I should point out that Liberty Times is probably the highest circulated paper in Taiwan, it aint Charlie Hedo (though if you actually read it's opinions and comics, you might not be able to tell the difference.) and the people in this DPP admin is largely the same group of folks in the Chen admin.
To add on, the most blatant case of the press attempting to create out of thin air shit to help the party they're backing, is the case of the heavily pro DPP Liberty Times, clearly colluding with Chen Shui Bian, the former president, where the Liberty times reported on an headline exclusive report for quite a while, of a top secret 南線專案 where the government funneled money off the records to help and bribe Australian politicians to our side.
It turned out of course, that this was totally bogus, as Chen later admitted in court that this was a pure cover for his corruption. Not after Australia actually launched an investigation to see if their politicians were taking bribes from us obviously.
The Liberty times reporter that reported this was promoted and she's currently the chief editor, and the Ma admin never really fined / attacked the paper for this blatant crime, you can wiki the Chinese wiki or google about 南線專案 if you want to check if I'm bullshitting here.
Bill: Wechat is insignificant in Taiwan as a social media platform, although a decent amount of people have it, it's almost entirely used as a work/communications (with
the mainland) platform only. The biggest mobile chat app by far is LINE.
If Taiwan is going to shut down a platform that might help against fake news, the first and most obvious is of course, like almost everywhere else, Facebook.
It should be pointed out that aside from Facebook, the very old school BBS channal PTT is far more influential in Taiwan's political discusssion discourse (and likewise, the disinformation and influence warfare is mainly around those two platform, although primarily it is centered locally, I can't preclude mainland influence, but anyone who knows anything about PTT would conclude that it's primarily dominated by DPP influencers more than anything else. while Facebook is much more of a mess of everything, where I'd guess the Mainland influence is probably more prevalent.) than wechat as well, which might not even be a distant 3rd, more like a distant 5th.
I'd guess very very few even of the more serious Taiwan watchers even know what PTT is, but actually that's probably the more important of the online platform in terms of discourse, since Facebook like everywhere else is far more of an echo chamber reinforcer than actual discourse creator.)
Also, Taiwan's media issue is far more complicated than that, if anything, that now the western narrative seem to be that everything's fine except the evil chinese influence, which much like the US case, is simply absurd but for some reason when it comes to Taiwan people seem to be totally ok taking that at face value.
I should point out that the last time this party was in power, it spent much of the 8 years trying to shutdown TVBS, one of the most influential TV channals of the time (it's also a HK subsidiary.) meanwhile, this time they seem to be going after another more pro-Beijing TV channals. There's a real credibility problem for the DPP in general in terms of their actual commitment to Freedom of Speech (or at least, being against disinformation.), given that plenty of folks in Taiwan see this more like Foxnews and the GOP crying about getting killed by fakenews and bias and then giving the conclusion that the solution is to censor free speech. as the cure.
That is not to say that the CTI channal it's going after is fine certainly, it is very biased and probably in the pockets of Beijing of some sort. The problem is of course again, the DPP have some serious credibility issue on this matter and the way they have approached this, generally does more to re-affirm people's suspicion that' it's not going after fake news, it's just trying to brand any news that's not favorable to them as fake news.
Meanwhile, the most talked about case of potential Mainland influenced fake news case, the one where our Osaka office head Su Chi Chen committed suicide over a rumor that the Mainland embassy went out it's way to bus people trapped in Kansai airport while our office basically hung up on the people that called them... yes that turned out to be a significant misinformation (though there's also no proof that it was a mainland operation rather than just common folks hearsay.) the problem of this news that's again, completely not talked about outside of the west, is that the widow of the Osaka head Su, basically laid the smackdown on Frank Hsieh (our ambassador to Japan and a DPP bigshot.) and the rest of the department of foreign affairs for attempting to framing her husband as the reason for the suicide, well after the news ran it's course locally . and more damningly, accusing with good credibility that Hsieh blatantly lied about having seen Su's will right after the event.
So the nuanced contexted answer take to Taiwan's information situation would be, YES there's Mainland influece operations, HOWEVER that it works at all is mainly due to the ground being extremely fertile as the two sides, especially the ruling DPP, have long engaged in this excercise themselves, and made worse by their impluse to often try to use this as an excuse to limit free speech, which is hugely ironic given how Taiwan developed to where it is.
