Awash in Disinformation Before Vote, Taiwan Points Finger at China

Taiwan is on high alert for digital-age trickery and deception that Beijing is using to try to swing a crucial election.
By Raymond Zhong

TAIPEI, Taiwan — At first glance, the bespectacled YouTuber railing against Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, just seems like a concerned citizen making an appeal to his fellow Taiwanese.
He speaks Taiwanese-accented Mandarin, with the occasional phrase in Taiwanese dialect.
His captions are written with the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan, not the simplified ones used in China.
With outrage in his voice, he accuses Ms. Tsai of selling out “our beloved land of Taiwan” to Japan and the United States.
The man, Zhang Xida, does not say in his videos whom he works for.
But other websites and videos make it clear: He is a host for China National Radio, the Beijing-run broadcaster.
As Taiwan gears up for a major election this week, officials and researchers worry that China is experimenting with social media manipulation to sway the vote.
Doing so would be easy, they fear, in the island’s rowdy democracy, where the news cycle is fast and voters are already awash in false or highly partisan information.
China has been upfront about its dislike for President Tsai, who opposes closer ties with Beijing.
The Communist Party claims Taiwan as part of China’s territory, and it has long deployed propaganda and intimidation to try to influence elections here.
Polls suggest, however, that Beijing’s heavy-handed ways might be backfiring and driving voters to embrace Ms. Tsai.
Thousands of Taiwan citizens marched last month against “red media,” or local news organizations influenced by the Chinese government.
That is why Beijing may be turning to subtler, digital-age methods to inflame and divide.
Recently, there have been Facebook posts saying falsely that Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong democracy activist who has fans in Taiwan, had attacked an old man.
There were posts about nonexistent protests outside Taiwan’s presidential house, and hoax messages warning that ballots for the opposition Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, would be automatically invalidated.
In the southern city of Kaohsiung, thousands marched at a Dec. 21 rally to oppose pro-Beijing Han Kuo-yu, the presidential candidate for the Kuomintang.

So many rumors and falsehoods circulate on Taiwanese social media that it can be hard to tell whether they originate in Taiwan or in China, and whether they are the work of private provocateurs or of state agents.
Taiwan’s National Security Bureau in May issued a downbeat assessment of Chinese-backed disinformation on the island, urging a “‘whole of government’ and ‘whole of society’ response.”
“False information is the last step in an information war,” the bureau’s report said.
“If you find false information, that means you have already been thoroughly infiltrated.”
Taiwanese society has woken up to the threat.
The government has strengthened laws against spreading harmful rumors.
Companies including Facebook, Google and the messaging service Line have agreed to police their platforms more stringently.
Government departments and civil society groups now race to debunk hoaxes as quickly as they appear.
The election will put these efforts — and the resilience of Taiwan’s democracy — to the test.
“The ultimate goal, just like what Russia tried to do in the United States, is to crush people’s confidence in the democratic system,” said Tzeng Yi-suo of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a think tank funded by the government of Taiwan.
In Taiwan, civil society groups such as FakenewsCleaner have worked to fact check social media posts and educate the public about disinformation.

Fears of Chinese meddling became acute in recent months after a man named Wang Liqiang sought asylum in Australia claiming he had worked for Chinese intelligence to fund pro-Beijing candidates in Taiwan, buy off media groups and conduct social media attacks.
And there are other signs that Beijing is working to upgrade its techniques of information warfare.
Twitter, which is blocked in mainland China, recently took down a vast network of accounts that it described as Chinese state-backed trolls trying to discredit Hong Kong’s protesters.
A 2018 paper in a journal linked to the United Front Work Department, a Communist Party organ that organizes overseas political networking, argued that Beijing had failed to shape Taiwanese public discourse in favor of unification with China.
In November, the United Front Work Department held a conference in Beijing on internet influence activities, according to an official social media account.
The department’s head, You Quan, said the United Front would help people such as social media influencers, live-streamers and professional e-sports players to “play an active role in guiding public opinion.”
“We understand that the people who are sowing discord are also building a community, that they are also learning from each other’s playbooks,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s digital minister.
“There are new innovations happening literally every day.”
In Taiwan, Chinese internet trolls were once easily spotted because they posted using the simplified Chinese characters found only on the mainland.
That happens less these days, though there are still linguistic slip-ups.

Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan.

