Election interference is part of the Chinese communist regime’s strategy to win a ’smokeless war‘ by ’weakening the enemy from within,’ said one expert.
NEW YORK—The world at large isn’t prepared for the pervasive disinformation operations coming from adversaries such as China that aim at swinging votes, warned a research analyst.
If countries “calculate how much those people—[Russian President Vladimir] Putin, Xi Jinping—how much money and effort they are investing in those information operations, do the math, and then calculate how much money you’re putting into defense in a society,” the conclusion is “you are not prepared,” Wu Min-hsuan, CEO of Taiwan-based Doublethink Lab that focuses on digital defense, told The Epoch Times.
“Nobody’s prepared for that,” he said, describing the campaign as one of the Chinese regime’s “war tactics.”
Mr. Wu was one of the panelists at an event on Feb. 28 highlighting the threat of Chinese election meddling in a year when about half of the world’s population are set to cast a vote.
At the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office where the panel took place, Taipei’s ambassador, James K.J. Lee, said that Beijing has used Taiwan as a “test ground” for election interference in other democracies.
Ahead of Taiwan’s presidential election in January, China-linked malicious cyber attacks shot up more than two-fold, targeting government offices, police reports, and financial institutions, a U.S. cybersecurity firm found. Close to Election Day, Beijing-backed actors also spread fake news on social media to create the impression of food shortages to incite societal panic. A high volume of artificial intelligence-generated YouTube hosts also emerged on YouTube, making false claims in Mandarin and Cantonese about Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s personal life.
With its own elections drawing near, the United States should be on alert, the experts said.
Chinese state actors had tried to shape the outcome of certain races in the 2022 midterm elections, according to a December National Intelligence Council report. The same month, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of “elevated” risk of outside election interference in the 2024 presidential elections. Microsoft analysts had also raised similar concerns in a report released in November.
By Eva Fu
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