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Author: Yili Li.
Image source: 20240106_124307, g0v.tw Reiji Government/Flickr, licensed CC BY 2.0 DEED.
Cofacts is a civil technology community that has been using technology to combat disinformation since 2016. Disinformation is not a new problem; throughout history, incorrect intelligence has led to bad decisions during regime changes and even world wars. False information can serve as an incentive to “change decisions,” sometimes leading to self-harming choices. For example, believing in a profitable opportunity but ultimately suffering a significant loss because the investment failed. In international negotiations and international relations, false information has become a weapon to manipulate public opinion and decision-makers, affecting major changes in military and national policies.
Since 2024 is an election year in many countries, this article will share the phenomena observed before and after the 2024 Taiwan election. I hope these experiences can be helpful to friends.
The Origin and Evolution of Cofacts
Cofacts were established during the revision of the Marriage Equality Act, when the Constitutional Court ruled that the existing institution of marriage did not protect the rights of non-heterosexual people. At that time, false information was widely spread on the Internet, leading to discrimination and prejudice against sexual minorities. Incorrect messages, such as “My child’s same-sex partner will inherit my inheritance” or “Gay people contribute no children or profits to society” have a significant impact on human rights by emphasizing differences and promoting harmful behaviours.
Cofacts recognizes that even with accurate information available online and in the journalistic world, ordinary people find it difficult to obtain trustworthy knowledge. At the same time, people rely on social media platforms to obtain news information and are unable to distinguish legitimate news media from self-media and content farms, resulting in a large number of private websites being exposed. The experience of recurring articles in zero-cost content aggregators leads people to believe that false information is true. To solve this problem, Cofacts developed a fact-checking chatbot and a media literacy platform that mimics people’s knowledge acquisition habits. When users share questionable information with the Cofacts bot in private groups, the bot responds quickly to verify the accuracy of the news they are seeing.
Disinformation about marriage equality had a lasting impact on subsequent local and presidential elections. In the 2018 local elections, half of the referendum proposals were related to marriage equality. In the presidential election, a large amount of false information was targeted at the candidates, linking President Tsai Ing-wen to lesbians who support same-sex marriage and other false claims. This disinformation fueled tensions at the local level and fractured religious and generational divides, which were reflected in the election results.
As a citizen technology project that champions digital rights and online freedom, Cofacts spends a lot of time in weekly meetings and holds physical gatherings every two months for physical fact-checking workshops. Through these tangible connections, we hope to make people feel the energy of collaboration and mutual help. The AI automatic classification system helps scholars, think tanks, and journalists quickly organize research topics of interest and write important reports and articles. An open fact-checking platform enables immediate reporting and verification, ensuring misinformation is corrected as quickly as possible. This is confirmed by the rapid decline in the spread of misinformation, as shown in the data chart.
Over the years, engineers have developed the program not only for simple text verification but also for multimedia fact-checking capabilities. Now, whether it is images, audio, video or text, reliable information can be obtained through quick comparison. We openly share the design logic and underlying decision-making process in a bilingual format on the Internet, hoping to assist research teams around the world in similar developments to combat fake news. In recent years, an increasing number of fact-checking organizations have implemented response bot capabilities, and Cofacts has been contributing to all of these capabilities by championing open source code.
Disinformation in Taiwan’s 2024 elections
Disinformation not only affects election results, but also has a significant negative impact on national security and international relations. Public distrust of the country’s internal institutions, dissatisfaction with government policies, and uncertainty about the country’s direction have increased the cost of communication between the government and citizens. Internationally, disinformation damages trust between countries, leads to the misunderstanding of friendly aid, and interprets intrusive interference with important control methods as friendly aid. Short-term interests can lead to alliances with authoritarian leaders or betrayal of democratic allies, leading to instability and challenges in international relations.
In the 2024 election, we observed three main patterns of disinformation influencing the outcome. The first is an attack on livelihood policies, such as unaffordable egg prices, opening up U.S. pork imports and disposing of Japan’s treated water. Disinformation, including the fiction that Russia or the United States has taken a tough stance against Japan, such as declaring war or condemning actions, affects public perceptions of the government’s capabilities and leads people to believe that the Taiwanese government is unable to protect its citizens. The second pattern involves criticism of candidates and negative portrayals of parties. False information surrounding politicians, such as spreading unsubstantiated rumors about Lai’s extramarital affairs and illegitimate children. Similar to previous false information claims that Tsai Ing-wen helped Lee Teng-hui have an abortion and that Hsiao Meiqin was the undercover girlfriend of former President Chen Shui-bian, these accusations made use of negative rumors and images. Extramarital affairs influence voter perceptions. They have a significant impact on voters’ perceptions. The third model exploits the increased risk of war following the conflict in Ukraine to threaten the population. Messages suggesting that choosing the DPP will lead to war create fear and uncertainty, and manipulate international examples to intimidate Taiwanese citizens.
After the presidential election, disinformation began to spread about the electoral process being unfair. Videos and disinformation challenged the credibility of the election by suggesting irregularities and claiming it could not be trusted, thereby eroding public confidence in the electoral system. False messages such as “Elections are unfair and elected leaders may not necessarily represent true public opinion”, “The democratic process is unreliable” and “Asian people do not need democracy” use anti-democratic propaganda to create biased political views and fuel distrust. in democracy. This phenomenon reflects the worst-case scenario, in which an authoritarian regime takes advantage of the democratic system, hides under the protection of freedom of speech, conducts anti-democratic political propaganda, and ultimately eliminates democracy through the votes and systems of a democratic society.
Cofacts has been building a fact-checking platform to combat disinformation. Through the development of information technology tools, we teach public verification techniques for open source intelligence (OSINT) and leave the data to benefit others. Cofacts advocates openness and transparency and empowers citizens to verify information. By maximizing platform accessibility, everyone has the opportunity to provide answers and rebuttals to misinformation. This process encourages media literacy training for citizens so that they can actively contribute. We believe that only when individuals are aware of and engaged in this process can they truly understand the risks of information shaping and appreciate the value of maintaining trust.
Future Directions: Taiwan’s Disinformation Challenge
By the end of 2023, Cofacts had conducted more than 2,000 individual surveys by sending requests through the messaging app LINE. These surveys show that more than 85% of respondents believe that fake news originates from China, and more than 95% of respondents are aware of and believe that the problem of fake news is very serious. We’re glad people are paying attention to the issue of disinformation. But at the same time, some people still believe that fake news is produced locally in Taiwan. Understanding the authoritarian threats facing Taiwan is challenging, as malicious foreign disinformation can cleverly conceal its source and identity under the protection of free speech. We are concerned that democratic societies are so polarized that “ideologies with which they disagree are dismissed as fake news.”
In the future, Cofacts will continue to develop collaborations with artificial intelligence, providing researchers and international friends with the necessary data and code to develop fact-checking robots, just like what we have achieved with our friends in Thailand. We hope that through these collaborations and advocacy, we can strengthen our country’s democratic resilience and engage more with democratic allies around the world.
This article is published as part of the special issue “2023-2024: Looking Back, Looking Ahead”.
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