This thesis examines disinformation in Taiwan during the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 local elections. It argues that the Chinese government employs disinformation as a form of...Show moreThis thesis examines disinformation in Taiwan during the 2020 presidential election and the 2022 local elections. It argues that the Chinese government employs disinformation as a form of psychological warfare. Therefore, the thesis seeks to answer: “How is disinformation that is disseminated through content farms in Taiwan as a form of psychological warfare developing since the Taiwanese presidential election in 2020?” Using the 'content farm' Mission as a case study, the thesis finds there is a consistent bias against the Democratic People's Party (DPP) and favourable towards the Kuomintang (KMT), but (1) a slight decrease in terms of ‘lure’ and (2) a slight rise in the positive attention given to the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The thesis thus highlights the continuous development of China's state-led disinformation campaigns and its implications for democratic elections worldwide.Show less
This thesis seeks to address the academic debate surrounding the intervention of state actors in foreign information spaces, as this discourse lacks a coherent framework, allowing researchers to...Show moreThis thesis seeks to address the academic debate surrounding the intervention of state actors in foreign information spaces, as this discourse lacks a coherent framework, allowing researchers to identify, compare, categorize and hence explain acts of Information Intervention (II). To initiate a solution for this problem, this thesis aimed to create a typology of common contemporary types of covert and semi-covert state IIs beyond the means subsumed by the soft power and public diplomacy concepts. This process was facilitated by Kluge’s (2000) framework for the empirically grounded construction of types and an empirical research process, which was based on the identification of sources by employing keyword configurations and the search engines Google/Google Scholar. Given the scope of this project and the public unavailability of certain II practices, it was not possible to cover all acts of II for the given typology. Rather, the goal of this thesis was to guide future research in the field of Information Interventions, by providing a notion of the dynamics in the given field, on which future research can be built on. Therefore, while the typology presented in this thesis cannot be determined as universal, it made the first step towards the establishment of such framework, allowing researchers to systematically analyze IIs.Show less
