This chapter examines how information operations are being used alongside other tools to negatively impact regional stability in the Asia-Pacific, focusing on China’s disinformation operations against Taiwan and the Philippines.
ARGUMENTS AND FINDINGS
China uses disinformation operations to discredit political leaders and to deter the Taiwanese electorate who may be supportive of Taiwan proclaiming de jure independence. In the Philippines, China has pushed the narrative of it being a positive regional actor and has cast doubt on the United States’ leadership in an attempt to drive a wedge in US–Philippine relations. Governments must work with experts and platforms equipped with the tools to monitor, identify, debunk or take down this inauthentic information. They must also take steps to disincentivise disinformation-for-hire operations and build national digital literacy throughout all segments of the population.
REGIONAL SECURITY IMPLICATIONS
While the impact of information operations alone is insufficient for China to achieve its regional strategic objectives, the additional resources and growing sophistication of China’s information operations suggests that these sorts of information operations will increase in frequency. It is likely that with US–China geopolitical tensions set to remain elevated and with wider conflicts being waged in Ukraine and across the Middle East, the importance of the information domain as a place for all parties to tell their story, persuade, broaden their influence and reach populations in the Asia-Pacific is going to grow.
But the online information ecosystem from which most populations in Asia retrieve their information and through which they communicate is an increasingly contested space. Governments now recognise the deteriorating integrity of the online information ecosystem as a key challenge, to the extent that 34 countries (including Australia, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea in the Asia-Pacific) signed the Global Declaration on Information Integrity Online in September 2023.1
INFORMATION IS STILL POWER
Information operations have always existed. But the use of the internet and, in particular, social media as means of running information operations has grown prominently over the past decade. Today, the internet is seen as a force multiplier for these operations.2 Indeed, the advantages of the internet – namely, speed, scale, its low cost and anonymity – make the truth difficult to discern.
The scope and impact of information operations are not yet well understood. Much of what is known about information operations comes from public reporting on the largest American social-media platforms. Some governments, primarily those of the US and its allies, have also attributed a selection of information operations to state actors. What we know about information operations should, therefore, be considered a selectively disclosed snapshot rather than the overall picture.
State actors who carry out information-operation campaigns use both disinformation and misinformation. Their campaigns benefit from the social-media algorithms which privilege content that generates engagement. Since 2019, there has been an uptick in the number of operations that have used profile photos generated using artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.3
Advances in technology, such as AI-generated fake videos and photos (also known as deepfakes), voice cloning and AI chatbots like ChatGPT could also enhance the quality and, crucially, the apparent authenticity of disinformation campaigns. The increase in quality, across multiple languages, of completely fabricated personas, voice cloning and generated text, which may have previously given away content as inauthentic, is now harder to identify.