Spike in misinformation online during China's military drills this month

HONG KONG • Taiwan saw a spike in online misinformation as China hosted huge military drills this month, much of it aimed at undermining the self-ruled island's morale and pushing Beijing's narrative.

China reacted to a visit to Taipei by United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi by sending warships, missiles and jets into the waters and skies around Taiwan.

At the same time, pro-China posts flooded social media with false and misleading claims about Mrs Pelosi and her Taiwanese hosts. Many were posts sharing old military footage alongside claims that they showed real military drills, mainly by China.

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province to be reunified, by force if necessary. Taiwan says it will defend its freedoms and democracy.

As tensions in the Taiwan Strait rose to their highest level in years, fact-checkers played a round-the-clock game of whack-a-mole.

Mr Charles Yeh, chief editor of Taiwanese fact-check site MyGoPen, said most of the misinformation his team had observed was anti-American and promoted the idea that the island should "surrender" to China.

"In addition to military exercises in the physical world, China has also launched offensives in the online world - (with) cyber attacks and misinformation," he said.

As millions watched a Weibo live stream of a flight-tracking site showing Mrs Pelosi's flight landing in Taiwan, claims emerged that her plane was forced to turn back to the US after she got heatstroke.

Some Chinese users levelled insults at her, many of these misogynistic, including branding her an "unhinged hag" and questioning why she was allowed to avoid Taiwan's strict Covid-19 quarantine measures.

Taiwan is one of Asia's most progressive democracies and enjoys a much freer media environment than the Chinese mainland, where a "Great Firewall" and state censorship keep watch.

But this means misinformation often spreads easily, both on major social media sites and more local messaging boards such as PTT.

Taiwanese defence officials said they had identified some 270 "false" online claims in recent weeks.

In other widely viewed posts, a warning message purportedly issued by China's state-run Xinhua news agency erroneously claimed China would "resume sovereignty" over Taiwan on Aug 15.

The message - viewed over 356,000 times on Chinese-owned app TikTok - said Taiwan's army would be disbanded and that an opposition party politician would be installed as governor.

Agence France-Presse's fact-check team found no evidence that Xinhua had run such a report.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE