Digital Propaganda: How China Uses Short-Form Videos to Target Taiwan’s Youth
Introduction
Short-form video platforms like TikTok have transformed into more than entertainment hubs—they are now pivotal battlegrounds in the struggle for democratic sovereignty, particularly in Taiwan. As Asia’s freest democracy, Taiwan faces an unprecedented challenge: defending its youth from the algorithmic influence that subtly reshapes political identities, erodes civic trust, and blurs perceptions of sovereignty. This study examines TikTok’s role as a strategic tool in China’s cognitive warfare against Taiwan, using a multidisciplinary framework that integrates platform analysis, media theory, and geopolitical strategy.
Findings reveal that TikTok’s algorithm-driven environment exploits weaknesses in Taiwan’s fragmented regulatory systems, youth media literacy gaps, and limited access to global digital governance. If these operations succeed, Taiwan could face political collapse—not through tanks on beaches, but through the silent erosion of democratic willpower, electoral legitimacy, and civic identity.
Taiwan’s emerging countermeasures—such as platform accountability laws and youth-oriented media literacy programs—are promising but insufficient in addressing the scale and sophistication of this threat. Strengthening defenses through AI-powered content verification, international coalitions, and targeted civic education can help Taiwan counteract this evolving form of political subversion.
Ultimately, Taiwan’s experience highlights the broader struggle of democracies to safeguard their digital sovereignty. The fight against algorithmic propaganda demands not isolation but innovation and a steadfast commitment to democratic principles. Taiwan’s resilience serves as a beacon, showcasing how democracies can confront emerging threats while upholding their core values.
Algorithmic Influence: TikTok, Short-Form Video, and Youth Engagement in Taiwan
TikTok, a short-form video platform launched globally by ByteDance in 2018, has rapidly become the dominant platform for younger audiences worldwide. Its success lies in its advanced machine learning algorithms that analyze user interactions in real time, creating predictive engagement loops via the “For You Page.” These loops, which prioritize emotional stimulation over critical thinking, have been identified as powerful tools for shaping user attitudes subtly and without overt persuasion.
The platform’s influence, however, extends beyond its architecture or entertainment value. To fully grasp its impact, it must be framed within the contexts of digital manipulation, propaganda engineering, and geopolitical competition. Digital manipulation, involves the covert shaping of user cognition and emotion through algorithmically curated content streams that bypass conscious critical faculties. Propaganda, meanwhile, as the “deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.”
In Taiwan, these mechanisms take on heightened significance. Analysis highlights how short-form media ecosystems like TikTok provide adversaries with “scalable, precision tools for narrative warfare,” exploiting emotional resonance to influence political identities. Similarly, Harvard Belfer Center warns that digitally native youth, whose media literacy often lags behind their technological engagement, are particularly susceptible to “cognitive infiltration campaigns” that seamlessly combine entertainment with ideological influence.
This addictive design is especially potent among youth populations. In Taiwan—a hyper-digital society where 94.5% of youth aged 16–24 use social media daily—TikTok has carved a dominant niche. Its penetration rate among urban youth aged 18–29 exceeds 38%, with users averaging over two hours per day. More critically, over 60% of Taiwanese youth under 25 regularly engage with politically tinted content, with TikTok ranking highest in emotional dependency metrics. Taiwan’s youth, therefore, represent not just a digital audience—but a susceptible front line in emerging information wars.
Beyond entertainment, TikTok’s platform architecture has increasingly been linked to influence operations aligned with Beijing’s geopolitical interests. Due to ByteDance’s obligations under China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, TikTok’s nominal independence is legally compromised. TikTok systematically suppresses content related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang —regions where China has repeatedly failed to fully control the political narrative. These are the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) most politically sensitive frontiers: territories it claims as internal matters but where resistance to authoritarian influence remains strong. As a result, Beijing works aggressively to silence dissent, distort perception, and amplify content that aligns with Party interests. Psychological studies have further highlighted how TikTok’s recommendation system not only maximizes screen time but diminishes users’ critical engagement with content.
This dual dynamic—hyper-engagement plus covert narrative shaping—has fueled global alarm. Congressional hearings labeled TikTok a “Trojan Horse for Chinese intelligence” (Senator Warner) and “digital fentanyl” (Senator Hawley), while flagged the platform as a vector of authoritarian propaganda. Over 59% of U.S. adults are aware of TikTok’s security concerns, and more than 30 countries have restricted its use in government networks.