In one of the YouTube videos from Zhang, the China National Radio employee, a character in the description is incorrectly translated into traditional Chinese from simplified Chinese.
Zhang did not respond to a message seeking comment.
In December, Taiwan’s justice ministry warned about a fake government notice saying Taiwan was deporting protesters who had fled Hong Kong.
The hoax first appeared on the Chinese social platform Weibo, the ministry said, before spreading to a Chinese nationalist Facebook group.
Sometimes, Chinese trolls amplify rumors already floating around in Taiwan, Mr. Shen said.
He is also on the lookout for Taiwanese social media accounts that may be bought or supported by Chinese operatives.
Ahead of midterm elections in 2018, his team had been monitoring several YouTube channels that discussed Taiwanese politics.
The day after voting ended, the channels disappeared.
After Yu Hsin-Hsien was elected to the City Council that year in Taoyuan, a city near Taipei, mysterious strangers began inquiring about buying his Facebook page, which had around 280,000 followers.
Mr. Yu, 30, immediately suspected China.
His suspicions grew after he demanded an extravagantly high price and the buyers accepted.
Mr. Yu, who represents Ms. Tsai’s party, the Democratic Progressive Party, did not sell.
“Someone approaches a just-elected legislator and offers to buy his oldest weapon,” Mr. Yu said. “What’s his motive? To serve the public? It can’t be.”
Recently, internet users in Taiwan noticed a group of influencers, many of them pretty young women, posting messages on Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #DeclareMyDeterminationToVote. The posts did not mention candidates or parties, but the people included selfies with a fist at their chest, a gesture often used by Han Kuo-yu, the Kuomintang’s presidential candidate.
Han’s campaign denied involvement.
But some have speculated that China’s United Front might be responsible.
The United Front Work Department did not respond to a fax requesting comment.
One line of attack against Ms. Tsai has added to the atmosphere of mistrust and high conspiracy ahead of this week’s vote.
Politicians and media outlets have questioned whether Ms. Tsai’s doctoral dissertation is authentic, even though her alma mater, the London School of Economics, has confirmed that it is.

Taiwan is battling a wave of online disinformation from China

By Alice Su

Demonstrators in Taiwan rally against pro-China media. A global study found that the island was the territory most exposed to Chinese disinformation.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — The messages start out as innocuous advice, often health-related, like: “Don’t eat mushrooms and eggplant together, or you may die.”
Then they turn political.“Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s PhD is fake.” 

“The CIA pays Hong Kong protesters $385 a day to go on the streets.” 

“Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are ethnically Vietnamese and Japanese.”
Thousands of Chinese lies flood social media every day in Taiwan, a new frontier of information warfare. 

The island, which China claims as part of its territory but has been functionally independent since the 1950s, is the target of a Russian-style disinformation campaign by China to exploit social divisions and undermine democracy in the lead-up to the presidential election in January.
A recent study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that Taiwan was the territory most exposed to Chinese disinformation, based on weighted ratings by experts. 

The U.S. ranked No. 13.
On Friday alone, Facebook shut down 118 Taiwanese fan pages, 99 groups and 51 accounts, including at least one unofficial fan group with more than 150,000 members for pro-China politician Han Kuo-yu, the candidate of the Nationalist Party, who is seen as Beijing’s favorite. 

He is seeking to unseat Tsai, whose Democratic Progressive Party takes a more confrontational stance toward China.
Facebook told Taiwan’s Central News Agency that the accounts had been removed for violating the platform’s rules by artificially inflating their posts’ reach, and that the removal was part of Facebook’s efforts to protect Taiwan’s election.
Like other democracies, Taiwan has been struggling to contain the spread of false information via social media. 

Several nations, including Singapore and Vietnam, have passed laws to combat “fake news,” but advocates of human rights and press freedom think that such bans are being used as a pretext to censor news and stifle speech.
In Taiwan, a bill prohibiting foreign “infiltration” of elections is stalled in the legislature, challenged by critics who say it brings back memories of the “White Terror,” a nearly four-decade period of martial law period that ended only in 1987.
Instead, Taiwan’s government is relying on private citizens to check facts and promote media literacy.
In a small office tucked inside a TV broadcast building, four former journalists recently pored over social media posts for the Taiwan FactCheck Center, a nonprofit group that started collaborating with Facebook in July 2018 to debunk disinformation on Taiwanese pages. 

