The burden of proof is on Chiang

On Saturday last week, Taipei City Mayor Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) wrote on Facebook a post criticizing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator and Taipei mayoral candidate Puma Shen (沈伯洋) for a 2014 op-ed on drug policy. The post amassed an astonishing 500,000 comments in less than 24 hours.

Chiang said the flood of activity was orchestrated by the ruling party. If he wishes to make such claims, Chiang cannot simply point to the volume of comments as evidence; he must look a little closer.

Amid the backlash, KMT Taipei City Councilor Chang Szu-kang (張斯綱) shared a DPP supporter’s post on X featuring a screen grab of himself programming a script to comment on the original post to “deal with” the number of comments being deleted. At most, this proves that people could have used bots to leave comments on the post, but there is no indication of what proportion of comments they might account for, how much traffic was due to coordinated behavior, or who implemented any of it. There is also no evidence to suggest that any accounts involved had ties to the DPP.

Chiang claimed that Threads had 90 million registered users in Taiwan, disproportionate to its population size of 23 million.

The Taiwan FackCheck Center has said that the 90 million figure is not from Meta’s official statistics. It was from a miscalculation in a report from the US market research company Resourcera, which mistook Taiwan’s share of traffic as a share of user accounts in its workings. Resourcera has since acknowledged the error and removed the statistic from its Web site.

In sum, Chiang’s first accusation offered no definitive evidence, while his second simply repeated debunked information. We can be certain that 500,000 comments is a startling number. However, we cannot be certain that someone posting about building a comment bot is grounds to dismiss the entire outcry as being the result of green-camp online armies and ruling party power privileges.

As the election heats up, Chiang must accept the burden of proof for his accusations seriously and point to verifiable accounts, coordinated behaviors or official platform data that support his case. Old pieces of misinformation do not suddenly become compelling simply because the mayor quotes them; nor should they be used to give unproven political allegations a second run.