cCharles Yeh’s battle against misinformation in Taiwan began with a bowl of beef noodles. Nine years ago, the Taiwanese engineer was at a restaurant with his family when his mother-in-law began removing green onions from her food. When she was asked what she was doing, she explained that onions can damage the liver. She knew, she said, because she had received text messages telling her so.
Yeh was puzzled by this. His family had always happily eaten green onions. So he decided to set the record straight.
He put the truth into a blog post and circulated it to family and friends via the Line messaging app. She shared it more widely and soon received requests from strangers asking to connect to her personal Line account.
“Back then there wasn’t much of a concept of fact-checking in Taiwan, but I realized there was a demand. It could also help solve people’s problems,” Yeh said. So he continued and in 2015 launched the website MyGoPen, which means “don’t be fooled again” in Taiwanese.
Within two years, MyGoPen had 50,000 subscribers. Today it has more than 400,000. In 2023, it received 1.3 million fact-check requests and has debunked misinformation about everything from carcinogens in bananas to the false claim that Taiwan’s new president, Lai Ching-te, had a child outside the marriage.
Other fact-checking organizations have emerged, including Taiwan FactCheck Center, Cofacts, and DoubleThink Lab.
But as fact-checking organizations have grown, so has the threat of misinformation.
The growing and changing threat from China
The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg Liza Taiwan is the target of more foreign misinformation than any other democracy, ahead of Latvia and the United States. The greatest threat comes from across the Taiwan Strait and is most intense during election periods.
Taiwanese civic organization Doublethink Lab tracks China’s influence in 82 countries in sectors such as academia, media and domestic politics. It is classified Taiwan ranks first in terms of the degree of China’s influence on its society and media.and 11th overall.
In February this year, after two Chinese fishermen died in a speedboat accident while being chased by Taiwan’s coast guard, after which Beijing condemned Taiwan, a video circulating online claimed to show 100 fishing boats Chinese surrounding Taiwan’s Kinmen Islands in retaliation.
But MyGoPen he pointed that the video was taken in 2023 in waters near the eastern Chinese provinces of Shandong and Zhejiang, when ships were returning to port at the end of a fishing season.
Jaw-Nian Huang, an associate professor at National Chengchi University in Taiwan, says Beijing has evolved its strategy from a more direct approach, such as spreading the false accusation in 2020 that then-President Tsai Ing-Wen, who was running for office, reelection, had fabricated his doctorate – to an indirect approach. For example, Beijing has used the war between Israel and Gaza to sow doubts about the United States’ approach to global politics and, therefore, to Taiwan.
These “misleading narratives,” he says, can be harder to counter because they are based on opinions or perspectives. “There’s nothing right or wrong about a perspective,” she said. “It’s no longer a question of true or false.”
An important way to overcome such narratives is to ensure a diverse media environment and that the public gets into the habit of getting information from multiple sources, he says.
As for China’s view, when a 2023 report from the US State Department claimed that Beijing was expanding its disinformation efforts, China’s Foreign Ministry responded calling the claims themselves disinformation. “The US State Department report is itself disinformation as it misrepresents facts and truth. In fact, it was the United States that invented weaponization in the global information space,” a spokesperson said when asked about the report.
AI: ‘Systematic operation at work’
Artificial intelligence is a rapidly growing challenge for fact-checkers. A recent report conducted by the Thomson Foundation on AI disinformation attacks during the 2024 presidential election concluded that the attack has “continued unabated” and is evolving.
Eve Chiu, director of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, a non-profit organization, describes the development of AI as “unstoppable.” During the January election there was widespread use of deepfakes overlaid with AI-generated celebrity voices, she says.
“The large amount of false information about election manipulation that was spread before and after election day via TikTok, in an attempt to subvert the results of Taiwan’s democratic elections, indicated a systematic operation at work,” it says.
MyGoPen’s Yeh is daunted by the challenge of misinformation generated and spread by AI, but says it can also have benefits. It can be used to generate verbatim transcriptions, for example, improving the efficiency of verification of video and audio materials.
And MyGoPen already uses bots to help respond to many of the requests the platform receives. His robots receive and, using the MyGoPen database, respond to about 3,000 queries a day, he said. But it also has a Line account that provides an individual verification service with a live verifier. Additionally, AI “speeds up the verification process (helps with comparison, identification and translation) and we use it in some situations,” although verification is still done manually.
Yeh emphasizes that it is also very important to educate people about China’s changing disinformation tactics. He compares people who spread misinformation to scammers who come up with new ways to trick people out of their money.
“Just like fraud, the tactics always change, but the goal (swindling you out of money) doesn’t.”