Taiwan’s Presidential Office held the 2026 Resilient Taiwan for Sustainable Democracy International Forum in Taipei on Sept. 19, bringing together foreign scholars and security experts to discuss whole-of-society resilience, information warfare and psychological defense.
According to the Presidential Office, the forum examined emerging security threats through sessions covering civil-military cooperation, psychological defense and international resilience partnerships.
During a panel on psychological defense, experts warned that authoritarian governments are devoting substantial resources to expanding their influence over the global information environment and said democratic societies need to become more proactive in responding to foreign information operations.
Authoritarian states invest heavily in information influence
Christopher Walker, vice president of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis, said authoritarian governments have made information influence a strategic priority and invested heavily in global communications capabilities.
Walker said few observers 25 years ago would have anticipated the level of global communications influence now exercised by the Chinese Communist Party. By contrast, he argued, democratic countries have devoted insufficient resources to countering foreign information influence.
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The challenge, he said, is not limited to Taiwan but also affects the United States and other democratic societies, making the resilience of the information environment a broader security concern.
Peter Mattis, president of the Jamestown Foundation, pointed to concerns surrounding platforms such as TikTok. He said democratic governments should take the issue seriously when platforms that have become part of the public information environment are vulnerable to manipulation by foreign actors pursuing specific objectives.
Mattis also argued that democracies confronting cognitive warfare need to communicate proactively rather than simply respond to individual pieces of disinformation after they appear.
Media literacy seen as key defense
Lai Hsiu-ju, chairperson of Radio Taiwan International, said Taiwan’s crowded media landscape presents its own vulnerabilities.
She said some Taiwanese media outlets have been criticized for repeating Beijing’s positions or publishing reports that lack adequate fact-checking. A large number of news outlets, she argued, does not necessarily guarantee that audiences receive accurate information.
Lai said strengthening media literacy and maintaining reliable public media are therefore important parts of Taiwan’s response to information warfare.
Beyond identifying outside interference, she said society needs the ability to distinguish factual reporting from false or manipulated information and to understand competing narratives.
‘No vacuum’ in the information environment
Jānis Karlsbergs, senior policy and publications manager at the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, said one of the vulnerabilities of free societies is that citizens may pursue their individual interests without recognizing that outside actors are attempting to exploit existing social divisions.
Drawing on Latvia’s experience with Russian information influence, Karlsbergs said governments need to provide credible information quickly when controversies or social problems emerge. Otherwise, foreign actors can exploit those divisions and shape the public debate.
He described a lack of awareness that an adversary is operating in the information space as one of the greatest weaknesses of free societies.
Karlsbergs also cautioned Taiwan against remaining silent because of concerns that proactively communicating its position could be criticized as propaganda.
“There is no such thing as a vacuum in the information environment,” he said in remarks reported by the Central News Agency.
When democratic governments fail to provide their own credible information, he said, other actors can move in to fill the gap.
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