Shen Boyang's Facebook flooded with 18,000 overseas accounts to express "angry", and the election campaign called on voters to interpret it calmly

Shen Boyang's personal Facebook was flooded with 18,000 suspected fake accounts and people were angry. (Provided by Shen Boyang’s campaign office)

The Democratic Progressive Party’s Taipei mayoral candidate Shen Boyang’s campaign office pointed out that Shen Boyang’s personal Facebook post today (5th) received a large influx of suspicious overseas accounts that clicked “angry”. The team analyzed a total of about 46,000 emoticon responses to the article and found that more than 18,000 of them clicked “angry” and came from highly abnormal overseas accounts. The competition stressed that such malicious interference will not change the team's original intention of adhering to a "positive and joyful" election. It also called on the public to interpret the election calmly and not to be affected by deliberately created online trends.

The competition pointed out that the post had an unusually large increase in interactions in a short period of time. After checking the background data and comparing characteristics, it was found that more than 18,000 accounts generally had "overseas origins, no substantial friend interactions, recent batch creation, and empty personal data", and were suspected to be systematically created "no-clean accounts." The bidder stressed that the election campaign is counting down and the team is highly vigilant about human manipulation that attempts to influence the atmosphere of public opinion in the community.

The competition also calls on social platforms to pay attention to the recent concentrated activities of such abnormal accounts to maintain a normal communication environment for users. At the same time, attention should also be paid to whether there is someone behind the abnormal account deliberately operating to create false online volume and a confrontational atmosphere.

Shen Boyang hopes that the election should return to the discussion of political opinions and become a process of demonstrating the vitality of democracy and exchanging ideas. The campaign also reminds netizens and voters to check more when receiving community information, and together protect the rational democratic discussion space so that election discussions focus on the future development and vision of the city.