Abstract
From fact-checking chatbots to community-maintained misinformation databases, Taiwan has emerged as a critical case-study for citizen participation in politics online. Due to Taiwan’s geopolitical history with China, the recent 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election brought fierce levels of online engagement led by citizens from both sides of the strait. In this article, we study misinformation and digital participation on three platforms, namely Line, Twitter, and Taiwan’s Professional Technology Temple (PTT, Taiwan’s equivalent of Reddit). Each of these platforms presents a different facet of the elections. Results reveal that the greatest level of disagreement occurs in discussion about incumbent president Tsai. Chinese users demonstrate emergent coordination and selective discussion around topics like China, Hong Kong, and President Tsai, whereas topics like Covid-19 are avoided. We discover an imbalance of the political presence of Tsai on Twitter, which suggests partisan practices in disinformation regulation. The cases of Taiwan and China point toward a growing trend where regular citizens, enabled by new media, can both exacerbate and hinder the flow of misinformation. The study highlights an overlooked aspect of misinformation studies, beyond the veracity of information itself, that is the clash of ideologies, practices, and cultural history that matter to democratic ideals.
Highlights
Taiwan is one of the freest regions in Asia from a sociopolitical standpoint, and yet it receives some of the highest concentrations of online disinformation, due to its geo-political history with China (Monaco, 2017)
Recent studies have linked this with the growing populism in the West, a political trend observed in Taiwan
The levels of Line are more consistent throughout and increases after January 20th. This is likely due to the combination of two reasons. It is against the law in Taiwan to post about the elections on the day ballots are counted
Summary
Taiwan is one of the freest regions in Asia from a sociopolitical standpoint, and yet it receives some of the highest concentrations of online disinformation, due to its geo-political history with China (Monaco, 2017). The recent 2020 Taiwanese Presidential Election has presented a fierce battleground that re-examines democratic values. Citizen participation in support of and detrimental to democratic ideals is not a new phenomenon. In Dark Participation, Quandt contrasted the utopian vision and dark realities of citizen news making (Quandt, 2018). In contrast, describes negative contributions to news production. This includes “trolling,” piggybacking off untruths, and the dissemination of disinformation. Recent studies have linked this with the growing populism in the West, a political trend observed in Taiwan.
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