The center is supported by two private foundations and is not funded by any government, political party or politician.
When users click on a Facebook post flagged as false, they encounter a warning screen with a link directing them to the center’s report before the user can access the content.
(Facebook says it similarly works with third-party fact-checking organizations in a number of countries, including the U.S. But when posts are marked false in most countries, they simply get moved lower in the news feed so that users see it less prominently. Fact-checking reports are also added as “Related Articles” connected to the false posts, Facebook says.)
In Taiwan the fact-checking team is small. 

It takes days to research and publish a full debunking report. 

The work is Sisyphean: The center has published 214 reports so far, but thousands of fake-news posts show up daily on Facebook and Line, a popular messaging app. 

Many appear in private chat groups that the center cannot monitor.
“This is just a beginning,” said Summer Chen, the center’s editor in chief, acknowledging the challenge.
Chen sees parallels with the disinformation campaigns used by the Russians to interfere in American elections. 

Some accounts and pages lure readers with seemingly innocuous information, then suddenly switch to political messaging.
Other posts try to stir emotions on hot-button issues — for example, false claims that Tsai’s government has misused pension funds to lure Korean and Japanese tourists to make up for a drop in visitors from the mainland, and that organizers of Taiwan’s annual gay-rights parade received stipends to invite overseas partners to march with them.
“They see a crack and stick a needle in,” Chen said, citing a Chinese proverb to explain disinformation that exploits social divisions.
The provenance of some slanderous posts is barely concealed.
One false post, for example, claimed that pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong had been offered money to kill police officers in suicide attacks. 

Chen’s group traced its first appearance to a post on Weibo, a mainland Chinese platform, by an official account belonging to China’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission.Fact-checkers also noted that the posts were accompanied by a fabricated poster claiming to recruit “martyrs.” 

But the name of the supposed martyrs’ chat group was written in Mandarin phonetics, rather than in Cantonese, the dialect spoken in Hong Kong.
Content analysis is one method analysts use to discern whether disinformation is coming from China, said Puma Shen, head of DoubleThink Labs, an organization that tracks Chinese disinformation and influence networks in Taiwan.
Timing can also be a giveaway, Shen said, as when clusters of accounts post and share content at the same time, between the same hours every day.
Proving whether such “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is linked to the Beijing government is harder. 

But there are clues: When Twitter shut down 936 mainland Chinese accounts targeting Hong Kong protests with disinformation in the summer, it found that several originated from internet addresses in mainland China that can access Twitter without a virtual private network — which strongly suggests that they were state-controlled accounts.
Facebook soon followed suit, closing mainland Chinese pages with thousands of followers and disclosing that individuals behind them were “associated with the Chinese government.” 

Google recently disabled 210 YouTube channels coordinating disinformation about Hong Kong.
Yet Taiwanese society remains undecided on whether Chinese disinformation is a threat, or even real.
In a survey of voters in November 2018, a week after local elections in Taiwan, Wang Tai-Li, a journalism professor at National Taiwan University, found that 52% of respondents did not believe there was Chinese interference in the elections, or did not know enough to judge.
Last month, a survey by the local news outlet Apple Daily found that in general, respondents could not correctly identify the source of online disinformation in Taiwan: 23.6% said it came from Tsai’s party, while 12.8% said it came from the Nationalist Party. 

Only 17.8% said it came from China.
It doesn’t help that Taiwan’s media landscape is severely polarized, with poor fact-checking standards and a high emphasis on entertainment over factual, neutrally presented news. 

Politicians from both of Taiwan’s major parties have also used trolls and cyber armies to influence voters as elections approach, Wang said.
That unsure, confused segment of Taiwanese society is most susceptible to Chinese influence — and most in need of media literacy training, Wang said. 

“Disinformation works on people in the middle, the politically neutral.”
On a recent Sunday afternoon, about 20 volunteers filed into a co-working space in Taipei, the Taiwanese capital. 

Pop music played as they snacked on egg tarts and opened their laptops, typing reports for CoFacts, a crowdsourced fact-checking database. 

Users can send queries to a CoFacts chatbot on Line about suspicious messages, which generates prewritten responses debunking the false claims.
Johnson Liang, the founder of CoFacts, acknowledged that it was hard to change the minds of people deceived by disinformation, but he said that the chatbot at least provided alternative viewpoints to consider.
“We’re providing information, not telling people what to think,” Liang said.
It’s a philosophy in line with how Liang and many Taiwanese people believe the internet should operate: open source, based on exchange and dialogue, not on censorship and top-down control.
“Our kind of defining identity is to be not what the PRC is,” said Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s “digital minister,” referring to the People’s Republic of China. 