I should point out that Liberty Times is probably the highest circulated paper in Taiwan, it aint Charlie Hedo (though if you actually read it's opinions and comics, you might not be able to tell the difference.) and the people in this DPP admin is largely the same group of folks in the Chen admin.
To add on, the most blatant case of the press attempting to create out of thin air shit to help the party they're backing, is the case of the heavily pro DPP Liberty Times, clearly colluding with Chen Shui Bian, the former president, where the Liberty times reported on an headline exclusive report for quite a while, of a top secret 南線專案 where the government funneled money off the records to help and bribe Australian politicians to our side.
It turned out of course, that this was totally bogus, as Chen later admitted in court that this was a pure cover for his corruption. Not after Australia actually launched an investigation to see if their politicians were taking bribes from us obviously.
The Liberty times reporter that reported this was promoted and she's currently the chief editor, and the Ma admin never really fined / attacked the paper for this blatant crime, you can wiki the Chinese wiki or google about 南線專案 if you want to check if I'm bullshitting here.
Bill: Wechat is insignificant in Taiwan as a social media platform, although a decent amount of people have it, it's almost entirely used as a work/communications (with
the mainland) platform only. The biggest mobile chat app by far is LINE.
If Taiwan is going to shut down a platform that might help against fake news, the first and most obvious is of course, like almost everywhere else, Facebook.
It should be pointed out that aside from Facebook, the very old school BBS channal PTT is far more influential in Taiwan's political discusssion discourse (and likewise, the disinformation and influence warfare is mainly around those two platform, although primarily it is centered locally, I can't preclude mainland influence, but anyone who knows anything about PTT would conclude that it's primarily dominated by DPP influencers more than anything else. while Facebook is much more of a mess of everything, where I'd guess the Mainland influence is probably more prevalent.) than wechat as well, which might not even be a distant 3rd, more like a distant 5th.
I'd guess very very few even of the more serious Taiwan watchers even know what PTT is, but actually that's probably the more important of the online platform in terms of discourse, since Facebook like everywhere else is far more of an echo chamber reinforcer than actual discourse creator.)
Also, Taiwan's media issue is far more complicated than that, if anything, that now the western narrative seem to be that everything's fine except the evil chinese influence, which much like the US case, is simply absurd but for some reason when it comes to Taiwan people seem to be totally ok taking that at face value.
I should point out that the last time this party was in power, it spent much of the 8 years trying to shutdown TVBS, one of the most influential TV channals of the time (it's also a HK subsidiary.) meanwhile, this time they seem to be going after another more pro-Beijing TV channals. There's a real credibility problem for the DPP in general in terms of their actual commitment to Freedom of Speech (or at least, being against disinformation.), given that plenty of folks in Taiwan see this more like Foxnews and the GOP crying about getting killed by fakenews and bias and then giving the conclusion that the solution is to censor free speech. as the cure.
That is not to say that the CTI channal it's going after is fine certainly, it is very biased and probably in the pockets of Beijing of some sort. The problem is of course again, the DPP have some serious credibility issue on this matter and the way they have approached this, generally does more to re-affirm people's suspicion that' it's not going after fake news, it's just trying to brand any news that's not favorable to them as fake news.
Meanwhile, the most talked about case of potential Mainland influenced fake news case, the one where our Osaka office head Su Chi Chen committed suicide over a rumor that the Mainland embassy went out it's way to bus people trapped in Kansai airport while our office basically hung up on the people that called them... yes that turned out to be a significant misinformation (though there's also no proof that it was a mainland operation rather than just common folks hearsay.) the problem of this news that's again, completely not talked about outside of the west, is that the widow of the Osaka head Su, basically laid the smackdown on Frank Hsieh (our ambassador to Japan and a DPP bigshot.) and the rest of the department of foreign affairs for attempting to framing her husband as the reason for the suicide, well after the news ran it's course locally . and more damningly, accusing with good credibility that Hsieh blatantly lied about having seen Su's will right after the event.
https://news.ebc.net.tw/News/Article/144902
So the nuanced contexted answer take to Taiwan's information situation would be, YES there's Mainland influece operations, HOWEVER that it works at all is mainly due to the ground being extremely fertile as the two sides, especially the ruling DPP, have long engaged in this excercise themselves, and made worse by their impluse to often try to use this as an excuse to limit free speech, which is hugely ironic given how Taiwan developed to where it is.