Government spokesperson Lo Ping-cheng says Taiwan has been the number one target of foreign disinformation for the last nine years. That statement came during a press conference on Thursday.

Lo made the statement based on a research report from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He says the government has identified four techniques used by foreign hostile forces to conduct disinformation in Taiwan. Those are mass propaganda, internet trolls, content farms, and local collaborators.

Lo says the intensity of information attacks on Taiwan shows that there is now no difference between war and peacetime when it comes to cognitive warfare. In Ukraine, he says, the propaganda war came before the Russian military invasion.

Lo says that online disinformation has the potential to change behavior and thinking, and even affect democracy. He says protection against disinformation should be like immunization against disease. The education system should foster media literacy and establish a digital civic consciousness. Lo says this would allow the population to develop resistance to cognitive warfare.