The rise of ‘America skepticism’ーNHK WORLD-JAPAN NEWS
Crowds of people rushing into supermarkets and fighting over products. These are scenes from a viral video released earlier this year. Text in Chinese says they’re American shoppers scrambling to buy Chinese-made products before Washington’s additional tariffs kick in. Except it isn’t true. The video is a compilation of old footage used to support a narrative that imposing tariffs on China will cause retail chaos in the US. It’s believed to be part of a campaign to undermine trust in Washington. In Taiwan, this has become known as America skepticism and it’s setting alarm bells ringing in other parts of the world as well. Hello. My goen is a Taiwanese factchecking group that investigates the accuracy of claims made on social media. The America skepticism posts over the past few months have been mostly about Trump’s tariffs and relations between Taiwan and China. The group is paying close attention to claims made about semiconductors, Taiwan’s main industry. It says such claims have been spreading as Taiwan’s TSMC, the world’s largest contract chip maker, expands into the US. One example is this interview released by website news media which has about 3 million subscribers on YouTube. The group contacted TSMC to check if the claim was true. TSMC responded to our inquiry and told us the content in question is false, but the video had already spread on several social media platforms. one is Facebook and the other is Tik Tok. At the time of our report, this post had already attracted more than 10,000 likes and been shared 6,000 times. If America’s skepticism content keeps spreading, the situation in Taiwan will get really bad. It could affect society by undermining trust between citizens and making people suspicious of the authorities. something. The spread of such content is being deliberately orchestrated. Security firm Team T5 investigates online information manipulation. In a survey of internet forums, which are popular in Taiwan, they found widespread pessimism about TSMC’s expansion into the US. Many people believe that Taiwan is safe because of TSMC and if it loses TSMC, the US won’t protect Taiwan anymore. When they investigated further, they found several almost identical posts on other social media platforms. Our investigation found that some of the accounts might have been hacked. We also confirmed multiple suspicious accounts with unknown locations. They analyzed IP addresses in order to find out who was behind the posts. Searching your system, we got a hit for a service provider that’s unusual in Taiwan. The company is based in Shanghai, China. Taiwan. We think it’s highly likely that social media is being manipulated by people outside Taiwan or by people who shouldn’t be engaging in such activity. America’s skepticism is prompting growing concern in the United States. US research firm Grapha says Chinese authorities and businesses are finding ways to seow doubt among American citizens. This image was posted immediately after the so-called Trump tariffs were announced. The research firm says it was shared on social media by various influential Chinese figures. They posted for example uh this cartoon um framing the tariff as a bomb. So that would hurt everybody basically without any discrimination. Graphica observed uh multiple uh Chinese actors. So state media actors, Chinese official, pro-China actors pushing uh anti-American terrorist claims. A video of a Chinese business person giving advice on how to evade the US terrorists also went viral. Right now I’m in a hair accessory factory in EU. If you’re looking for something like that high quality, contact me now and I’ll give you all information you need. It’s definitely not something we can say it is coordinated or linked to any Chinese state actor. It is different. It’s a really another another trend, another layer to all this spread of narratives. And now we’re joined by Fukura Yoh who has been covering this story. So Yohi, we just heard that Beijing is suspected of being involved in sewing doubts about the US online. So what are they aiming to achieve? It seems to be an effort to shape public opinion. The US research forum featured in the report said Beijing is trying to spread a positive narrative about China and boost its position in the international community. Yay. The report focused on Taiwan and the United States. But uh is America skepticism also becoming an issue in other areas across the globe? Yes, the research company says it had also been confirmed uh in Singapore and Canada and Australia and there found post related to Japan as well. Uh this post sites an article about tariff negotiations between Japan and the US with the hashtag Japan say no. It appears to be trying to start conflict by stressing Japan’s resistance to you to the US. So you it’s not always easy to know whether you know the information we’re looking at is um real or fake. So what can we do to avoid spreading false information ourselves? First of all I should say there’s nothing wrong with being skeptical or criticizing the US the Trump administration has attracted a lot of controversy. uh so and Japan the US bors have freedom of speech but sometimes information is spread on purpose to discredit the US in particular countries so we need to be aware of this and not assume everything we see is true and information is becoming less reliable and it’s not clear where things will go from here but we can teach ourselves to seek the intention behind why Something is being shared and not just take it at the place
Fake videos and false information are being used to sow doubts about the US in Taiwan, and now the problem seems to be spreading to other parts of the world. #usa #taiwan #china #security
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