A couple in Hualien linked to the Communist Youth League of China has been sentenced for posting bullsh&t on f-book about the coronavirus and its impact in Taiwan.
Guy
Grandma who does not know how to use UberEATS or FoodPanda and needs someone to order coffee for her yet states with absolute authority that 3 million people have died in the US of COVID -her classmate in the US said so in a LINE group- and that is because they have too much freedom, not like the great China where they just order people to vaccinate and that is why they are so great/have so much money/do not have that many dead…
Sigh.
She has a vacant apartment or two she needs to sell. Let her dream her “Chinese are coming!” dreams.
She could retire there if she likes. 
Guy
@Icon ? Who’s going to warn us about the next pandemic?
What are you guys talking about?! 
If stuff is so awesome in The Motherland, why doesn’t grandma give it a try as a place to retire?
Guy
Ah. Beats me.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Taiwan has taken note of the ongoing information war in this helpful detailed report:
Guy
Some real life implications to these campaigns:
Guy
Laowhy86 has posted an excellent new deep dive into one site of international disinformation from the PRC: the popular website Quora.
Guy
A nice piece by C Donovan Smith on what to expect as united front operators in the PRC and beyond ramp up a range of tactics (including new disinformation campaigns enabled by AI tools) before the upcoming national election.
Guy
A helpful report on how AI can be weaponized to cause trouble in Taiwan.
Guy
Who reads Quora?
It’s flooded with Chinese disinformation but it’s so obvious to that I don’t think anyone is using it as source
Biggest disinformation threat is that Taiwanese young people are obsessed with Chinese apps and that’s where they get a lot of their information from
Xiaohongshu is the most popular app for young people now. I keep hearing that because of this, it’s become cool to use simplified characters in Taiwan
Younger Taiwanese have a much more positive view of China than the generation before
This has been an obvious for a while and the government hasn’t shown much interest of dealing with this threat, so fuck it
Because of course they would.
Guy
At least it’ll make an interesting diversion from the locally-produced propaganda designed to divide and bamboozle. I suspect - if it even exists - Chinese propaganda will be quite easy to spot because it won’t tap into the American cultural consciousness at the right points.
In any case I don’t see how it’s inherently unreasonable for a country to try to project a positive public image of itself to other nations. Isn’t that what Hollywood is for?
…which is why people were buying salt like crazy because they saw people in China doing it. Sigh.
That and pro Putin, anti US and Japan, racist attacks against Chinese people abroad, antivax, lots of deep fake …
And for some strange reason, a lot of say worms in vegetables, unsafe fish to eat, yet at the same time a lot of weird home remedies, take this concoction for wherever magic lose weight or better digestion.
More disinformation is in the air, or on the web, as the election approaches. Here’s one crazy example: Klaus Bardenhagen, the long-term respected German journalist and commentator, has tweeted about an essay posted on Medium purporting to be by him—and it’s NOT by him. The phoney Bardenhagen essay calls for multicultural reasonableness—by activating more student flows from China to Taiwan, of course.
Here’s the fake essay:
Here is the legitimate complaint:
There’s a fake account impersonating me on Medium. I have nothing to do with this and the text “Geopolitical Rifts: Implications for Educational Mobility in the Taiwan Conundrum.”
Source: https://twitter.com/taiwanreporter/status/1734143439455859151
Guy
What’s more scary: How much more common it is going to become to fake things, or how society isn’t taking critical thinking and educating people (especially in school aged kids) how to think critically and decipher the fake.
Disinformation isn’t going away. I truly hope the world at large really takes it more serious in the future and we make serious education campaigns in schools starting at a very young age about such shenanigans.