Phuong-Thao Bui
The Asian Fact-Checking Forum, hosted by the Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC), made its annual return to Taipei on May 7th 2025, as our speakers and guests discussed the unprecedented challenges facing fact-checkers and information activists in the region, from deliberately manipulative state-actors to profit-driven tech giants. This year’s forum was attended by members of the Asia-Oceania Alliance Steering Committee who came to Taiwan, including fact-checking representatives from East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, North Asia, and Oceania. Topics discussed ranged from Taiwan-specific problems to shared challenges in the Asia-Pacific region, and our speakers came from diverse fields such as media literacy activists, educators, researchers and journalists.
“Influencer” is that one word which loomed large during the first section, which focused on Taiwan and its efforts against misinformation. Many of the speakers noted the entanglement of the attention economy and the blossoming of misinformation. Misleading stories are now a profitable commodity, so the active players do not always spread fake news for the sake of their ideology, but out of economic incentives. Disinformation pays, by those with political goals and also by the attention that it generates because the public loves sensational stories. It does not help that more people than ever are actually listening to those influencers as the primary source when it comes to political issues.
As more actors and motivations enter the picture, it would be more difficult, if not impossible, to call out Foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) on the surface.
The rise of political influencers
Tim Niven, Research Head of Double Think Lab recalled an incident in early 2023, when a pro-China former legislator in Taiwan posted on his Facebook an (obviously unfounded) story that “Biden has a plan for the destruction of Taiwan,” citing “a famous radio host based out of Washington, D.C.” Local CCP proxy media was eager to report on it, prompting Taiwan’s foreign ministry to release a statement on it. China was also quick to capitalize on the news by responding to it in their press briefing.
The team at Double Think Lab managed to trace the source back to a Russian state-media journalist on Twitter, while a separate verification of TFC found that the “D.C.-based journalist” had his name on the website of Sputnik, a Russian state-owned news agency, where he was listed as a Radio Sputnik journalist based in Washington DC. His Twitter account is also notable for a series of bizarre information disguised as “breaking news” or “leak.” Despite all the effort to debunk that fabricated story, it understably blew up on the internet and local media. The local media in Taiwan was more eager to report on that story than those of international media, many of which had journalists based in D.C. and they found no evidence for such information. Efforts to debunk, unfortunately, sometimes turned into amplification, and prolonged the circulation of disinformation. Mr. Naven said that weeks after the original fake story was published, they still had to deal with variance of it.
Local proxies in action
The rise of political influencers complicates the network of disinformation production, and hides behind it the entanglement of foreign and domestic players. Both researchers from the Double Think Lab and Asia Fact Check Lab spoke of a heavier reliance on domestic actors in recent years by allegedly foreign actors manipulating the Taiwanese and elsewhere’s information landscape. As a result, researchers are seeing less and less China in their observations, at least not in a direct way. And this use of proxies could only intensify in coming years.
Asia Fact Check Lab, the fact check group under Radio Free Asia, led a 11-part investigative series on Chinese propaganda efforts in Taiwan. The focus of the report is what they term as the “Fujian Network”, because the team discovered a large volume of content produced and distributed by media groups based in Fujian, the Chinese province facing Taiwan across the strait, and also which shares many cultural and linguistic traits with the Taiwanese.
According to Chih-Te Li, Director at Asia Fact Check Lab, the media produced from Fujian tend to be even more aggressive than that of Beijing’s central media such as CCTV. Outlets within the Fujian Network have expanded aggressively into new media and social platforms in recent years, infiltrating all forms of media, from printed, broadcasting to online and social media. He believes this is a coordinated effort.
In one incident, 40 days before the 2024 presidential election in Taiwan, a little known media outlet called Finger Media published an opinion poll claiming that the opposition KMT candidate has overtaken the ruling DPP’s candidate. Prosecutors later revealed that the head of Finger Media had accepted funding and directives from China to produce disinformation, and the mastermind behind the operation was an executive at a Fujian-based media company. Li noted that the case was currently under appeal and not yet reached a final verdict.
Such a mechanism is also highlighted in the case of Chang Meng-tsung, a Taiwanese social media commentator who in 2022 posted a short video encouraging the public to vote to recall Freddy Lim, a pro-independence legislator. Taiwanese prosecutors alleged that Chang and his wife had acted under instruction from China, using scripts provided by Chinese authority through Fujian Media Group.
The report by the Asia Fact Check Lab argues that this new mechanism is “rooted in not only political but commercial dynamic and cross-strait relationships.” According to Mr. Li, it typically takes two forms: paid coverage for the soft news including positive portrayal of China tourism, culture, economic development and national power. This sort of story often features in pro-China or the so-called pan-Blue media. They benefit from advertising revenues for business ties with China. The second type is what Mr. Li calls selective silence in some pro-independence or the so-called pan-Green outlets where negative coverage of China is downplayed or ignored at mass. In return, these media may receive access to Chinese entertainment content’s distribution rights, which opens the door to the lucrative market.
