What Taiwan can teach Canada about fighting foreign interference – National | 24CA News

On a Sunday morning in Taipei, just a few dozen Taiwanese civilians carrying journey espresso mugs and notebooks settled into their seats in a classroom for a day-long crash course on surviving a Chinese army invasion.

The lessons, run by a Taiwanese non-profit referred to as Kuma Academy, present classes in first support methods and evacuation planning. And there’s a brand new addition to the survival course curriculum: debunking disinformation.

“Before the troops arrive, first comes the disinformation to justify the invasion,” defined Puma Shen, co-founder of Kuma Academy.

Shen pointed to the conflict in Ukraine, the place the Kremlin falsely claims it’s rescuing Russian-speaking areas from Nazis. Like President Vladimir Putin’s baseless declare to Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping equally believes Taiwan, a thriving democracy, belongs to the Chinese Communist Party.

Kuma Academy’s college students are taught to count on comparable propaganda from Beijing forward of an invasion, together with disinformation designed to magnify China’s army energy to coerce the Taiwanese into submission.

“I think the best scenario for China is that we surrender or we sign a peace agreement,” Shen stated. “If people are willing to sign this agreement, they don’t need all the troops, they don’t need the People’s Liberation Army. For those reasons, I think they will use disinformation a lot.”

“Imagine, for the cost of one missile, they could pay for numerous online influencers to spread disinformation.”

While Canadians grapple with latest allegations of election interference by the Chinese authorities, the Taiwanese say they’ve been focused for years by disinformation and interference campaigns. And over time, they’ve developed novel methods to battle again.

“Here in Taiwan, we have been facing this issue, this situation for decades,” stated Freddy Lim, an impartial politician in Taiwan’s authorities.

Long earlier than he grew to become a champion for Asian democracy, Lim was finest recognized for sporting black “corpse” face paint and screaming right into a microphone because the frontmen for the Taiwanese heavy steel band Chthonic, typically known as “Asia’s Black Sabbath.”

In 2015, after 20 years of chart-topping albums and world excursions, together with a number of Canadian performances, Lim pivoted to politics.

“I found inspiration from Taiwan’s stories. But I found a lot of unfair things. So I felt like I wanted to not just use these stories as inspiration for music, but also try to fix things, to make things right,” Lim informed Global News about his determination to pursue a political profession.

Lim now makes use of his highly effective voice to sentence the Chinese authorities’s alleged intimidation and interference, which he stated runs deep in Taiwanese society. Lim accused Beijing of covertly supporting politicians, lecturers and group teams that need Taiwan to hitch the People’s Republic of China.

After talking out, Lim stated his personal marketing campaign was focused. “They tried to operate a lot of fake accounts to attack me,” he stated.

A few years in the past, his workforce discovered hundreds of nameless on-line accounts attacking Lim, all of which had been posting the identical messages concurrently. Lim despatched screenshots of the suspicious posts for additional investigation to an area group referred to as DoubleThink Lab.

The non-profit group is certainly one of a number of launched lately that’s devoted to debunking disinformation and investigating interference.

“Taiwan faces probably the most pressure and influence and exposure to Chinese disinformation,” stated Ai-Men Lau, a Canadian researcher with DoubleThink Lab primarily based in Taipei.

“It’s quite striking being here in Taiwan, seeing how Taiwanese civil society has really risen up to address the issue. It’s very much a whole-of-society approach,” she stated.

“In recent years there has been a real surge of awareness and interest and also of more innovative ways to combat disinformation here in Taiwan.”

Another progressive instance is an NGO referred to as MyGoPen, which created a disinformation chatbot the place customers can ship tales or posts they think are faux to a workforce of fact-checkers. MyGoPen was launched in 2015 by IT engineer Charles Yeh after he acquired on-line articles containing misinformation from his mother-in-law.

MyGoPen, which implies “Don’t fool me again” in Taiwanese, has grown to 400,000 subscribers.

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During Nancy Pelosi’s go to to Taiwan final yr, MyGoPen debunked a viral TikTok video that falsely claimed the previous U.S. House Speaker arrived with a fleet of fighter jets and warships within the South China Sea, threatening conflict with China.

“We receive a lot of content that appears to originate from mainland China,” Yeh stated. “We have observed an increasing trend of video content in particular.”

According to Ryan Ho-Kilpatrick, Chinese state propaganda and disinformation have a tendency to strengthen the same narrative. The Canadian-Hong Konger is the managing editor of the China Media Project, a analysis group in Taipei that research the Chinese media panorama.

“Obviously, it’s trying to portray China in a very positive light, as a stable, strong country, particularly in global affairs,” he stated. “And a part of that also involves preying upon the divisions and supposed chaos in other countries.”

Together, Taiwanese non-profit and nongovernmental organizations comparable to Kuma Academy, Doublethink Lab and MyGoPen are pushing again towards overseas interference and offering a playbook for different nations.

“All those operations that (the Chinese government) has been doing in Taiwan, now they operate the same thing in Canada,” Freddy Lim stated.

“Now is the time Taiwan can share our experiences and all we have learned from the last three decades, to make our democracies resilient together.”