Chinese authoritarianism is a reminder of Taiwan’s recent past under martial law, she said.
“Freedom of speech, assembly and press are not something instrumental that you can kind of trade away — rather, they form the core identity of Taiwan.”
Yisuo Tzeng, acting director of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a government-backed think tank, said that China’s Communist Party lacked sufficient understanding of democratic societies to change how people outside mainland China think.
“People always say disinformation must have a huge impact on you, because you are all Chinese — but look at Hong Kong now,” he said, pointing to pro-democracy candidates’ landslide victory in recent elections, notwithstanding a wave of mainland propaganda. 

“If it didn’t work on Hong Kong, how can it have an impact on us?”
Tzeng worries less about disinformation than about conventional influence operations — coercion and bribery — carried out by the United Front Work Department, the Communist Party entity responsible for co-opting ethnic Chinese outside China.
Shen, of DoubleThink Labs, is less optimistic. 

He says that civil society needs physical protection from Chinese agents, especially when they move beyond fact-checking to exposing influence networks.
“There are so many agencies bought or ordered by the Chinese government right now,” Shen said. “We might be attacked by them, and some of them are gangsters.”
One of Taiwan’s largest “triad” gangs, the Bamboo Union, is overtly pro-Beijing. 

Its members attacked students protesting closer ties to Beijing during Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement. 

The gang also was associated with anti-democratic repression in the 1980s.Civil society can handle content farms and trolls, Shen said, but the government still needs to protect the fact-checkers and democracy advocates in the real world.

Taiwan Gets Tough On Chinese Disinformation Ahead Of Elections

By EMILY FENG

Demonstrators protest against what they called "red media" influence in Taiwan during a rally against pro-China media in front of the president's office building in Taipei on June 23. With a presidential election in January, Taiwan is bracing for a new deluge of disinformation, much of it aimed at boosting Beijing's preferred politicians.

Eye Central Television is a popular satirical TV news show in Taiwan, with an active social media presence. 

One day in April, it received a Facebook message from someone using the name Tina Hsu, but this was no ordinary fan.
Hsu's Facebook profile was blank; it had just been created that morning.
And Hsu made a surprising proposition: to buy EyeCTV's Facebook admin rights, taking control of the content shared with its more than 420,000 followers.
At first, the political satire program, reminiscent of The Daily Show, played along. 

"We jokingly asked for 1.4 billion Taiwan dollars [$46 million]," says show writer Sandra Ho — requesting a number that matches the population of China, she notes.
EyeCTV didn't sell out in the end. 

Many in the Taiwanese media suspect the proposition and others like it are part of a Chinese state-backed influence campaign. 

Dozens of Facebook pages in Taiwan have become content mills for Chinese Communist Party propaganda. 

Taiwan is now the liberal democracy that receives the most disinformation spread by a foreign government, according to a May report from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The stakes for curbing the propaganda are especially high right now in Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing says belongs to the People's Republic of China. 

In January, Taiwan will vote for its president and legislators. 

Its current leaders are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2018 local elections, which were marred by Chinese interference.
But to filter false content, Taiwan faces free speech concerns that other countries, such as the United States, also have encountered.

Fact-checking Facebook
One of the latest efforts against disinformation is a unique collaboration between Facebook and the Taiwan FactCheck Center. 

The nonprofit center uses a back-end tool provided by Facebook to track viral, misleading posts and works to fact-check them. 

Once it does, Facebook alerts anyone who shared the post that it was wrong and includes a link to the fact-check article below the false post.
"Journalists focus on the truth, on describing something that happened. But for us, we want to prove that something has not happened. 

That's much harder to do," says Summer Chen, the editor-in-chief of the Taiwan FactCheck Center.
The initiative comes as the government is getting tough on disinformation, including steep fines for those caught spreading it.

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu speaks during a news conference in Taipei on Nov. 22.

"It's not only a domestic effort or a [Taiwanese] government interagency effort. There's also an international effort" to ward off Beijing's influence campaigns, Joseph Wu, Taiwan's foreign minister, tells NPR. 

"Because of the experiences we have, we have also built up some of the most formidable defense capabilities in the world."
In April, Taiwan's broadcast regulator fined a TV station over $32,000 for not verifying an inaccurate news item before airing it. 

