In 2014, a large crowd of protesters, mostly university students, barged into Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan (Zhonghua Minguo lifayuan, 中華民國立法院) and proceeded to occupy the building for three weeks. This led to Taiwanese disinformation response strategy policy that is still in place today and aims to cultivate democracy. While this may seem unrelated, this article takes a deeper look into what Taiwan’s principle of digital sovereignty is about, how it is resisting China’s severe destabilisation efforts, and what the future outlook is for this position.
To fully understand the connection between Taiwanese resistance to the Chinese threat and their civil society, we must go back to the year 2014, and the events that are now called the Sunflower Movement (Taiyanghua yundong, 太陽花運動), alternatively the March 18th Student Movement (318 xueyun, 318學運) or Occupy Taiwan Legislature Incident (Zhanling guohui shijian, 占領國會事件). The protests (and the subsequent occupation of parliament) began as a response to a law, called the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (Haixia liang’an fuwu maoyi xieyi, 海峽兩岸服務貿易協議, CSSTA), proposed by the ruling party, Kuomintang (KMT), a few months prior to the protests, in June 2013.
This law’s goal was to liberalise trade with China, but most importantly, it would allow Chinese companies to buy up shares in Taiwanese telecommunication services, which would highly endanger the Taiwanese state and its established democracy. The ruling party was trying to forcibly pass the law; however, this was considered an unfair practice by the opposition and the students, who are generally more supportive of them than the KMT. [1] A group of protesters thus decided to occupy the Legislative Yuan for a few weeks, due to the unpredictability and non-transparency of the law. [2]
The non-transparency was the reason why many protesters insisted on calling the CSSTA the black box law (heixiang fumao, 黑箱服貿). The most vocal out of these protesters happened to be the members of the g0v (or gov-zero) organisation, [3] founded in 2012, that focuses on digital transparency and collects data in collaboration with the Digital Ministry and later analyses it. This was the first sign of the incoming tight bond between civic tech companies [4] and the Democratic Progressive Party (Minjindang 民進黨, DPP) governmental initiatives that would come with the 2016 election and the two other presidential terms that would ensue.
However, the issue is not as simple as it may seem. PRC informational warfare is gradually worsening, and with the adoption of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, there might be a need for Taiwan to adopt harsher policies. This article will analyse the main methods used to counter Chinese influence and will attempt to argue for the continuation of strengthening its digital sovereignty through transparency, civic participation, and open technology, and resistance to the tempting adoption of authoritarian-style information controls that would erode its democratic legitimacy.
The Authoritarian Threat
To understand why Taiwan is so focused on developing a democratic digital identity and defense structure, we first need to look at the threat that the country faces – that is, the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
The PRC has developed a very sophisticated model based on digital authoritarianism. Their usage of disinformation, cyberattacks, and cognitive warfare is an extreme threat to the livelihood of the Taiwanese state, as it is making information manipulation into a key component of Cross-Strait confrontation. According to Dimitrov, [5] the digital authoritarian model is dependent on three components, that is: surveillance hardware (such as cameras or GPS trackers), sophisticated software (such as server clusters), and human collection of intelligence (this one being a component that is impossible to export, therefore reliant on already existing structures in the goal country). The Chinese model is hugely influential abroad as well, as it tends to diffuse to different countries that are ideologically inclined towards the PRC, for example, with urban surveillance, internet restrictions (and thus the spread of censorship through cooperative interdependence). [6] For example, Uganda and Zambia have been known to use Huawei technology to spy on their opponents. [7] But the very first instance of this sort of Chinese interference, or more closely, the start of data-centric authoritarianism export was recorded in the mid-2000s, when China sold radio jammers to the government of Zimbabwe. [8] This means it would be easy for PRC sympathisers in Taiwan to adopt this kind of technology to use against Taiwanese citizens and their government.
Disinformation disseminated by the PRC is possibly the largest threat to Taiwanese democracy, especially due to the big polarisation of Taiwanese media, when most media is supportive of one of the parties [9] and the generally more objective public broadcasters lack viewership. There have already been attempts to influence Taiwanese media by buying shares, for example, by the Want Want China Times media conglomerate, [10] but most disinformation is currently spread through new media, so new strategies were found to be necessary in the most recent years. If we take presidential elections as an example, disinformation originating in China has been targeting five key issues: ineffective governance of the Taiwanese government, national defense and the possible Cross-Strait conflict, Cross-Strait and diplomatic relations, controversies involving political parties, figures, and issues that are related to democratic procedures. [11] Most of the targets are related to the Democratic Progressive Party (Minjindang 民進黨, DPP). New technology, such as artificial intelligence, has increased the speed and decreased the cost of production, which has increased the pressure on Taiwan to respond faster.
In the next section, this article will go through some of the methods used to counter China’s digital authoritarianism-based tactics.
