Panel on elections, disinformation, and democratic resilience in Taiwan

Panel speakers

• Chen Nai-chia (SOAS Alumni);
• Billion Lee, (Co-founder of Cofacts);
• Tim Niven (Research Lead of Double Think Lab);
• Jane Yeh (Democracy Activist).

About the speakers

Chen Nai-chia joined Westminster Foundation for Democracy in October 2022. She worked as a research fellow for Taiwan’s leading LGBT+ rights Organisation, Taiwan Equality Campaign, between 2019 to 2021. Nai-chia also worked in Legislative Yuan as a parliamentary staff and served as Press Officer for one of the political parties in Taiwan from 2016 to 2018. She holds an MSc in International Politics from SOAS, University of London.

Jane Yeh, came from International Economy and Politics background, with a MA degree in international relations. She developed closer observation working as a management associate in an Investment Banking department, participated in M&A and Private Equity (PE) projects. Her thesis focussed on China’s Foreign direct investment (FDI) in European Union and its effect on EU-China relations.

About the organisations

Cofacts

Cofacts is an AI chatbot project that combines collaborative fact-checking and a chatbot in closed messaging app LINE, which has over 90% of market share in Taiwan. It consists of a chatbot, a website, and a crowd-sourced database. LINE users can forward any suspicious message and get an immediate response of fact-checking results right inside the closed messaging app. On the other hand, the Cofacts website displays all the user-reported messages, and enables factcheckers to “reply” the messages; these replies will become part of the chatbot’s automatic response. The database, comprised of user-reported messages and crowd source contributed “replies”, is opened for anyone to access to maximize interoperability and form a “Cofacts ecosystem”.

Billion Lee, Co-founder of Cofacts

Billion co-founded Cofacts in 2016. In this open-source project, Cofacts has been combating disinformation in a grass-rooted way. She has organized an over 2000 contributors' fact checking community and collected over 100k different suspicions disseminated articles. She has been lecturers among different communities and working on global network. She was awarded a fellowship for open data & disinformation professional fellows program to USA supported by State Department.

Doublethink Lab

Doublethink Lab (Doublethink) is a civil society organization devoted to studying the malign influence of digital authoritarianism. Doublethink’s strengths lie in the ability to combine a diverse set of research approaches in the social, behavioural, and computational sciences to study statefunded propaganda campaigns, psychological warfare, and related information operations.

Doublethink seeks to foster global networks connecting academics, democracy movements, digital communities, like-minded CSOs, and experts on the People’s Republic of China, in order to strengthen global democratic resilience.

Tim Niven, Research Lead of Double Think Lab

Tim is a computational social scientist by training, he has been working with Doublethink Lab for over three years. In his current role as Research Lead, Tim oversees all aspects of our research. He also led projects that apply current technology to the study of PRC information warfare

China In The World (CITW)

In 2019, Doublethink Lab and its partners established the China In The World (CITW) network to bring together stakeholders researching the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s global influence and disinformation strategies. CITW aims to support and unite these stakeholders, improve global and regional awareness of related challenges, and strengthen democratic resilience worldwide.

CITW oversees publication of the China Index, the first cross-regional initiative to measure and compare the PRC’s influence in various countries.