"Anyone who has to deal with corrupt officials is against official corruption." Such was the title of a text reposted to a high school alumni WeChat group by a user we shall call Xu. It consisted of a conversation between Yu Wentai, founder of the Northern Zhou Dynasty, and Su Chuo, one of his ministers. Another group member said that the post was a fake that had been going around online for almost a decade. Xu got a bit huffy at this, and typed back: "Isn't there anything worthwhile in there then? I was trying to inspire people!" "To each his own" came back the dour reply. So it was that, at the onset of 2021, two friends who had known each other since their schooldays had a falling out, and all over a history-related dialogue that never happened. Fake news is even more toxic than fake history. Last April, a young man from mainland China studying at a state college in Taiwan - we'll call him Liang - suddenly got a call from his parents. They had seen something on WeChat saying that Taipei was under lockdown, and were worried about Liang's safety. They wanted him to take a break from his studies and come home. This was news to Liang, who was going about his normal daily life in Taipei. He wanted to know where they heard it from, and there was a heated debate over the phone. He tracked down the source of the report to a People's Daily article, which read "Exercise Banned for 21 Days in New Taipei." This had been changed to "locked down" in the version his parents saw. Online rumors flourish under censorship In March 2020, around the time that the coronavirus pandemic had started to stabilize in China, even as it spread around the world, posts started appearing on certain official WeChat accounts with headlines like "Pandemic Spread to X Country, Shops Closed, Chinese Nationals Stranded.” The wording of the stories was basically the same, with only the country name changed. These stories were eventually traced to a fake news outlet in Fuqing city, in the southeastern province of Fujian, articles that claimed that the rest of the world was in chaos due to the pandemic. Just one month later, Kazakhstan's foreign affairs ministry summoned Chinese Ambassador Zhang Xiao to protest an article titled "Why Kazakhstan Wants to be Part of China Again." Even as this diplomatic blunder unfolded, official WeChat accounts posted similar articles about how Mongolia and Vietnam were also keen to become part of China. Even though those articles were soon deleted, a fresh batch appeared on official accounts and websites like Sohu claiming that the women from various countries were keen to marry Chinese nationals and relocate to China. In February 2020, a journalist called Wei Xing set up an international news article fact-checking website – Fact Check China – with its own WeChat account. It later expanded into an online collaboration involving journalists, media professors and their students. "In the world of Chinese internet, which uses simplified characters [brought in by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after 1949], there is a lot of shoddy international news," Wei explains. "A lot of the errors are generated by poor translations; you can tell after just a few lines that the meanings have been lost or distorted in translation." "But the [writers of fake news also] take advantage of the fact that not many people have foreign language skills, or their ability to read in a foreign language is very limited, and they prefer to read news in their own language," he says. "Then of course there's the Great Firewall," Wei adds, in a reference to the system of blocks, filters and human censorship that limits what Chinese internet users can do or see online. These shoddy news items are often comical and use clunky language. Some are even written by machines in a bid to generate huge quantities of online content. Like the stories mentioned above, their creators produce a story template, make superficial changes, and disseminate them to social media users on platforms they control. Wei says there are other types of foreign news imitators that are slightly more sophisticated, including translated content and screenshots from an overseas source. "That stuff is usually partly true, but often parts of it have been exaggerated, or made to look more one-sided," he explains. "It takes a bit more effort to produce this kind of content, so the people who make it could even have some kind of professional media training," Wei adds. "This makes it even more confusing to read." For example, a Jan. 10, 2020 WeChat post about the 1987 Black Dragon wildfire favorably compared China's response with Australia's attempt to control the bushfires that ravaged huge swathes of the country in 2019 and 2020. The post went viral on Chinese internet, and was even reposted by the People's Daily official account. Fang Kecheng, assistant journalism professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), says the post played on nationalistic tropes like the heroism shown by Chinese firefighters, and distorted a massive disaster that should have prompted sober reflection. "The high-flown emotional style of the article might appeal to patriots, but even people who loathe the CCP might not be aware of the factual errors it contained," Fang says. In another example, posts containing conspiracy theories about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election circulated on WeChat, hinting at shady dealings in the election process and predicting the re-election of then-President