“It is a battle over truth itself where survival of global democracy is at stake”, says Taiwan’s minister of digitalization Audrey Tang in an interview with DN, making reference to dominant neighbor China’s aggressive cyber activity which increased 20 fowl after Nancy Pelosi, US Speaker of the House of representatives, visited Taiwan in August 2022. Tang is preparing Taiwan’s citizens for a civilian cyber defense – where citizen’s access to technology enable conflict reporting and documentation of potential war crimes – while she visits eastern Europe and Ukraine on a regular basis to aid with solutions for online education and gain experiences on cyber resilience. The suspicion that Chinese ships recently physically cut Internet cables to offshore islands also emphasizes the need of current Taiwanese $18 million investments into 700 satellite receivers for a robust Internet. Tang says China’s strategic goal is to undermine people’s trust in democratic institutions, shedding light on challenges ahead where wide use of orchestrated lies, sometimes augmented by artificial intelligence, requires more than fact checking. Teaching citizens to be source critical and think like journalists from an early age is part of the defense against expected attacks in the coming elections next year and frontwards.

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