Dozens of individuals have also been fined for sharing harmful, false items on social media.
The crackdown comes amid rising suspicion of mainland Chinese influence in Taiwan's news media.
In June, thousands marched against what protest organizers called the "threats of infiltration" by Chinese Communist "red media" in Taiwan's democracy. 

Later that month, Taiwan refused entry of a TV journalist from the mainland who broadcast misleading reports. 

Regulators are currently discussing blocking video-streaming sites run by Chinese companies Baidu and Tencent from broadcasting in Taiwan.

No name, no location
There's a central challenge for regulators: Most disinformation coming into Taiwan is through anonymous, hard to detect social media accounts.
Last year, when Taiwanese officials were falsely accused of abandoning Taiwanese tourists stranded by Typhoon Jebi in Osaka, Japan, the story was first spread by an anonymous user on PTT, a messaging forum popular in Taiwan. 

Within a day, several Taiwanese evening talk shows had picked up the item. 

Furious residents heaped criticism on the Taiwanese government's representative in Osaka, Su Chii-cheng.
He killed himself soon after, reportedly leaving a note that said he had been troubled by the news.
Researchers say some of the misleading material, including a doctored image, shows signs of being created in mainland China.
Tracing influence campaigns back to Beijing is difficult though, says Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. 

Social media users and hackers can use software to conceal their location.
One giveaway on Twitter, Tang says, is when users in mainland China are able to access the site, normally blocked by China's Internet firewall, without help from such software.

Using Taiwanese slang
Puma Shen runs DoubleThink Labs, a research outfit monitoring how false information travels from content farms funded by Chinese state or party-run entities to Facebook fan pages to news shows in Taiwan, and broadcast to an unsuspecting public.
Shen says one tactic he sees is an online "subliminal attack" to sway voters. 

Hundreds of hackers search one candidate's name over and over again to slant search engine algorithms toward displaying their results more prominently than other candidates'.
One day, Shen predicts China will surpass Russia in global disinformation operations.
"It's not really hard to do that," Shen says, pointing to Chinese-run apps like short video platform TikTok, now under U.S. investigation for collecting American user data, and messaging app WeChat. 

"[China] has all these marketing groups' online shopping apps which can easily collect private information on citizens in other countries."
China's influence efforts have advanced rapidly since the last Taiwanese municipal elections in 2018. Some messages stood out because they used mainland Chinese text, written in a simplified alphabet, in contrast with the traditional characters used in Taiwan, researchers say. 

Now, disinformation posts written in fluent Taiwanese slang are shared through private social media channels rather than publicly.

Rights concerns
Cédric Alviani, the head of Reporters Without Borders' East Asia bureau in Taipei, warns that coercive measures against media, including fining news outlets, are counterproductive: "By doing this kind of thing, the Taiwanese authorities are actually doing the exact same thing as they criticize," he says. 

He's referring to how Taiwan is using top-down methods to control undesirable speech comparable to what China's Communist Party does.
Alviani advocates for allowing people and outlets to dispute their fines or revoked credentials.
He also says Taiwanese media need more funds to pay for good journalism, rather than rely on social media for news.
"People don't trust so much their media because the line between the media and entertainment is very blurred in Taiwan," Alviani contends. 

"[Outlets] have an undue pressure to generate audience to their articles."
Government officials say they are aware of concerns that the disinformation crackdown could hinder freedom of the press and expression.
"I think when people still remember the martial law like I do, we just don't want to go back there," says Tang, the digital minister.
The former authoritarian government enforced martial law for almost 40 years until 1987. 

Tang says her parents were journalists and had to work under censorship during that period.
As the government passes tougher legislation to protect Taiwan, it risks affecting the civil liberties Taiwanese have enjoyed for three decades.
"Maybe it's impossible to legislate social media," concedes Ketty Chen, vice president of the government think tank Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. 

"As democracies, a challenge we often face is how you can legislate an individual's right to expression and the freedom of media [and] freedom of journalists to report, to investigate."

China's Moral Inferiority

Beijing wants greater sway over global public opinion. Instead, its propaganda outlets make Chinese leaders look like bullies.
By Li Yuan

Demonstrators gathered at Victoria Park in Hong Kong over the weekend.


