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    Taiwan is battling a wave of online disinformation from China

    by Alice Su, Los Angeles Times Dec 18, 2019 6 minutes

    TAIPEI, Taiwan - The messages start out as innocuous advice, often health-related, like: "Don't eat mushrooms and eggplant together, or you may die."

    Then they turn political.

    "Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's PhD is fake." "The CIA pays Hong Kong protesters $385 a day to go on the streets." "Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan are ethnically Vietnamese and Japanese."

    Thousands of lies flood social media every day in Taiwan, a new frontier of information warfare. Scholars say the island, which China claims as part of its territory but has been functionally independent since the 1950s, is the target of a Russian-style disinformation campaign by China to exploit social divisions and undermine democracy in the lead-up to the presidential election in January.

    A recent study by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found that Taiwan was the territory most exposed to foreign disinformation, based on weighted ratings by experts. The U.S. ranked

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