Taiwan’s Digital Defense Strategy
It is impossible to discuss Taiwan’s current digital defense strategy without mentioning its main creator and face, the Digital Minister Audrey Tang (Tang Feng 唐鳳). Tang is a programmer who joined the 2016 DPP era’s Executive Yuan as a Minister without a portfolio. Tang happens to be a large proponent of what she calls “radical transparency“, [12] meaning her meetings are transcribed and later made available on the Ministry website. A former hacker and activist, she was one of the figureheads of the “g0v” (or “gov-zero”) movement. [3]
The aforementioned collaboration has managed to create a chatbot called “Cofacts,” which is available for download, and it is possible to add it to a popular message app Line, where it functions as a sort of fact-checking bot – a potentially harmful piece of information can be sent through the app to the website where a collaborative team works on its confirmation or denial. The application, which the author of this text first tried out for academic purposes in 2020, has become much more widely used in those five years. In 2020, the largest issue was its relatively inactive userbase; now, however, it seems to contain a large amount of troll or spam messages, which could hinder people’s user experience and dissuade them from fact-checking using the chatbot (and website). The claim about its openness being a strength but also a weakness was made by Davis et al. before, so we can clearly see this weak point has not been resolved, and the prediction came true. [13] There is also the issue of Taiwan being a super-aged society, meaning many older users of message apps may not be able to use the chatbots to their full potential.
However, collaborating with civic tech companies (such as Cofacts or the first centre of its kind, Taiwan FactCheck Center [Taiwan shishi chahe zhongxin 台灣事實查核中心] [14] is not the only way Taiwan solves all its fact-checking needs. There are also the so-called government “anti-troll armies”, which function at every ministry in Taiwan, and whenever they detect a message, they have 60 minutes to create a counter-narrative that they later spread amongst Taiwanese citizens. Sometimes, the counter-narrative spreads faster among the citizens than the original disinformation. The counter-narrative also does not have to be a text-based one – many can take the appearance of a stand-up (which happened with the former president Tsai Ing-wen [Cai Yingwen 蔡英文]), or in the form of a meme. [15]
The last strategy that is necessary to mention in this section is the effort to cultivate media literacy and media skills. While those two terms sound identical to an untrained eye, Audrey Tang tends to look at them as two separate issues. [16] Media literacy is a more classic form of disinformation weapon, and its cultivation among students in Taiwan began in the year 2000. Its goals are mainly learning how to work with media, criticise them, understand their importance and influence in a healthy democratic society, and to cultivate critical thinking among not only students, but also other citizens. [17] Media skills are, according to Tang, more about an active response to disinformation. Tang considers it important, as most of us are not only consumers but also creators. We should, therefore, learn how to use professional journalistic techniques of fact-checking. [16]
However, due to the rising Chinese threat and the fast development of potentially harmful technology, Taiwan may feel compelled to move away from digital transparency to a more conventional approach. The next part discusses the dilemma and the two possible paths that Taiwan can take.
Taiwan Digital Democracy at a Crossroads
As was mentioned, Taiwan now has two possible competing models of digital sovereignty. One relies on tighter regulation and centralised control to ensure the security of the country, and the second one on civic empowerment, participatory technology, and transparency to strengthen the country from within, a sort of bottom-up strategy. Each path promises them protection; however, both carry significant risks.
Censorship in Taiwan is currently very rare; [18] most censorship present happens to be self-censorship that is often related to business ventures of companies in China, for example, in the music industry due to market demands across the Strait. [19] There are some examples of censorship related to online slander [20] criminalised by Article 309 of the Criminal Code, or to the dissemination of false information (this was used mostly during the COVID-19 pandemic to prosecute the spread of medical disinformation online), criminalised by the Social Order Maintenance Act. [21] However, this liberal attitude to censorship could prove to be detrimental in the future.
As China’s disinformation efforts grow, Taiwan may feel inclined to choose national security imperatives over digital democracy. One of the approaches may be cracking down on cross-border data transfers, [22] tightening online content regulation, or relying more on state-controlled channels for crisis communication. Despite these measures strengthening short-term resistance, they would erode the current transparency that Taiwan enjoys. The already deeply polarised Taiwanese society could lose trust in democratic institutions, which was difficult to gain – digital transparency actually played a large part in the radical growth of trust of Taiwanese society in its institutions, from 9% of society trusting the government in 2014 (that was, before the Sunflower Movement) to an impressive 70%, which later fell slightly, to 60% in 2024. [23] Thus, ridding Taiwanese society of civic tech collaborations and related measures may be counterproductive, with citizens not incentivised towards fighting in a potential conflict, be it hybrid or physical.
In the second model, the democratic resilience model, Taiwan would continue framing digital security as a collective project and not a state-centric one. Thus, Taiwan would continue investing in digital literacy, transparency, and various participatory platforms for fact-checking. This model sees openness as a foundation of resilience, and not as a weakness. This model carries risks as well; it is much slower than the more conventional one, and coordination during a possible crisis could fail.
There is also the issue of potential changes in disinformation-countering policies in case the opposition party, the KMT, decides not to continue with the model due to its differing opinions on the China threat and disinformation in general – Chinese disinformation narratives tend to target the DPP more often than the KMT, mostly because of their stance towards reunification with China. However, this model, based on openness, would continue to cultivate an adaptive, transparent democracy that has trust in its citizens’ abilities to defend the public sphere.
This model is also important due to the potential soft power it can carry – Taiwan is now a member of a new coalition, the Artificial Intelligence Advisory Group on Elections (AI AGE), and its expertise in countering disinformation is highly sought after. [24] The image of a tech-based nation that has technology and know-how that others seek may be a key weapon against the Chinese threat.
Conclusion
As Taiwan invests in digital infrastructure and anti-disinformation defense, its decisions as a key Indo-Pacific actor may prove to shape the global dialogue about democratic resilience. If it chooses to build its security around transparency, participation, and resiliation, it will protect its sovereignty but will also strengthen its role as a role model for other societies under increasing pressure, for example, Finland. Ultimately, the credibility of its democracy may be the most powerful form of defense.
Reviewed by Martin Machorek
References
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