The citizens of the small Asian island state – with government support – are successfully fighting back against fake news. But when they want to help shape the country’s policies through direct democracy, they get blocked, as SWI swissinfo.ch learned during a visit to Taipei. “A naval soldier of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army looks through binoculars to monitor shipping traffic off the east coast of the island of Taiwan,” reads the caption under a press photo, which was published by media outlets around the world in the summer of 2022. Some media outlets wrongly cited the Associated Press news agency (AP) as the source, whereas the photo was actually provided to the AP by the Chinese state news agency Xinhua. Several days later, AP announced that it could see no problem with the picture, but neither could it authenticate it, as “it was not taken by us”. Xinhua News Agency published the picture to coincide with the conclusion of a visit to Taiwan by the then-speaker of the US ...
