Taiwan's elderly love messaging app LINE. So do health scammers and propagandists from China
Messaging app LINE is a haven for health scams, misleading headlines and Chinese government propaganda. In this four part series, The Reporter reveals a trans-national group of schemers behind the all out assault.
By Jason Liu (劉致昕), Ko Hao-hsiang (柯皓翔) and Hsu Chia-yu (許家瑜)
Photography by Su Wei-ming (蘇威銘)
Design by Brittany Myburgh
Translation by Harrison Chen
This piece first appeared in The Reporter (報導者) and is published under a creative commons license.
On one end of the line, Taiwanese uncles and aunties read about the newfound healing powers of “yam leaf milk,” an elixir that purportedly prevents high blood pressure, high blood sugar and cholesterol. On the other end are the “merchants” fabricating such stories, who use the resulting income to buy cars and mansions.
Attracted by provocative and controversial headlines they see on platforms such as Google, Facebook and LINE, these unsuspecting uncles and aunties are contributing clicks to “content farms” — companies that produce massive amounts of low-quality news articles in order to collect money from page clicks.
A team at The Reporter spent two months investigating this phenomenon, following a trail which began in public LINE groups and ultimately revealed a transnational money-making machine which has operated for at least four years between Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and China.
After gaining membership to their Telegram, WhatsApp and Facebook groups, we checked the list of members and discovered a motley crew of Taiwanese and overseas Chinese individuals, from a member of a Taiwanese pro-unification political party, to a businessman living in Kaohsiung who founded the well-known Taiwanese websites Ghost Island News (鬼島狂新聞) and Blue-White Sandals Counterattack (藍白拖的逆襲).
DISINFORMATION IN LINE GROUPS
At the end of November, next to the Wanhua Railway Station in Taipei, about forty to fifty elderly people sat in a community activity center. But they weren’t playing cards or singing songs that day. On each table was a pamphlet reading “A Guide to Checking Fake News” and the audience listened attentively to the presenter.
“Okay everyone, when you wake up, the first thing you do is check LINE, right?” the 31 year old Ivy asks. The elderly respond in unison like schoolchildren: “right!”
“If you’ve been scammed before, can you raise your hand?” Ivy asked. The atmosphere suddenly chills. After a second someone laughs, and the words “fake news” undulate in the crowd as a few hands are slowly raised into the air. “Let’s give them a round of applause!” Ivy said, encouraging them to find the courage to admit past mistakes.
A DISASTER BREWING IN THE PHONES OF THE ELDERLY
Since the end of 2018, Ivy and three other partners founded the Fakenews Cleaner (假新聞清潔劑). Since then, with the help of over seven hundred multi-generational volunteers from towns and cities of all sizes, Ivy and her team have travelled around Taiwan giving over a hundred public presentations in community spaces, temples, and traditional markets. These volunteers form local fake news self-help groups, and report suspicious messages that appear daily on messaging app LINE.
It’s the Fakenews Cleaner team that tells us about the cure-all elixirs circulating on LINE that most Taiwanese have never heard of:
Yam leaf milk: cures high blood pressure, high blood sugar, high cholesterol, and gout
Cilantro water: cleanse, detox, and lower blood pressure
Bitter leaf: lowers blood pressure, cures diabetes, lowers cholesterol, protects liver, cures cancer
Content farm KanWatch produces a lot of daily content, with a lot of misinformation mixed in. Source: KanWatch website screenshot
These snake oil recipes come from obscure websites with innocuous names, such as Jintian Toutiao (not to be confused with the ByteDance news aggregator app Jinri Toutiao), KanWatch, and beeper.live. In their terms of service, these websites assert that they are not responsible for the veracity of content on their platforms. But content from these websites is popular among middle-aged and elderly Taiwanese who use LINE as their main source of information. The Fakenews Cleaner team has met many seniors who say they’ve seen cure-all claims to the ones described above. “Once during a presentation in Zhudong we realized that the entire village had been drying bitter leaves to make tea” said Ivy. In Nantou county, a village community development association would host yam leaf tea drinking events every morning.
“The situation was worse than we could have imagined, and I became increasingly frightened,” says Melody, a volunteer with Fake News Cleaner. In their interactions with the elderly, volunteers sometimes play the role of a private tutor, giving them one-on-one counselling in resolving questions about digital products, and while doing so, they have incidentally witnessed the disaster brewing in LINE groups for the elderly.
“For some people, as soon as they open LINE, the screen becomes filled with news from forty to fifty content farm groups,” says Mark, a Fakenews Cleaner volunteer. “During class, some people ask us how to block them.” These content farms fold false and disputed information into their content. The content is often propagated through web links that, once clicked, require the user to subscribe to that content farm’s LINE account before viewing. The user then receives daily news from the content farm.
What is a content farm?
A content farm (or content mill) is a website that specializes in producing high-traffic articles, videos and images with very little original content and generates revenue via advertising. The truth behind their claims are often difficult to verify, and their creators use various legal and illegal means to create said content. Content mills do not proactively manage content, and much of it violates copyright, or is plagiarized or minimally rewritten.
Fakenews Cleaner volunteers from all over Taiwan have found that the false information was highly coordinated, strategic and effective. “Often, all within a day or two, we will see the same viral content being re-shared from all over. It’s really very scary” says Mark. Elderly people who live alone in villages often have no other way than to ask these volunteers to verify whether content they see is correct or incorrect. It only takes a single slip-up for them to become victims of false information.
60% OF DISINFORMATION COMES FROM ABROAD
Fact-checking group MyGoPen — which sounds similar to the Taiwanese Hokkien phrase mài koh phiàn (嘜擱騙) or “don't fool people again” — has over 180,000 followers on its official LINE group. The founders of the group were concerned about the flurry of misinformation on social media and started MyGoPen in 2015. Since then, the group has put together a substantial database of stories with false information.
Robin, a project manager at MyGoPen, noted that most content farms do not operate locally in Taiwan, with at least 60 percent of disinformation or disputed news stories originating from overseas. Some of the images contain simplified characters, or phrases used only in China, or official pronouncements by the Chinese government. MyGoPen has already examined more than 900 items; their program automatically compares news items with those in the database, and the user can view the results directly when a match occurs.
But after they wrote this program, their opponents carried out a counterattack. In the early morning, some users would take fake news known by the MyGoPen database and tweak the titles, images, videos and text. If the program did not recognize the altered version, then they would begin to disseminate it instead.
The battle between the two sides rages on. Robin has observed that a large number of articles with very similar content would tend to appear before elections. For example, during the Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests, a wave of rumours circulated online that claimed protesters were promising rewards of $20 million HKD ($2.5 million USD) for each police officer killed.
In the half-year before Taiwan’s 2020 presidential and legislative elections, content portraying China favourably bubbled up in Taiwanese LINE groups, such as news of Chinese “flying trains” that could reach speeds of 4000 km per hour (3 times the speed of airplanes) or high speed trains with carriages made of bamboo. Pointing out an article containing disinformation which was shared by 180,000 users, Robin says, “this is an unending war.”
In part two, we followed the trail of these alluring stories to find out where they come from, leading us all the way to Malaysia.
