Rumors about vote fraud started swirling as the ballots in Taiwan’s closely watched presidential election were tallied on January 13.
Influencers like @FroggyChiu, with over 600,000 subscribers, released explainers on YouTube detailing how votes are tallied. I Photo: 邱威傑 X
Baseless claims emerged, alleging fabricated votes and miscounted ballots, which skewed the results. David Klepper and Huizhong Wu reported for the Associated Press (AP).
The response to disinformation was swift. Fact-checking groups debunked the rumors, while the Central Election Commission held a news conference to push back on claims of electoral discrepancies.
Influencers like @FroggyChiu, with over 600,000 subscribers, released explainers on YouTube detailing how votes are tallied.
Fact-checkers found that a video showing an election worker miscounting votes had been selectively edited. Voters at the polling station spotted the error, and election workers promptly corrected the count, according to MyGoPen, an independent Taiwanese fact-checking chatbot.
This was just one of dozens of videos that fact-checkers had to debunk. China, which claims Taiwan as its own, targeted the island with a stream of disinformation ahead of its election, research from DoubleThink Lab showed.
Much of it aimed to undermine faith in the incumbent Democratic Progressive Party, portraying it as belligerent and likely to start a war that Taiwan can’t win.
Other narratives targeted US support for Taiwan, arguing that America was an untrustworthy partner only interested in Taiwan’s semiconductor exports and would not support the island in a conflict with China, Didi Tang also reported for AP.
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