Like in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, where a quarter of the island's 23 million residents use it.
People post videos of themselves buying trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters, and pranking their roommates. Influencers perform choreographed dance moves and debate whether sticky dumplings from northern or southern Taiwan are better.
Taiwanese users of TikTok, owned by Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are also being offered pro-China content of the kind that the U.S. Congress cited as a reason for passing legislation that could lead to a ban on TikTok in the United States.
One recent example is when Republican Congressman Rob Whitman of Virginia announced that if he votes for the ruling party in Taiwan's January general election, he will use U.S. weapons to support the island's democracy in a possible conflict with China. This video raises concerns that there will be a large influx of people. as part of the territory. The video was flagged as fake by a fact-checking agency and removed by TikTok.
Taiwan, about 130 miles off the coast of China, is particularly exposed to the possibility that TikTok could be used as a source of geopolitical propaganda. Taiwan has been exposed to digital disinformation for decades, much of it traced back to China.
But unlike Congress, Taiwan's government is not considering legislation that could lead to a ban on TikTok.
Taiwanese officials say the debate over TikTok is just one battle in the country's already long-standing war against disinformation and foreign influence.
Taiwan is building defenses that include a deep network of independent fact-checking organizations. There is a government department dedicated to digital issues.
And Taiwan has long recognized TikTok as a national security threat. In 2019, the government issued an executive order banning Douyin and Xiaohongshu, also owned by ByteDance, along with two other Chinese apps that play short videos, from official devices.
The political party that has ruled Taiwan for the past eight years, set to rule for another four years with Lai Ching-de's inauguration as president on Monday, has not used the app even during elections due to concerns about its data. No collection.
Here in Taiwan, lawmakers say we can't afford to think of TikTok as the only threat. Disinformation reaches Taiwanese internet users on all kinds of social media, from chat rooms to short videos.
Puma Shen, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, said, “If we say we are targeting China, people will ask why we don't also talk about other countries.'' “That's why our strategy needs to be to regulate all social media platforms, not just TikTok,” said Shen, former director of the Taipei disinformation research group Doublethink Lab.
Taiwan has a deeply rooted culture of political freedom of speech, and took its first steps toward democracy only about 30 years ago. Discussions are active on various social media platforms, including Taiwanese online forums such as Dcard and Professional Technology Temple.
But the most widely used platforms have foreign owners, and TikTok is not the only one. YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, which are run by US-listed companies, are even more popular in Taiwan than his TikTok. LINE, a messaging app owned by the Japanese subsidiary of South Korean internet giant Naver, is also commonly used in the country as a news source and payment method.
Taiwan's legislature has announced measures to broadly address internet threats such as scams, scams and cybercrime, to apply to all existing social media platforms, including TikTok, as well as any that may replace them in the future. We are considering.
One proposal introduced this month would require influential platforms that advertise online, including virtually all, to register a legal representative in Taiwan. Officials said these restrictions were not aimed at TikTok.
“While we currently consider TikTok to be a product that endangers national information security, this designation does not specifically target TikTok,” said Ministry of Digital Spokesperson Li Huai-jian. . The ministry applied similar classification to other Chinese short video apps, such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu, which have large audiences in China.
In March, executives from TikTok's Singapore office met with Taiwanese government and political officials. A TikTok spokesperson said the company has consulted with stakeholders to “solicit feedback on our platform and detail the various ways we keep our community safe.” He added that the app's data collection policies are in line with industry practices.
When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on hand to make sure the conversations on TikTok were factual.
TikTok has contacted Taiwan's Election Commission, National Police Agency, and Ministry of the Interior to issue warnings about potentially illegal content. TikTok announced it had removed about 1,500 videos and shut down a network of 21 accounts that were amplifying pro-China rhetoric for violating its misinformation and election integrity policies. We also worked with local fact-checking groups to tag election-related videos with misinformation resources.
But the day after the election, the website of the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, a non-governmental organization that works with tech companies like Google and Meta, was crowded with thousands of visitors, said Eve Chiu, the center's chief executive. Ta.
Qiu said many people had doubts about the election results after watching videos on TikTok and YouTube showing volunteer voters miscounting votes. Some of these videos were real, she added. The problem was that viewers believed the scale of the error was much larger than it actually was.
Taiwan's ruling party did not use TikTok for election campaigning, but the opposition, which is seen as less hostile by the Chinese government, did.
However, this may have made it easier for pro-China opinions to spread on TikTok, and Taiwan's approach to regulating social media may not be strong enough to counter the persistent threat of foreign influence online. Some people are concerned that this may not be the case.
“In the United States, the target is very clear, this one platform, but in Taiwan, you don't know where the enemy is,” Chiu said. “This is not just a cross-Channel issue, it's a domestic issue as well.”