1/21/24, 11:57 AM Confronting Digital Authoritarianism Through Digital Democracy: Lessons From Taiwan – The Diplomat

CHINA POWER | SOCIETY | EAST ASIA

Confronting Digital
Authoritarianism
Through Digital
Democracy: Lessons
From Taiwan
Taiwan bears the brunt of foreign
information manipulation from
China. In response, it has
embraced transparency and civic
participation.

By Michael Caster
January 20, 2024

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1/21/24, 11:57 AM Confronting Digital Authoritarianism Through Digital Democracy: Lessons From Taiwan – The Diplomat

Credit: Depositphotos

On January 13, the citizens of Taiwan took to the polls in a

presidential election bombarded by the full coordinated
force of information manipulation and influence
operations directed by the People’s Republic of China.
Disinformation spikes by some 40 percent ahead of
elections in Taiwan, according to Billion Lee, the founder
of Taiwan fact-checking organization Cofacts. Ahead of
Saturday’s vote, this included coordinated inauthentic
behavior spanning hundreds of Facebook profiles and
cross-platform amplification of Beijing-backed
disinformation from TikTok and YouTube, along with
deepfakes and other AI-generated content.
Despite this, Taiwan elected Lai Ching-te of the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in a rebuke to the
Kuomintang (KMT), the party seen as more friendly
toward Beijing’s interests. This was certainly not the
result China had been trying to game.
Now, especially ahead of a year of global elections,
Taiwan may offer lessons in confronting digital
authoritarianism’s influence through its practice of digital
democracy.
Taiwan’s Digital Democracy

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China has a history of foreign information manipulation

and influence operations targeting Taiwan, from
economic to political and diplomatic pressure, to cyber
and cognitive warfare, and increasingly sophisticated
disinformation operations. In fact, the most recent dataset
from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) and Digital
Society Project tracking foreign government manipulation
of social media and disinformation among 202 countries
from 2000-2021 showed Taiwan as the country most
targeted globally by foreign disinformation operations,
although it is not always possible to attribute the
information threats directly to China.
Rather than succumb to malicious foreign manipulation
and influence, Taiwan has sought to “promote co-creation
from tensions and conflicts,” in the words of Digital
Minister Audrey Tang, through a whole of society
approach to digital democracy.
Taiwan’s Open Government National Action Plan (2021-
2024) lists the promotion of “open data and freedom of
information” first among five categories of commitment,
and lays out a path to radical transparency and open-
source, acknowledging the importance of
multistakeholderism and harnessing technology. Taiwan
seeks to transform the diversity of public opinion into
creative policies to deepen democratic literacy.
Examples include the Presidential Hackathon, a
government initiative emphasizing open-source data, data
utilization, and social innovation. It is modeled on similar
activities of the civic tech community. It also includes an
international element, part of Taiwan’s digital diplomacy
efforts, which has solicited participation from 34
countries since 2019.
Also under Taiwan’s open government initiative, in 2020
it introduced an Open Parliament Action Plan (2021-2024),
led by heavy metal musician turned legislator Freddy
Lim, whose objectives are transparency, openness,
participation, digitization, and literacy.

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The Open Government National Action Plan and the Open

Parliament Action Plan in Taiwan notably stand out for
their high level of civil society engagement. This
collaborative approach was evident in both the drafting
and implementation phases of these plans. By embracing
transparency and encouraging public participation,
Taiwan strengthens its defenses against propaganda and
disinformation, which thrive when information is opaque
and people lack confidence in one another and their
public institutions. Such proactive measures are not only
instrumental in safeguarding the integrity of Taiwan’s
information landscape but also in maintaining the
infrastructures of digital democracy: the foundation for
containing the threats of digital authoritarianism.
Despite such best practices, Taiwan cannot be a formal
member of the global Open Government Partnership
because, emblematic of China’s pressure campaigns,
Taiwan is not recognized internationally as a sovereign
country. China’s efforts to alienate Taiwan internationally
create barriers to equal participation in showcasing
Taiwan’s successes and negotiating digital governance
norms, such as through the U.N. Internet Governance
Forum or as a full member of the Freedom Online
Coalition.
Beijing’s international blockade of Taiwan from such fora
creates a missed opportunity for greater global
engagement and the sharing of lessons learned in
confronting digital authoritarianism, and should be
opposed.
People-public-private Partnerships Confronting
Information Manipulation
In highlighting Taiwan’s embrace of digital democracy to
hold back foreign digital authoritarian influence, the civic
tech community is just as valuable as government
initiatives –if not more so.
For example, the Taiwan FactCheck Center, founded in
2018, seeks to counter disinformation and promote digital
literacy through its LINE chatbot, among other platforms
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for receiving information. LINE is the most popular

messaging app in Taiwan, and widely popular in the
region. Users can share questionable content with the
chatbot for verification. In the spirit of open-source
transparency, each result includes a complete list of
source material, information, and verification data. The
FactCheck Center also conducted fact-checking analysis of
presidential debates and other government
communications to close the space for malign actors to
exert influence in the dark.
Similarly, since 2016 Cofacts has managed their own LINE
chatbot as a crowdsourced fact-checking project. Users
can add the bot as a friend with the LINE ID @cofacts or
paste text suspected of being disinformation onto the
website to receive real-time debunking. It is open-source,
providing the data of all source code, unverified
messages, and fact-checking reports. It even inspired the
civic tech community in Thailand to replicate the model
there.
The Cofacts community of volunteers have also conducted
media literacy and fact-checking training workshops to
protect free speech and promote collective
countermeasures to disinformation. The project was born
from the collaborative efforts of the broader civic tech
community.
Launched in 2012, g0v (pronounced gov-zero) is a
coalition of open-source activists. Their name comes from
replacing the “o” in gov with a “0,” representing the
binary language of the digital age. Among its activities,
which inspired later government practices, g0v has
organized over 60 hackathons giving birth to some of the
people-public-private partnerships confronting foreign
disinformation, such as Cofacts.
The g0v movement is itself a community project under
the umbrella of the Open Culture Foundation (OCF),
which likewise advocates for open-source, open data, and
open government. The OCF has supported numerous
projects to strengthen digital resilience. Active in Taiwan

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and around the region, the OCF’s network, along with

many of their peers, is emblematic of the growing global
recognition of Taiwan’s people-public-private
partnerships.
A Global Future for Digital Democracy
The threats facing Taiwan have not abated with the
election. China is likely to react with redoubled hostility,
both targeting the information ecosystem in Taiwan and
seeking to poison international narratives against Taiwan.
In recognizing this, the international community should
expand cooperation to develop and apply transferable
best practices in confronting China’s global information
manipulation and influence, learning from the
groundbreaking work led by Doublethink Lab, among
others.
Ultimately, the methods of digital democracy developed
by Taiwan’s civic tech community and embraced by its
government may point to structures by which other states
might seek to roll back the rise of digital authoritarianism.
That said, the international community cannot merely
learn from Taiwan without giving back. It must stand firm
in concrete commitments, seek opportunities for deeper
government engagement and recognition, and expand
support for Taiwan’s civil society through funding and
international partnerships.
AUTHORS

GUEST AUTHOR

Michael Caster
Michael Caster is the Asia Digital Programme Manager at
ARTICLE 19 and a co-founder of Safeguard Defenders.

TAGS

China Power Society East Asia China Taiwan

China influence operations in Taiwan Digital authoritarianism g0v

Taiwan civil society Taiwan digital democracy Taiwan technology industry

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