Images of masked thugs massing in Hong Kong’s streets.
Unproven allegations that protesters are being led by the C.I.A.
Comparisons between activists and Nazis.
As protests continue to roil Hong Kong’s streets, China’s state-led propaganda machine has gone into overdrive to persuade the world that radical Hong Kong protesters have put the city in peril.
Through social media and other digital arenas, English-language messages from China have painted a picture of a tiny minority of foreign-influenced ruffians intimidating a silent majority of law-and-order residents.
But instead of making China’s case, Beijing’s ham-handed international efforts have largely failed to sway world public opinion.
They took a further blow on Monday, when Facebook and Twitter removed hundreds of accounts that they said appeared to be state-backed efforts to sow misinformation and discord in Hong Kong.
Perhaps more significantly, Twitter took the further step of forbidding state-run media outlets from paying to get their tweets promoted so that they appear prominently in users’ timelines. 
Chinese state-run outlets like the English-language China Daily newspaper and Xinhua, the officials news agency, have used promoted tweets to put their own spin on Hong Kong’s turmoil.


Pinboard@Pinboard

Every day I go out and see stuff with my own eyes, and then I go to report it on Twitter and see promoted tweets saying the opposite of what I saw. Twitter is taking money from Chinese propaganda outfits and running these promoted tweets against the top Hong Kong protest hashtags


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Call it a failure of Chinese “soft power” — what the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr., who coined the term, defined as getting others to want what you want.
China wants soft power but, judging by Beijing’s propaganda, doesn’t know how to get it.
The contrast has been stark.
On Sunday, millions of peaceful demonstrators clogged the city streets to call once again for the city’s leaders to give in to their demands and give the people greater say in a political system controlled by Beijing. 
The protesters — organizers put their number at 1.7 million — offered a more sympathetic narrative than the world saw the week before, when violent clashes broke out in protests at Hong Kong’s airport.
Chinese state media, on the other hand, in recent days has shown images of Chinese paramilitary police across the border in the mainland engaged in crowd-clearing exercises.
The Twitter account of Global Times, a nationalist tabloid controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, posted a video on Monday calling four pro-democracy Hong Kong figures “The Gang of Four,” a term that refers to the former Chinese leaders who were blamed for plunging the country into the disastrous Cultural Revolution. (The tweet has since disappeared.)
Pro-China activists also appeared in Australia, Canada and Europe, putting on less-than-wholesome displays.
In Toronto on Sunday, pro-mainland protesters shouted words like “traitor” and “loser” as well as crude epithets at a crowd of Hong Kong supporters.
One widely circulated video showed four flashy sports cars revving their engines with Chinese flags hoisted out their windows.
“Worst ‘Fast & Furious’ movie ever,” said one person on Twitter.
China’s tactics may ultimately work in Hong Kong, though so far protesters appear unbowed by threats of a crackdown.
And at home, where independent news sources like The New York Times are blocked, China’s propaganda push appears to be astonishingly effective.
Many internet users there reacted with outrage at the images last week of a Global Times "reporter" who was beaten by protesters at the airport.
Chinese social media is awash with the bloodied faces of police and shaky images of foreigners who state media have claimed — wrongly — are secret protest leaders.
China is using the same tactics abroad, but they don’t play well. 
These include comparing protesters to cockroaches and some cringe-inducing anti-democracy rapping.
“Who are you?/Who’s hiding behind the scenes?,” go the lyrics to a rap disseminated by the foreign arm of China Central Television, the state broadcaster.
“All I see is a beautiful dream turning to nightmare.”
China, since 2010 the world’s second largest economy after the United States, has been determined to build the nation’s soft power.
It envies the sort of unconscious sway that the United States enjoys simply through the pervasiveness of its economic and cultural heft.
President Trump isn’t going to win any trade wars because people in China love the “Transformers” movies or watch “Game of Thrones,” but American mass media and other cultural exports increase people’s familiarity and warmth with the country’s ideals.
China could use some of that sway about now.
Its credibility and legitimacy are under assault in Washington and elsewhere as China hawks rise in prominence.
Under Xi Jinping, China has come up with a wide range of initiatives to woo the world with its ideals and its wallet.
The “China Dream” envisions a peaceful world in which China plays a leading role.
Projects like the Belt and Road Initiative and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank are intended to show the benefits of China’s growing wealth.
“It is easy to dismiss such talk as ‘slogan diplomacy,’” wrote David Shambaugh of the George Washington University in 2015.
“But Beijing nonetheless attaches great importance to it.”
“We should increase China’s soft power, give a good Chinese narrative and better communicate China’s messages to the world,” Xi said not long after he became the president in 2013.
In his most important media policy speech in 2016, Xi instructed the top official media organizations to learn to tell compelling Chinese stories and build flagship foreign-language media outlets with global influences.
Xinhua, CCTV, Global Times and the rest have bolstered their presence in the United States and elsewhere and taken to the very same social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter that Beijing blocks at home.
Some accounts have amassed followers of over 10 million.
However, the Hong Kong protests have suggested that Beijing still knows hard power much better than soft. 
Instead of offering a competing narrative of a Hong Kong that could prosper under Chinese rule, it has instead made itself look like a bully.
Though troops haven’t crossed into Hong Kong, images distributed around the world by Chinese media outlets show heavily armed personnel preparing for urban conflict.
Beijing is forcing businesses, both global and local, to keep their Hong Kong employees in line or risk getting cut off from the vast Chinese market.
On Sunday, Beijing announced a new policy that will buff up the socialist city of Shenzhen just across the border so it can compete head-to-head with capitalist Hong Kong.
Some young mainlanders are so worked up with nationalistic fervor that they are using software to bypass Chinese censors to log into Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to blast and shame those who support Hong Kong.
While that may have some effect on Chinese students living abroad, it has otherwise had little impact.
Contrast China’s approach with Russia’s: Moscow-tied groups have used social media to tremendously disruptive effect in the United States, Europe and elsewhere.
But China needs to build a positive image for itself, not tear down the reputation of others.
That is why a recent CCTV tweet, comparing the Hong Kong protests to the Nazi rise in Germany in the 1930s, undermines Beijing more than it helps. 
The People’s Daily version compares the persecution of Jews, socialists and trade unionists with protesters storming Hong Kong’s main legislative building, blocking roads and attacking reporters, including an accusation that demonstrators “trampled the freedom of the press.”
Should it continue down the same rhetorical path, China risks eroding what little soft power it has.
As Mr. Nye once explained to Chinese university students, “the best propaganda is not propaganda,” because during the Information Age, “credibility is the scarcest resource.”