Donald Trump. "A lot of people are confused about the way the separation of powers, democracy and the rule of law work in the United States, and they have this mythical belief that the power of the president is somehow paramount," says one public intellectual who declined to be named for fear of retaliation. "They see no reason why there shouldn't be an armed struggle, which is incredible really." According to Wei, these posts had a different source from the pro-China propaganda about the wildfires. "Many of them came from Trump and his team, and had already gone viral in anglophone social media before being translated," Wei says. "Most of them were second-hand, and weren't produced by a Chinese content farm." WeChat, but do we believe? The Twitter-like social media platform Weibo was started in 2009. The WeChat era didn't start until 2012, with the launch of Tencent's messaging app. Similar apps soon followed from other platforms including Toutiao and Baijia. As the number of users continues to skyrocket, there is now a common joke about the platform: "WeChat - we chat, but do we believe any of it?" A 2018 study published in the journal Science by three researchers at MIT found that people commonly have feelings of surprise, fear and disgust when consuming fake news. The study found that while real news elicits feelings of sadness, joy, expectation and trust, fake news does so but more dramatically, making it more likely to be shared and to reach more people than the truth. According to Wei, fake news first started to appear on WeChat about five or six years ago. "The main trigger for this was the 2016 presidential election," Wei states. "Many of Trump’s statements and the practices of his campaign team subverted a lot of traditional ways of thinking in the media. The era of alternative facts was here." At the same time, there was a large uptick in the use of paid-for and sponsored content on social media platforms. "A hot post with more than 100,000 views could yield a good income, with advertising revenue into the thousands of dollars," he adds. "The reason we tend to fact-check international news items that don't involve China is to mitigate our own risk," Wei says. "We don't have the resources to fact-check domestic news, and there are large risks associated with doing so.". He also thinks that there is more fake international news circulating in China. "The people who make fake news in China are [mitigating their risk], much in the same way that we are," Wei states. "If you fabricate a piece of domestic news, it is easier to check, and it is also very likely to be spotted by the authorities." "But if you write fake international news, you can generate huge [online] traffic flow and it's safer and easier to do it that way." English draws a distinction between misinformation, which is the result of unintentional error, and disinformation, which indicates a deliberate attempt to confuse and mislead. Wei says that the majority of fake news stories he has seen circulating in China are in the latter category, with an estimated ratio of 3:7. Why are these stories so prevalent? "One reason is that social media apps want to deliver content that is as sticky as possible, that will attract and keep visitors," Wei declares. "The platform doesn't care much if the content is true or false, as long as it can drive traffic. So there's not much motivation to clean it up." "Meanwhile, the majority of fake international news comes from the U.S.," Wei says. "Most of it makes a lot of the chaos in the U.S. and other Western countries, contrasting it with the relative stability and security that has been achieved in China." "And it must be said that U.S. government policy regarding the pandemic could be said to have failed in many areas," Wei adds. "What's more, there's a definite demand from the authorities for the sort of content that sends a message about China's inevitable rise and the inevitable decline of the U.S. and other Western countries," Wei says. "This means that it is very safe to produce it, and that it hardly ever gets targeted in clean-up actions. And of course there's always the fact that human beings love a good conspiracy theory," he says. "This is the same anywhere in the world." In 2013, the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate issued a judicial interpretation warning that anyone fabricating false information, especially if they knew it to be false, could face criminal charges of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble." But there's a popular saying in China that the only “rumors” that get refuted are the ones made up by the people, not the ones made up by the government. All of the power to define what constitutes a rumor and who is judged to be spreading them lies with the government. And the charge of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble" has become a convenient charge to pin on critics of the government. And the government does little to clean up fake news that reflects its own interests. On Nov. 17, 2020, an F16 fighter plane belonging to the Taiwanese military lost contact shortly after take-off. A large number of posts appeared on WeChat and Weibo claiming that the pilot had landed at Xiamen Airport, and defected to China. Zhu Fenglian, a spokesperson for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, merely responded that China has "an open internet," and declined to refute the story. A roaring export trade in fake WeChat posts According to Wei, the accumulation of fake