Long-Term Influences of Misinformation on Taiwan Independent Voters

• In Event: Understanding Mass Behavior in Taiwan in a New Era

Abstract

The composition of the Taiwanese voters continuously changed over the decades after the democratization when more citizens considered themselves only Taiwanese, and the number of independent voters surged (Wang, 2019). The recent statistic about the voting decision of Taiwanese voters over the last two national-wide elections also displays that voters make their voting decisions not merely by their party attachment anymore; some of them cast their voters according to candidates’ issue positions, while others made their decisions by the atmospheres of each election when the election days approached (Wang, 1998, Wu et al., 2004, Cheng, 2009, 2014). The voters’ determinants of the decision-making process are actually diverse. At the same time, Taiwan’s election also faces challenges overseas; the increasing information manipulations have shaken Taiwanese trust in each other, which, by the recent research, may have caused short-term and long-term effects on Taiwanese politics (Lee, 2022).
Studies that focus on the short-term effects have revealed the influences of misinformation on distrusting people and the government, and the influence of fact-checking on people’s perspectives on candidates (Gottfried et al., 2013; Margolin et al., 2018; Nyhan et al., 2020; Wintersieck, 2017). These studies illustrate how a nation’s domestic politics are affected by foreign countries and shake its autonomy. Other studies argued that the influence of misinformation and fake news intentionally created may have caused a long-term impact on people’s awareness of information manipulation, making people fatigued in staying aware of misinformation (Lee, 2022). Compared to the short-term impacts, the long-term effects of misinformation are more devastating in democratic institutions since people do not just lose awareness of the misinformation; people may turn indifferent to politics in the long run and choose to focus on issues that are irrelevant to politics in their daily life, letting politicians easier to control the political climates without supervision from people. These studies also present the long-term influence of misinformation on people’s perspectives. Rather than seeing it as misinformation that can temporarily affect citizens, these long-term influences of information can also be thought of as a long-term lifestyle-shaping process.
This paper argues that the long-term effect has impacted politics in Taiwan in just a few years; people generally feel apathetic towards politics, and voters prefer politicians who run their campaigns by mentioning less critical issues. The research also illustrates that independent voters do not have a clear preference for human rights issues. Compared to some highly salient issues in society, independents indeed show less concern about the contentious issues like same-sex marriage issue.
This study uses the data collected from Facebook by the Taiwan Institute for Governance and Communication Research (TIGCR). The data was collected from the posts for these three Taipei mayoral candidates; Chiang, Wan-An, Chen, Shih-Chung, and Huang, Shan-Shan. The posts are collected from November first to the 30th, 2022. This paper will use the topic model to examine the framing of these posts and then use the emotion sentiment analysis to see whether these posts vary on the emotional triggers. Eight different emotions of the NRC Emotion lexicon are applied to analyze the posts. These two methods complement each other in that the topic model shows the consistency of word choices from candidates, and the NRC Emotion sentiment analysis captures the candidates' overall word choice and evaluates the candidates' tones. The independent vote preferences are analyzed with TIGCR’s 2022 Political Polarization Survey. Most of the Independent voters in the pre-election survey had not decided who to vote for, therefore, the posts from each candidate could help us to understand how to attract voters’ attention.
The outcomes of the analysis show that these posts from the candidates do not vary significantly from the statistical perspectives on triggering people’s emotions. More words related to trust are used than other words across the three candidates. In general, more positive words are used over negative words by them. However, the topic model analysis shows slight differences in issue framing across the candidates, while whose framing mentioned less about critical issues are elected to office. The analysis outcomes from the Political Polarization Survey also identify the independent voters’ exclusive preferences on arguable political issues. These outcomes illustrate the long-term influence of overseas misinformation on citizens' affected political choices and political attitudes.

Authors

• Ting-wei Weng, University of Houston

• Shu-An Tsai, SUNY Buffalo