How to Fight Misinformation Without Censorship
Taiwan’s approach puts other countries to shame.
2024 is a pivotal year for the future of global democracy, as some two billion—about half the adult population of the globe—will have the chance to vote.
Even though more people will cast a ballot in 2024 than any previous year, the prevailing mood seems more fearful than celebratory. In the words of Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the combination of online influence campaigns and artificial intelligence has created a “perfect storm of disinformation” that threatens free and fair elections. This type of pessimism has led several open societies—including those of the European Union—to adopt illiberal measures such as banning foreign media outlets and cracking down on social media platforms. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has only heightened the sense of emergency.
Yet little attention has been paid to the fact that Team Democracy triumphed in one of 2024’s most decisive battles by staying true to its liberal values.
Taiwan is an instructive example of a young and vibrant democracy that views freedom of expression as a competitive advantage against authoritarian censorship and propaganda. In large part, Taiwan’s response to China’s aggressive disinformation campaigns has relied on a model where organic and civil society-led initiatives serve as first responders and heavy-handed government intervention is treated with great skepticism. Taiwan’s success provides a proof of concept that should prompt a change of course in European democracies, which increasingly believe that preserving their open societies requires sacrificing free expression.
Taiwan: A Model to Follow
Taiwan lives with constant Chinese saber-rattling, but without the security guarantees of NATO that many European democracies can rely on vis-à-vis Russia. Taiwan has been the largest target of foreign disinformation for the last ten years. Regardless, the January 2024 presidential election did not go the way that China wanted. The pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a national identity separate from China, won an unprecedented third presidential term as Lai Ching-te swept to power replacing the term-limited Tsai Ing-wen, also of the DPP.
Despite deep concerns about Chinese disinformation, the election was carried out with minimal efforts to censor the island state’s vibrant public square.
Taiwan’s civic tech initiatives have been instrumental in defending Taiwan’s democracy and depend to a large degree on freedom of information. “Civic tech” describes informal volunteer and nonprofit initiatives building digital technology for the public good, aiming to make government more open. In Taiwan, a web of organizations mutually reinforces each other’s work. By researching Chinese influence operations and disinformation campaigns using digital tools, think tanks like Doublethink Lab provide source attribution and analysis that helps Taiwanese society tweak and patch its digital resilience against Chinese disinformation campaigns. Another vital player on Taiwan’s civic-tech scene is Cofacts, a crowdsourced initiative that allows users to send suspected disinformation to its chatbot on Taiwan’s most popular messaging app, LINE, where queries are posted and fact-checked in real-time.
In the first ten days of January 2024, Cofacts received over 16,000 inquiries about a DPP candidate alleged to have a mistress and illegitimate child. This claim was quickly debunked by a fact-checking organization called MyGoPen. This episode reinforces recent research from Cornell University which found that crowdsourced sites like Cofacts often responded to queries more rapidly than professional fact-checking sites, which is crucial given the speed at which disinformation can spread online.
These bottom-up and organic civil society initiatives are not at odds with but rather encouraged and complemented by official government policy. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s Minister of Digital Affairs, has pioneered a nonrestrictive policy based on her philosophy of “Radical Transparency.” The Ministry of Digital Affairs’ website proclaims that it combatted the COVID-19 “infodemic with no takedowns.” With assistance from the civic-tech collective g0v, Taiwan’s government implemented a robust contract tracing and vaccination system, while civil society organizations debunked COVID-19 disinformation.
Taiwan’s deep skepticism of government censorship was also on display when the proposed Digital Intermediary Services Act was abandoned due to political and popular opposition. The draft law aimed to regulate platform accountability to counter illegal content and ensure transparency. Taiwanese cyberlaw specialists were particularly concerned that the law gave government authorities powers to file for “information restriction orders,” which—subject to court approval—would limit access to online information. In the context of Taiwan’s recent authoritarian past, many viewed the law as thinly veiled state censorship and an excessive restriction on free speech. In September 2022, the effort to pass DISA was suspended due to sustained public pressure. Moreover, when Taiwan’s communication commission took the unprecedented step of refusing to renew the license of a Taiwanese pro-China TV station, it was overturned in May 2023 by a Taipei court, which ruled that the commission had failed to provide adequate reasoning.
Disinformation in the EU
The European approach to disinformation in recent years compares unflatteringly to Taiwan. In 2022, the European Union banned the Kremlin-backed media outlets Russia Today and Sputnik and even obliged social media companies to prevent the sharing of content originating from these outlets. These events suggest legitimate concerns about disinformation from hostile states have incentivized democratic governments to adopt illiberal regulations, which weaken the very values they are supposed to protect. Absurdly, the EU’s foreign policy chief argued that by prohibiting 448 million citizens across 27 European democracies from accessing information, “we are not attacking the freedom of expression, we are just protecting the freedom of expression.”
Unlike in Taiwan, the separation of powers has not acted as a check on speech restrictions. In July 2022, a top EU court found that the ban on RT France did not violate free expression protections under EU law because the European Council enjoys “wide discretion” to counter Russian propaganda. Media law experts have criticized the court’s reasoning for failing to uphold fundamental principles of freedom of expression under European and international human rights law.
Then, in 2023, European Commissioner Thierry Breton attracted criticism from 28 rights groups for his communications to X, Meta, TikTok, and YouTube on the spread of disinformation and illegal content across their platforms following the escalation of hostilities in Gaza. The groups highlighted Breton’s conflation of illegal content with “disinformation” even though the latter is often protected speech under international human rights law.
Breton’s approach not only undermines free expression and access to information in the EU but also runs the risk of emboldening and providing cover for illiberal regimes. There was a steady rise in laws targeting “fake news” between 2011 and 2022, and many include imprisonment as a punishment. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently recorded its second-highest number of journalists behind bars since it began keeping track in 1992. It is, therefore, especially important for leading democracies to consider the global collateral consequences of their counter-disinformation methods. Some censorial fake news bills and laws, including Brazil’s, take inspiration from the European DSA.
In America, the First Amendment would—for now—prohibit the adoption of laws and measures equivalent to those enacted by the EU. But this has not stopped the federal government from trying to limit information about COVID-19, vaccines, and the 2020 presidential election that it deemed false or misleading. In September 2023, a federal court ruled that government officials—including at the White House, the CDC, and the FBI—had likely violated the First Amendment in “a coordinated campaign” to put pressure on social media platforms to remove constitutionally protected content (when argued before the Supreme Court in March, a majority of Justices seemed skeptical of the lower court decisions). Leaked emails appear to show that the Biden administration may also have pressured Amazon to remove or limit the visibility of books skeptical of vaccines. Even if such measures did pass constitutional muster, they are more likely to embolden the narrative of conspiracy theorists than to inspire trust and confidence amongst a polarized public.
It is much more promising to rely on transparency and openness to bolster resilience. In the words of Taiwanese behavioral scientist Tzu-wei Hung, “Free speech is not the cost but the key to counteract disinformation.” In this “Year of Democracy,” it is more tempting than ever to disregard Hung’s admonition as mere abstract principles. But Taiwan’s success shows that sometimes principles and practice go hand in hand. Accordingly, Taiwan should be viewed as a guiding light for how open societies can build civic resilience without sacrificing freedom of expression.
Jacob Mchangama is the CEO of the Future of Free Speech Project, Research Professor at Vanderbilt University, and a senior fellow with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
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The only way to combat disinformation is free speech absolutism... especially when your own government is the primary source of disinformation.
Finally, something about disinformation that doesn't just say "That's the wrong way to deal with it", but provides an idea of what's the right way. I hope that Taiwan really is as admirable as they seem.