In August, as China’s massive military maneuvers off the coast of Taiwan captivated the world’s attention, another offensive was taking place in the digital sphere.
Just days after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi came on the island, fake rumors circulated on social media claiming that China was evacuating its citizens from Taiwan and launching missiles at a nearby airport.
During the same time, hacked digital signage in 7-Eleven convenience stores across Taiwan displayed the message, “War-mongering Pelosi, get out of Taiwan!” Digital signage in a railway station in the southern port city of Kaohsiung referred to Pelosi as a “old witch.”
Even the official government website of Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen was taken offline by hackers for almost twenty minutes.
China’s fight against Taiwan included a robust cyberfront.
Kitsch Yen-Fan, associate director of the Global China Hub at the Atlantic Council, told 60 Minutes, “We are already at war.” This is a consistent occurrence.
According to a research published in 2022 by the Digital Society Project, an initiative of the Swedish institute Varieties of Democracy, Taiwan has been the top target of foreign disinformation worldwide for the past nine years. According to Taiwanese politicians and scholars, the majority of these attacks originate in China.
Prior to Pelosi’s August visit to Taiwan, both hacking efforts and disinformation propagated over prominent social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, and LINE, a popular instant messaging service in Taiwan.
“Fake news on social media is a means by which [China] prepares for their future operation,” Kitsch explained. In Ukraine, the Russians were actively attempting to affect public opinion and demoralize the populace in order to facilitate their eventual conquest.
According to Kitsch, the majority of individuals who publish false information on applications such as LINE appear to be ordinary Chinese residents and not government agents. In order to gain the trust of the Taiwanese in their chat groups, they initially publish benign information such as store discounts and temple events.
“And they would be credible, such that people’s initial reaction to the narrative would be, “Oh.” This man cannot be deceiving me. Just last week, he told me about the excellent bargain “Kitsch is defined.
According to cybersecurity experts, the false or deceptive messages are part of a Chinese disinformation operation designed to undermine Taiwanese morale. It is also intended to create mistrust of the United States, one of Taiwan’s biggest supporters, so that Taiwanese question that the U.S. will come to their rescue in the case of a physical conflict.
A video of a White House press conference was falsely captioned with an ominous fictional statement from the press secretary: “The United States will abandon Taiwan in the event of an attack.” 60 Minutes discovered this post in the LINE app.
The director of DoubleThink Lab, a research organization that focuses on Chinese influence tactics in Taiwan and around the world, Puma Shen, told 60 Minutes that this is part of China’s disinformation strategy to portray the United States as an enemy.
Twenty percent of college students in Taiwan identified the United States and Japan as the countries that distribute this information to Taiwan, according to Shen.
China’s cyberwar has other fronts besides disinformation. Cyberattacks could also take the form of disruption and hacking attempts, including both large-scale assaults on infrastructure and smaller-scale attacks on digital targets, such as restricting access to or defacing government websites.
According to Taiwanese parliament member Wang Ting-interview Yu’s with 60 Minutes, roughly 20 million cyberattacks are launched daily against the island. According to Wang, China is the origin of the vast majority of them.
Wang stated that Taiwan does not engage in counterattacks in response to cyberattacks, but does safeguard itself.
“Taiwan is an IT island. We excel in advanced technology “He elucidated. “We have been under these types of attacks for some time. Consequently, our capacity to counteract these types of activities is pretty strong.”
Brit McCandless Farmer and Will Croxton made the film seen above. Will Croxton acted as editor.