U.S.-Skepticism: Transnational Misinformation in the 2024 Presidential Election

• In Event: Local Ballots, Global Ties: U.S.-China-Taiwan Relations in the Presidential Vote

Abstract

Taiwan simultaneously has one of the highest freedom of speech indexes yet encounters the largest foreign interference due to its contentious history with China. Due to the large influx, Taiwan takes a public “crowdsourcing” approach using fact-checking ChatBots and AI to combat misinformation. Combining this public database with large-language models, we investigate misinformation across three platforms (Line, PTT, and Facebook) during the 2024 Taiwanese Presidential Elections. The dataset includes 41,291 labeled articles from Line, 911,000 posts from Facebook, and 2,200,000 posts and comments from PTT. We present three main findings. First, misinformation targets international relations with the United States (henceforth referred to as US-Skepticism) by economic, health policy, and the threat of war through Ukraine. Second, temporal and spatial evidence suggests proxy-based coordination, focused on the United States-based proxies. Third, misinformation targets Pan-Blue and R.O.C. identity groups through visuals, sharing many themes with conspiracy groups in Western Countries. Our study shows change trends in misinformation strategies based on visuals and fake news websites. It also highlights how crowd-sourcing and advances in large-language models can be used to identify misinformation in cross-platform workflows.

Authors

• Ho-Chun Herbert Chang, Dartmouth College

• Yu Fang, Barnard College

• Austin Horng-En Wang, University of Nevada, Las Vegas