularity during the course. The answer is a certain Facebook fanpage supporting Mr. Han, which would regularly produce fake news to criticize other candidates, or encourage its fans to attack other news sources that report negative stories of Mr. Han. Strangely enough, according to their Internet Protocol, many of those “fans” do not seem to reside in Taiwan, but rather come from Mainland China. By mobilizing these fans, the people behind said fan page created an impression that Mr. Han is gaining popularity and will surely lead the city to a promising future.
What is the reason for believing that this perfectly credible influence operation is the cause of the popularity of its object?
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Aftermath
The results of the two forces playing behind the Taiwanese election is the election of Mr. Han, who, based on his recent conducts, is not the able man that will lead the city to a promising future. The silver lining is that more and more people became aware of how their surroundings, such as news on social media or online comments of certain Politian, are fabricated to trick them. Although Facebook is now deemed as hotbed of fake news, younger generation is also now exploiting the instant delivery of information feature of Facebook to break fake news as soon as they emerge. As now the puppets are aware of the strings tying them, the coming presidential election of Taiwan in January will be the tug saw of self-aware dolls and the strings. | |
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A very good start. I've marked a couple of linguistic editing issues. In order to improve the substance of the draft, two efforts will be most effective, I think. First, focus more clearly. The introduction, about general media literacy, can probably go, giving you more space. Fake news is one thing, and political influence operations are another; they are related, to be sure, by the underlying issue of trust in the press. To the extent that's your subject, however, you should write about it directly: why do we grant or withhold trust to those who attempt to inform or misinform us? How do those mechanisms of trust change in the current technological and social environment? Where in this sense is Taiwan, with a political culture that cultivates young democracy, and both a technical and social environment that is adjacent to the Chinese Communist Party's very different, doubtless more traditional, authoritarian understandings of the use and abuse of public trust?
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