On January 11, 2020, Taiwan held its 15th presidential and 10th Legislative Yuan election. Taiwanese citizens soundly re-elected Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, who won 57.1% of the vote over her opponents, Kuomintang (KMT) candidate Han Kuo-yu (who took 38.61%), and the People’s First Party candidate James Soong (4.26%). The DPP also maintained its majority in the Legislative Yuan, though with a slight decrease of a few seats. Voter turnout was high, with almost 74% of eligible voters casting ballots, up from 66% in 2016. According to Liberty Times Net, the number of Taiwanese voters living overseas who registered to vote on Saturday more than doubled from 2016.
In this blog post we provide an overview of some unexpected results from the 2020 election. We examine how the election was perceived on social media, within each candidate’s respective Facebook fan Pages and Groups. We wrap up this election coverage series by looking at areas that are important battlegrounds in Taiwan for ongoing disinformation dissemination, such as YouTube, and on the role the perceived threat of foreign interference played in this election. Lastly, we end by focusing on why collaboration to detect and mitigate influence operations is so important.
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Source: FSI | Cyber | Internet Observatory – Taiwan Election: Disinformation as a Partisan Issue