Empirical evidence confirms these concerns. Report documents systemic suppression of Taiwan sovereignty-related content while amplifying unification narratives. Research highlights an associated problem: only 12.3% of youth engaging with political content on TikTok can accurately identify its origins, underscoring a vast vulnerability to foreign influence.
Algorithmic-centric digital influence via short-form video platforms is not random, coincidental, or ad hoc, but rather a dedicated and coherent vector within the CCP’s broader cognitive warfare efforts.
China’s Cognitive Warfare Framework and the Role of Digital Influence
While much of the world debates TikTok as an entertainment or privacy risk, Chinese strategic planners treat it as a critical weapon in the battlefield of the mind. Under Xi Jinping’s leadership, the CCP has shifted from reactive information control to proactive “Cognitive Domain Operations” (認知領域作戰)—a strategy aimed at seizing control of an adversary’s perceptions, loyalties, and political will without firing a single shot. Originally laid out and refined in subsequent white papers, this doctrine places platforms like TikTok at the heart of CCP political warfare.
Cognitive Domain Operations combine psychological warfare (心理戰), public opinion warfare (輿論戰), and legal warfare (法律戰) to shape foreign societies from within. Rather than relying on traditional military coercion, China now pursues “discourse power” (話語權)—the ability to algorithmically engineer narratives, fracture civic trust, and manipulate political identity at scale.
In Taiwan, these strategies are already unfolding. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has documented how Chinese-linked networks systematically suppress Taiwanese sovereignty narratives, amplify pro-unification themes, and foster political polarization through TikTok’s algorithmic curation. The platform’s emotionally charged, compulsive short-form content is uniquely suited for cognitive infiltration, particularly among Taiwan’s digitally native youth, whose media literacy struggles to keep pace with algorithmic sophistication.
Meanwhile, the United Front Work Department (UFWD) has expanded its operations across Taiwan’s political and civil society sectors, embedding pro-China narratives through media partnerships, grassroots organizations, and political figures sympathetic to Beijing. The UFWD operates as the CCP’s “Magic Weapon” at Home and Abroad, tasked with shaping external political environments through psychological, cultural, and informational means without triggering overt confrontation. The 2024 Taiwanese elections revealed early signs of coordinated TikTok campaigns that reframed sovereignty as “extremism” and promoted “reconciliation” narratives aligning with the Kuomintang (KMT), Taiwan’s historically pro-China party.
Strategically, China is preparing for a 2027–2030 window to “resolve” the Taiwan issue—potentially without kinetic conflict. CCP cognitive warfare theory increasingly emphasizes “winning without fighting,” envisioning Taiwan’s civic collapse via narrative erosion, youth identity manipulation, and elite co-optation. In this framework, TikTok is not merely a security threat— it is a Trojan Horse, normalizing pro-Beijing sentiment through entertainment ecosystems embedded in everyday life. The strategic interaction between China and Taiwan today can be modeled as follows:
Table 1. Game Theory Matrix: Taiwan vs. China — Strategic Response Options in the Cognitive Domain
Furthermore, China’s operational architecture targeting Taiwan is deeply integrated across political, cyber, and psychological spheres:
Table 2. Core Actors in China’s Cognitive and Political Warfare Ecosystem Against Taiwan
According to a 2023 analysis by the Jamestown Foundation, the CCP views “ideological disarmament” (去意識形態化) of Taiwan’s youth as a necessary precondition for unification, seeing it as a pathway to “soften resistance to PRC rule by eroding democratic will and civic identity.” If these operations succeed, Taiwan could face political collapse—not through tanks on beaches, but through the silent erosion of democratic willpower, electoral legitimacy, and civic identity. The stakes could not be higher.
Taiwan’s frontline is no longer its coastline—it is the digital psyche of its next generation. Failure to recognize and counteract China’s cognitive warfare strategy risks losing Taiwan without a single shot fired—only a steady, algorithmically engineered loss of sovereignty.
Taiwan’s Strategic Outlook: Domestic Constraints and Information Sovereignty
After years of warning signs, Taiwan now faces an urgent battle for digital sovereignty—a battle it is dangerously underprepared for. While China’s cognitive operations are unfolding according to a well-developed playbook, Taiwan’s defenses remain fragmented, reactive, and politically constrained. Despite growing public awareness after the 2024 presidential election, real societal capacity for countering coordinated influence operations remains limited.