news is harmful both to individuals and to organizations. "If all of your information is tainted, you are going to make poor judgements eventually," he states. "It's really not too much of a stretch to say that it will affect your entire world view," he says. "And if this is the case for a whole generation of young people, that is very worrying." According to Wei, it's not the job of the truth to make things look pretty. And even attempts to smear a person or a country must involve some understanding of their target. "If you don't understand your opponent's true strengths, then you could get roundly defeated when it comes to a fight," he says. WeChat's poison spreads overseas. In April 2018, a research report by the Tow Digital Journalism Center at Columbia University found that WeChat accounts had a tendency to plagiarize news copy, patching stories together from news websites and fake political news items on social media platforms, to the extent that Chinese users overseas were also being misled. On Sept. 4, 2018, a typhoon hit Kansai in Japan, leaving the airport closed and a large number of passengers stranded. Soon after, a story spread on WeChat saying that the Chinese Consulate in Osaka had organized a bus to assist more than 1,000 Chinese passengers to evacuate the airport. The story was that Taiwanese passengers "would be allowed on the bus as long as they feel that they are Chinese." When the news reached Taiwan, it caused a public outcry against Taiwan's own representative office in Japan, which was deemed not to be doing its job properly. Su Qicheng, the former director of the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office in Osaka, committed suicide on Sept. 14. His death was believed to be linked to the bus incident. A later report from the Taiwan FactCheck Center revealed that neither the claim that a bus had been dispatched by the Chinese embassy, nor the claim that Taiwanese could board if they felt Chinese was true. A media editor from China, who gives only the surname Ye, says he feels heavy-hearted thinking of the bus incident because the article in question was written by a former student of his. "A former student of mine was hired by a government department to do WeChat work," Ye says. "His job was mostly to write puff pieces about the so-called can-do spirit. But this time his article really blew up, and he got a promotion for it." "I didn't want to see him again after that, knowing that someone died because of this article," Ye admits. "I was shocked." Assistant criminology professor Shen Po-yang of Taiwan's National Taipei University has studied the incident in detail. "The fake news story first appeared on Weibo, and was picked up by a large number of other media outlets within about half an hour," Shen explains. "It seems that the Communist Youth League may have been behind it. The Observers news website made a news story out of the claim that Taiwanese could get on the bus if they felt Chinese." "A day later, a Chinese photojournalist posted on PTT (a popular forum website in Taiwan), which made this story go viral in Taiwan. Opposition celebrities started attacking the Green Camp, sending the Green Camp into counterattack mode before the story had been checked," Shen says, in a reference to the "green" parties allied with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). According to Shen, there are four prongs to China's disinformation wars: government departments and state media in foreign propaganda mode; proactive and spontaneous comments and responses from "little pink" nationalistic youth; the content farms, which churn out vast quantities of fake news and spam; and a ”cooperative model” in which trusted organizations and officials, like village heads, are enlisted to carry the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s message. According to Shen, information warfare is a part of mixed warfare, which is intertwined with diplomatic warfare, economic warfare, trade war, and financial warfare. "In recent years, China’s information war against Taiwan has continued to intensify. It has been upgraded from a model that generates fake news and tries to spread it around, to a model that creates fake news and invests in trusted companies which then disseminate it," Shen says. "These operations tend to be at their most effective during times of trouble and upheaval, like earthquakes or the pandemic," he says. Who should shoot down the rumors? The sheer quantity of fake information online is overwhelming. Fact-checking is now a full-time profession in its own right, rather than a single role within the media industry. Fact-checking agencies have proliferated around the world. In September 2015, the International Fact-Checking Network was set up to formulate principles, procedures and standards for fact-checking, and to provide training and certification for verification agencies around the world. The institution currently has around 100 member agencies. But not one of them is in China. Wei, who is effectively a fact-checker, tries to avoid describing what he is doing as ”shooting down rumors.” "Both the idea of shooting down rumors in Chinese, and the concept of fake news in English have been politicized," Wei says. So who should bear responsibility: the media or the government? "The government doesn't have much credibility," Wei says. "But it isn't only China's problem." "In the United States and in Europe, it isn't considered acceptable for the government to get directly involved in the media," Wei