Abstract
How sharing of political information/disinformation on social media influences democracy is an important and urgent global issue. Taiwan is the only democratic society in the Chinese-speaking sphere. Studying sharing by Taiwanese Facebook users allows us to understand the role of social media in this society and to see the patterns and effects of disinformation diffusion across societies. Technically, the aim of the project is to identify and characterize the most frequently shared URLs on Facebook by Taiwanese users in public events. By combining computational and qualitative methods, we aim to approximate the public’s opinions by analyzing the shared content. We seek to identify the sources of disinformation (i.e., fake news) and to characterize the mechanism of fake news formation in Taiwan. Additionally, the project will attempt to determine whether the echo-chamber effect takes place and how it is involved in the propagation of disinformation among Taiwanese Facebook users.
Principal Investigator

Pai-lin Chen
Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Journalism, National Chengchi University
Participants

Kung Chen
Professor and Director of Computer Center, National Chengchi University

Yu-Chung Cheng
Associate Professor, National Chengchi University

Shiuh-Feng Shih
Data Scientist, National Chengchi University