Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Ezekiel2550/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0
THERE HAS BEEN a wave of disinformation and misinformation in Taiwan as of late about recent South Korean elections, alleging widespread fraud and vote-rigging. This has occurred, in many cases, through videos alleging ballot stuffing being shared online, as being translated from Korean into Chinese through automated translation tools.
Experts have highlighted that the sharing of such disinformation highlights how new automated online tools make it easier than ever for disinformation to cross from one language to another. Likewise, such disinformation spreads in Taiwan because of concerns about China being able to rig elections in Taiwan in some way–as well as the specter of Taiwan’s authoritarian past, in which vote buying and vote rigging occurred on a mass scale, as carried out by the KMT.
Indeed, Taiwanese media has also not fared much better. Mirror News was among the media outlets that claimed there was widespread voter fraud, as occurring through early voting and ballot stuffing. Likewise, Mirror News circulated claims by far-right actors that Chinese interference in South Korean elections previously resulted in President Lee Jae Myung’s election victory and that large numbers of Chinese non-Korean citizens voted in elections. When criticized by a Taiwanese journalist based in Seoul, Mirror News reportedly hit back with personal attacks and threatened to sue for defamation.
Recent South Korean elections were marred by shortages of ballot papers and other mismanagement. Far-right-wing political actors aligned with former president Yoon Suk Yeol, who attempted to overthrow the democratic institutions of government in a failed coup attempt in 2024, have drawn on the resultant controversy to amplify claims of voter fraud.
When it comes to Taiwan, however, this appears to be projecting Taiwan’s domestic political concerns onto South Korea. In particular, Taiwan’s concerns about Chinese interference in Taiwan’s elections are projected to China–perhaps, in some way, with parallels observed between South Korea and Taiwan because of a similar past of authoritarian governance. As such, what is disinformation and misinformation is amplified for a Taiwanese audience.
At the same time, such projection is ironic when it is the former authoritarian party in Taiwan, the KMT, that is aligned with pro-China actors, while the DPP–which emerged from the democracy movement–currently holds power. Yoon and his supporters, on the other hand, are often nostalgic for South Korea’s past era of authoritarian governance, but are perceived by pan-Greens in Taiwan as allies because of their anti-China stance, while the Korean political left–which has closer historical ties to democratization in South Korea–is read as compromised and pro-China. This, too, would be a means of projecting Taiwan’s domestic political outlook, in which the main polarities are between independence and unification, onto a very different context, as well as misreading South Korean society as having similar levels of Chinese influence as Taiwan.
This is not the first time that Taiwan has mistakenly projected its own history, as well as domestic political concerns, onto South Korea. In 2024, when Yoon’s abortive coup attempt occurred with claims of this being a necessary measure against internal threats, the DPP legislative caucus’s social media presence initially claimed in support of the coup attempt. The post was later deleted and replaced with a post condemning Taiwan’s own history of martial law and reminding that it was the KMT that kept Taiwan in a state of martial law for so many decades. From this scandal, one notes how Taiwan often has a lack of knowledge of the region, as well as how it projects its own history and present politics onto other places. It appears that this has not changed.