states. "Fact-checking may be challenging, but social media platforms need to take it more seriously," he adds. Internationally, social media platforms, including Facebook and Twitter, have collaborated with fact-checking agencies. In China, WeChat launched a “rumor-busting assistant"' in June 2017, but Wei says its capabilities are limited. "There are only three kinds of partners that help them carry out fact-checking: government departments, medical institutions, and universities," Wei says. "They take no account of any other institutions." "Meanwhile, WeChat's processes for the deletion of content believed to contain rumors are opaque, with vague, one-line explanations offered that usually reference a complaint from another user or that the post violated laws and regulations," Wei says. "Sometimes, fact-checking posts are deleted, while the original posts with their questionable information are left in place," he says. The post comparing Australia's 2019-2020 fight against its massive bushfires to the 1987 Black Dragon fires is still online, while a post taking issue with it penned by Fang Kecheng has long since been deleted. Wei's Fact Check China came across an article that claimed Julian Assange had been formally pardoned by [outgoing U.S. President] Donald Trump in exchange for incriminating evidence against former President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. "I tried to edit it, but I couldn't get it to send," Wei says, in a reference to likely automated censorship. "It wouldn't send until I had changed the names of pretty much everyone in the article from Chinese to English." "If there isn't much choice, I think the most suitable organizations to carry out fact-checking are still the more credible media organizations and third-party fact-checking agencies," Wei says. However, in the absence of freedom of speech and civil society, media verification may not be an option. "Can you imagine letting The Global Times do your fact-checking for you?" asks Wei. A lie gets halfway round the world before the truth has gotten its boots on "There is a long-standing problem. All fact-checking is carried out in a kind of impact-response mode," Wei declares. "Fake news will always spread before you can react to it. All you can do is hope that the fact-checking response will be seen too." "This isn't often the case when it comes to mass communications, however," he says. According to Wei, fact-checking is always defensive rather than offensive, and never has the same kind of visibility that fake news seems to command. "False information is often made in a highly skilled manner, with concise language and engaging content," he says. "It's compelling and provocative, and it spreads very easily." By contrast, a fact-checking article has to be written in a rational, neutral and objective tone, citing sources, evidence, charts, figures and laws, none of which makes good clickbait. It's even harder to break into a fake news bubble. "People can inhabit online bubbles with entirely different sources of information," Wei says. "Even if you point out the content someone has read is incorrect, he will still carry on reading it the next day because that's what he's seeing in his immediate circle of friends, in his WeChat groups." Wei often uses the word "sad" when speaking about fake news. On Dec. 19, 2020, the United Kingdom announced that London and other places would enter Tier 3 of coronavirus restrictions the very next day. Very soon afterwards, reports that 300,000 people were scrambling to leave London started circulating on WeChat. Calmer voices soon emerged, saying that Dec. 19 was the last weekend before Christmas, and that the railway stations were crowded in a similar manner to the Lunar New Year travel rush in China, and that the word “escape” was putting it too strongly. Both posts were widely shared. Volunteer fact-checkers looked at British media reports, and found that many of them did actually use the word "flee" in English, but that this didn't merit a literal translation into Chinese as "escape." No common ground between the two views was ever found. As one fairly neutral member of the WeChat group sought to flee the discussion, he commented, "All I can say, and I say it in good faith, is this. There are many ways to interpret the world, and the truth is a luxury commodity that is found embedded in the world view of an individual." "If you think that the pandemic hasn't caused major problems in London, then they are heading out on vacation: if you believe it is hell on earth right now, then naturally they are fleeing," he wrote. "So maybe our fact-checking project isn't much use to anyone," he concluded. Back in Taiwan, Liang feels a sense of helplessness in the face of fake news. "I majored in communication, but my parents are getting deceived by fake news almost every day," he laments. "We get into family fights over it, and they can't seem to take in what I am saying, no matter what I say to them." A former journalist, who gives only the nickname Rachel, says she is saddened by the amount of fake news she sees in one of her WeChat groups. "There are more than 30 members in that group, and most of them are senior media professionals," Rachel says. "There are also some younger media workers." "Every day someone in the group forwards various messages that I think are highly suspect. If people who work in the media are doing this, how can they expect ordinary people to have the ability to distinguish between real and fake news?"