China’s strategy, built around short-form media ecosystems like TikTok, is no longer hypothetical. It seeks not immediate conquest but long-term erosion of Taiwanese civic identity, using emotional manipulation, ideological infiltration, and social polarization as core weapons. Internal gaps worsen Taiwan’s vulnerability: low trust in government regulation, limited legal tools to demand platform accountability, and exclusion from global regulatory frameworks.
Statistics paint a stark picture. Over 42% of Taiwanese voters under 30 now rely exclusively on algorithmic platforms like TikTok for political information. Yet a 2024 Taiwan Pre-election Telephone Surveys found that while a majority supports stricter oversight, only 41% trust the government to regulate without infringing on free speech. This civil distrust leaves Taiwan’s leadership walking a political tightrope—caught between defending democracy and being accused of suppressing it.
Taiwan’s policy response so far has been cautious. Reforms such as the Anti-Infiltration Act and the proposed Digital Intermediary Services Act show intent but remain hamstrung by fears of political backlash and civil society resistance. Taiwan has built soft partnerships like the Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience Partnership, but these lack teeth compared to China’s sprawling influence apparatus. China is exploiting Taiwan’s open digital environment faster than new safeguards can be implemented.
The strategic contrast is glaring. China has a plan—integrating short-form propaganda, algorithmic shaping, cyber disruption, and political cooptation to target Taiwan’s youth and future elections. Taiwan, by contrast, lacks a centralized defense strategy. No unified “grand strategy” exists for digital resilience. No national doctrine organizes civil, cyber, and cognitive defense into one counterplay. The threat is evolving, but Taiwan’s response remains piecemeal. Taiwan’s strengths and weaknesses in this information battle can be summarized as follows:
Table 3. SWOT Analysis: Taiwan’s Information Sovereignty (2025)
Democracy’s Dilemma: Taiwan’s Hardest Digital Battle
Ranked among the top 10 freest countries in the world and consistently leading Asia in democratic governance, Taiwan is often hailed as a beacon of liberal values in a region increasingly dominated by authoritarian regimes. Its civil liberties, political participation, and free press stand as a testament to decades of hard-earned progress. Yet today, these very freedoms have become Taiwan’s greatest vulnerability.
China’s cognitive warfare strategy does not challenge Taiwan’s democracy through force—it exploits Taiwan’s openness. TikTok, short-form media, and algorithmic manipulation bypass traditional defenses, quietly shaping public opinion, distorting national identity, and undermining civic trust without the need for tanks or missiles. The threat is slow but systematically creeping erosion of democratic resilience orchestrated through everyday digital interactions.
Taiwan now faces a seemingly impossible tradeoff. Efforts to regulate foreign platforms or tighten control over information flows risk accusations of censorship, undermining the very values Taiwan seeks to defend. Yet allowing unchecked cognitive infiltration leaves the island exposed to strategic subversion. This dilemma has trapped political leaders between principle and survival. Public opinion mirrors this anxiety: while 67% of citizens support stronger action against foreign influence, only 41% trust the government to act without infringing on free speech.
To address these threats, Taiwan can adopt platform accountability laws requiring transparency in algorithms and content moderation, ensuring foreign platforms cannot exploit its information ecosystem unchecked. Simultaneously, targeted civic education initiatives, such as media literacy programs in schools and community workshops, can empower citizens to identify and resist disinformation. Strengthening cyber resilience through AI-driven tools to detect coordinated influence operations and misinformation campaigns will provide a proactive defense against cognitive warfare. Finally, international partnerships—particularly with like-minded democracies, can help Taiwan share best practices, pool technological resources, and counter foreign interference on a global scale. These measures collectively provide a roadmap for safeguarding democratic integrity without sacrificing the openness that defines Taiwan.
Conclusion
What if the next war is fought not over territory, but for the algorithmic soul of a generation? This paper sits at the intersection of digital authoritarianism, algorithmic governance, and democratic resilience. By analyzing how short-form video platforms like TikTok enable China’s influence operations in Taiwan, this study reveals how algorithmic propaganda can reshape national identity and erode democratic trust—especially among youth. The heart to defend this land—in both the physical and digital worlds—has never changed. Ultimately, this research contributes to both policy and political science by equipping scholars and decision-makers with the tools to understand how digital platforms have become the new frontline in the struggle for democratic sovereignty.
