Chiang’s past catching up with him

A Facebook post by Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) earlier this month achieved record levels of engagement — although perhaps inadvertently. In it, he attacked Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) for an op-ed published in 2014 discussing drug harm reduction policies. In attempting to stir up fear with talk of community centers, drugs and needles, Chiang’s comment section exploded. More than 100,000 comments poured in within the first two hours; more than 330,000 after the first 12; and more than 400,000 by noon the following day.

Rather embarrassingly, many commenters made a point not of joining Chiang in criticizing Shen, but of posting records of Chiang’s own proposal as a legislator in 2021. The mayor himself, it turns out, had once supported methadone substitution treatments, improving access to rehabilitation resources and creating a more supportive environment for those undergoing treatment. The political shots aimed at Shen appear to have found their way back to Chiang himself, only five years back in time.

Politicians can, of course, change their minds. However, if Chiang believed that drug harm reduction policies were reasonable in 2021, he should still have a clear understanding that harm reduction and actively encouraging drug use — which were conflated in his Facebook post — are two fundamentally different things. Moreover, Taipei already has its own system for preventing and addressing drug-related harm, and as mayor, Chiang should be better versed in these policies than the average citizen.

The specific proposals Shen put forward in an article 12 years ago can certainly be scrutinized, and there is ample room for public debate over which approaches are suitable for Taiwan. However, reducing a complex public health policy to a few sensational keywords to insinuate that one’s opponent “supports drugs” is not policy debate; it is the politicization of a professional issue for electoral purposes. The backlash to this kind of political maneuvering has been borne out in the hundreds of thousands of comments demanding that Chiang explain his own legislative record.

Things escalated further with allegations that comments had been deleted. Some people and media outlets used screenshots and video recordings to question why certain images or comments had disappeared so quickly. Chiang’s response was “how anyone could delete hundreds of thousands of comments,” and said that he welcomed differing opinions. However, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) went further, alleging that the flood of comments involved online troll armies or bots.

There is insufficient evidence to conclude that all these hundreds of thousands of comments were organic, just as there is no basis for labeling them all as the work of a “green-camp troll army.” Yet one does not need a definitive comment count to know that the Legislative Yuan’s proposal records from 2021 are here to stay.

Perhaps what Chiang should really be concerned with is not the question of comment trolls on his Facebook dashboard, but his own legislative record. Online engagement can be artificially inflated, comments can be duplicated and support can be mobilized by political platforms.

However, records of legislative proposals do not change with the algorithm. If Chiang still believes in his earlier positions, he should acknowledge that drug prevention and treatment require professional expertise, rather than using harm reduction policies for electioneering and fearmongering purposes. If he believes his former position was wrong, he should publicly explain what was wrong with it.

What makes the more than 600,000 comments worth examining is not the number itself, but how they flipped a political offensive into an invitation for hundreds of thousands of people to revisit Chiang’s own political record. The mayor should take note.