Tech Quisling

TWITTER HELPED CHINESE PROMOTE DISINFORMATION ON REPRESSION OF UIGHURS
By Ryan Gallagher

TWITTER HELPED TO promote Chinese government propaganda and disinformation about the country’s concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony, a review of the company’s advertising records reveals.
The social media company today announced a policy change that would bar such promotion following an inquiry from The Intercept and an earlier controversy over similar propaganda related to demonstrations in Hong Kong.
In East Turkestan, a western colony of China, the United Nations has estimated that 1 million ethnic minority Muslim Uighurs — including children, pregnant women, elderly people, and people with disabilities — have been detained under the pretext of fighting extremism. 

According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing human rights abuses in East Turkestan on a scale unseen in the country in decades.”

A review of Twitter advertisements from between June and August this year showed that the social media giant promoted more than 50 English-language tweets from the Global Times, a Chinese state media organization. 

The tweets deliberately obscure the truth about the situation in East Turkestan and attack critics of the country’s ruling Communist Party regime.
The Global Times paid Twitter to promote its tweets to a portion of the more than 300 million active users on the social media platform. 

The tweets appeared in users’ timelines, regardless of whether they followed the Global Times account. 

In July, amid global condemnation of the treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan, Twitter began promoting several Global Times tweets about the region.
One of the promoted tweets, from July 11, included a embedded video in which the Global Times’ editor-in-chief claimed that people who refer to the facilities in East Turkestan as “mass detention camps” have “smeared the vocational education and training centers established to help people avoid extremism.” 

He went on to attack “European politicians and media workers,” who he claimed had “tried to defend terrorist activities in East Turkestan,” adding, “their hands are in a way soiled with the blood of the Chinese people who died in violent attacks.”
Another promoted tweet, from July 4, included a video purportedly taken in East Turkestan, in which people are seen shopping in the street and eating in restaurants to a soundtrack of piano music. 

The video describes riots in 2009 that occurred in Urumqi, the capital of East Turkestan, and states that residents there “now live a happy and peaceful life” because they work together to fight terrorism and extremism. 

There is no mention in the video of the mass detention camps.
Other Global Times ads promoted by Twitter follow a similar theme, presenting the region as a happy and peaceful place where no human rights abuses have occurred. 

One promoted tweet includes video of an elderly woman receiving a package of medical supplies from government officials before breaking down in tears of joy. 