Chinese media would, in turn, cite commentaries by Taiwanese influencers in their reports. In early March when TSMC announced a new investment in the US, critics said the Taiwanese government had itself “hijacked by the Trump administration.” And from March 4th to 10, the lab found 99 short videos on eight TikTok accounts linked to Fujian-based media. After removing videos which were unclear on source, the rest of 47 came from China Times media group in Taiwan, 9 from TVBS in Taiwan, 7 from Taiwanese commentators personal channels and 20 from the Chinese state media. It means 76% of the videos were made using Taiwanese voices to push for political messages.
It was not only individual influencers who are participating in the propaganda industry but also media companies from Taiwan. One such case is CTI. CTI was previously a cable news station, but had to go online after losing its broadcasting license in 2020, following repeated instances of journalistic misconduct, including the airing of inaccurate reports and failure to heed regulatory warnings to reform. Mr. Li noted that the shift to cyberspace had seen a more radical approach in CTI’s content, while the authorities in Taiwan have no regulation over internet speech. Researchers identified at least one commentary program produced by Fujian-based media outlets in collaboration with CTI.
Niven admitted that they can not always know who to attribute the fake news all over the internet to, due to the multiple layering of private actors. Third parties’ offline relationships are inscrutable to open source researchers. “It could be the CPP, could be TPP,” said Mr. Niven. “You’ll have a PR company paying influencers who will be reading the same script to produce the narrative.” In most cases, it is impossible for researchers and fact-checkers to obtain evidence of such relationships.
The economic incentives of fake news was also noted in the speech of both Masato Kajimoto, Journalism Professor, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) and Lutz Güllner, the Head of the European Union Office in Taipei.
The economy of attention would not save us
It does not help that fact-checkers are way less resourced than state actors that have an interest in cultivating disinformation and influencers that thrive on bombastic content. But it should not be surprising though, given influencers are now the core engine of the business model employed by many social media platforms. That’s a business model that favors clickbaits and sensational content.
“That’s the reason money is going to that side and not to the qualiti(fied) information”, said Kajimoto of HKU, adding that qualified information is somewhat a void now in many countries, especially when it comes to non-English media. At the same time, the cost of producing disinformation is now lower than ever with generative AI. There is no way for fact-checkers to debunk such a volume of content.
Money is not the only resource being withdrawn from fact-checkers. Many speakers also raised concern of access to platforms being cut off. Given that Meta in January decided to stop fact-checking in their platforms, it should give us a clearer picture about Meta’s priorities.
Niven said his team currently do not have API data access to research on Threads which is the rising platform in many places, particularly Taiwan; thus they had to find their way around to work with it. There is also concern about TikTok, as the platform’s users are the “persuadable middle”, as put by Niven. And there is also a correlation: if you are using TikTok, then you are more likely to oppose Taiwan’s defense.
“I believe social media are bad faith actors. At the very least, they are retreating from information integrity efforts, cutting off data access to organizations that need them to hold them accountable and to fight back to defend themselves in the relatively inscrutable influencer economy,” said Niven.
The attacks have come from all sides though. Asia Fact Check Lab is already shut down due to the suspension of funding from the USAID, part of a broader cut by the US government that sent chaos to RFA, and the global civil society landscape.
“This could be our last report,” noted Mr. Li in the seminar. In most parts of Asia, freedom of press is under threat. Professor Kajimoto noted that in Hong Kong where he’s based, despite years of journalist resistance, Hong Kong eventually entered the “red zone” of press freedom, according to the latest Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index.
Influencers can also be helpful in amplifying the work of fact checkers, a.k.a to help debunking the misinformation, but only when it’s convenient. Hui-An Ho, Head of International Affairs, Taiwan FactCheck Center (TFC) said that TFC’s works are often cherrypicked and sprayed in favor of politicians and influencers’ narrative, all in Taiwan’s already polarized political landscape. This weaponization of factchecking eventually landed fact-checkers in attacks and criticism.
All the attacks happen in a brand new information landscape where content can be now produced by generative AI, and it is fast and cheap and easy. These days fake news proliferates fast, travels faster, but good fact-checking (and journalism) takes time. Ho admitted that sometimes it takes a while for her team to verify some story, but when they’re confident enough to publish their work, the public have already moved on to newer stories. “I am not sure if our fact-checks are really effective to tackle this kind of issue,” said Ho.
Despite all the polarization and disinformation overload, compared to Hong Kong and many places in Asia, Taiwan fares better when it comes to press freedom. It is essential, if not sufficient, to pave the way for quality information to thrive.
Phuong-Thao Bui is a former journalist working in Vietnam and currently a master’s student at National Chengchi University (Taiwan). Thao is interested in data science, politics, gender issues and how the media is shaped by those all forces.