The tweet claims that poverty has been alleviated in the area because local residents have “access to high-quality medical care and affordable medicines.”
Patrick Poon, China researcher for Amnesty International, said he found Twitter’s promotion of the advertisements to be “appalling.”
“This is a very important, serious issue that Twitter needs to address,” said Poon. 

“Twitter is helping to promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising sets an alarming precedent.”
On Monday, Twitter said that it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in order to “protect healthy discourse and open conversation.”
The announcement was published three hours after The Intercept had contacted the company for comment on its promotion of the Global Times’ East Turkestan tweets. 

Earlier on Monday, TechCrunch highlighted Twitter’s promotion of tweets from a different state news entity, China Xinhua News, which portrayed largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong as violent.
Twitter’s promotion of Chinese government propaganda had appeared to contradict its own policies, which state that advertising on the platform must be “honest.” 

The advertisements also undermined statements from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that the company was working to combat “propaganda through bots and human coordination [and] misinformation campaigns.”
Like many Western technology companies, Twitter has a complex relationship with China. 

The social media platform is blocked in the country and cannot be accessed there without the use of censorship circumvention technologies, such as a virtual private network or proxy service. 

At the same time, however, Twitter generates a lot of advertising revenue in China and has a growing presence in the country.
In July, Twitter’s director in China reportedly stated that the company’s team there had tripled in the last year and was the company’s fastest growing division. 

In May, the social media giant held a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. 

Meanwhile, Twitter was criticized for purging Chinese dissidents’ accounts on the platform – which it claimed was a mistake – and has also been the subject of a protest campaign, launched by the Chinese artist Badiucao, after it refused to publish a “hashflag” symbol to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
Poon, the Amnesty researcher, said police in China have in recent months increasingly targeted human rights advocates in the country who are active on Twitter, forcing them to delete their accounts or remove specific posts that are critical of the government. 

These cases have been reported to Twitter, according to Poon, but the company has not taken any action.
“Twitter has allowed the Chinese government to advertise its propaganda while turning a deaf ear on those who have been persecuted by the Chinese regime,” Poon said. 

“We need to hear how Twitter can justify that.”

Chinese Disinformation

China’s North Korea Policy is All Smoke and Mirrors
By Van Jackson

As long as U.S. policy toward North Korea relies on coercive pressure, China will always be working at cross-purposes with it. 

The idea that North Korea is “China’s problem,” or that the path to denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula runs through China is a dangerous fallacy.
Social media is abuzz with news that China’s Ministry of Commerce announced it will suspend coal imports from North Korea as part of U.N. Security Council sanctions enforcement for the North’s most recent nuclear and ballistic missile tests in violation of prior Security Council resolutions. 

So China is finally standing arm-in-arm with the United States and international community to actually do something about North Korea. 

That’s great, right? 

Wrong.
China’s suspension of coal imports is smoke and mirrors; an act of geopolitical misdirection. 

The United States is being played, as it has in the numerous past instances when China supported sanctions resolutions against North Korea at the United Nations only to fail to implement them. 

China allows exporters crossing the border from North Korea into China to “self verify” compliance with sanctions.
This amounts to China saying one thing and doing another. 

Chinese businesses operating in North Korea will continue to do so, which alleviates a good deal of the pain the United States intended when it pushed for sanctions. 

In geopolitical terms, China is optimizing its regional position at the expense of the United States and its allies. 

China can claim to be a good citizen of the international community by supporting and enforcing sanctions. 

It garners goodwill from China-watchers in the United States who see North Korea as an issue where Chinese and U.S. interests converge. 

Yet it avoids taking actions that would put real pressure on Kim Jong Un’s regime. 

China, in other words, placates the United States while helping keep North Korea stable. 

Win-win, for both of China’s faces.
It is true that China loathes North Korea and vice versa­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­ — at the societal level, the leadership level, and the governmental level. 

As I discuss in the latest episode of the War on the Rocks podcast, the old adage that China and North Korea are “as close as lips and teeth” was always cleverer than it was true.
But China’s “emotions” toward North Korea don’t drive its policy. 

China has a long tradition of paying lip service toward cooperation with the United States and the international community while largely failing to apply any meaningful pressure on North Korea, and for good reason: It doesn’t want a nuclear-armed neighbor on its border to become a nuclear-armed enemy. 

We ignore China’s enduring strategic interests in North Korea at our peril.