Written by Ming-tse Hung.
Image credit: Agongdian Reservoir02 by Eric Deng/ Wikimedia Commons, license: CC BY-SA 4.0.
For years, Taiwan’s renewable energy development has been repeatedly undermined by waves of misinformation—a situation that further escalated in 2025. After Typhoon Danas struck Taiwan last July, tens of thousands of solar panels in southern Taiwan were damaged, scattering debris across nearby land and fishponds. The incident sparked public distrust of renewable energy and ignited rumours about environmental pollution, fuelling a resurgence of long-standing false claims—such as toxic chemicals and heavy metals from solar panels polluting the environment. Similar rumours resurfaced in mutated forms across mainstream media outlets and social media platforms, creating an even more hostile information environment for renewable energy.
Facing these rumours and misleading stories, the government’s response remains passive and fragmented, addressing them only after they have gone viral. By that point, however, the impact of misinformation has often already spread beyond containment, or at least requires far more resources to effectively address. In an increasingly complex information environment, authorities must shift from reactive debunking to a proactive, comprehensive defence framework based on a solid understanding of the information ecosystem to create the conditions for rational discussions on climate issues and energy policy, which are essential for building a more resilient energy system.
This need has become more pressing than ever as Taiwan’s media consumption habits reshape the landscape and bring new challenges. While Facebook remains influential, short-video platforms have grown rapidly. According to recent data, TikTok’s popularity among Taiwanese respondents grew rapidly, with the proportion who reported watching content on the platform increasing from 18.7% in 2019 to 47.5% in 2025. The platform’s design inherently fosters fragmentation and polarisation, creates greater room for information manipulation, and makes it easier for malicious actors to fuel division through misleading claims or partial information. Consequently, users are left with disconnected informational fragments in an echo chamber that only reinforces their existing prejudices. Driven by opaque recommendation algorithms, such content spreads rapidly across diverse audiences while insulating users from meaningful discussion and communication.
TikTok has become fertile ground for misinformation and disinformation, including on energy issues in Taiwan. After collecting and analysing misinformation posts about Taiwan’s renewable energy development on the platform in 2025, we found that many posts feature unattributed, heavily edited footage stripped of the original context, seeking to stigmatise green energy development by alleging that solar facilities pollute the environment and endanger public health.
For instance, the claim that solar panels are cleaned with toxic cleaning agents is routinely recirculated. Videos of panel cleaning processes in China are presented as evidence to falsely accuse cleaning workers in Taiwan of using chemical agents that could poison domestic water supplies. Another similar rumour claims that some solar panels in Taiwan are cleaned with hydrochloric acid. Although it was debunked years ago, edited video clips continue to circulate on the platform. In another case, footage of solar farms in China is repurposed to falsely suggest that solar panels blanket Taiwan’s mountains, and that the natural environment is severely damaged as a result.
Meanwhile, official clarifications and independent fact-checks remain sparse and confined to a limited number of platforms, failing to counter these mutating narratives or reach the audiences most vulnerable to them. Worse, a limited understanding of this ecosystem could render government responses counterproductive, leading to further misunderstandings or even inadvertently providing fresh material for manipulation.
After Typhoon Danas hit Taiwan last year, the government sought to address public concerns about heavy metal leaching from damaged solar panels by conducting a rigorous experiment, immersing debris samples in strong acid for months. The data published by the Ministry of Environment proved that heavy metal release was negligible. However, bad-faith actors quickly weaponised the results, misleadingly comparing the experimental acid-leaching metrics directly against standard drinking water safety limits. This manipulation led to claims that solar panels in reservoirs could release lead at levels far exceeding the limits, and it became one of the primary rumours circulating on TikTok. This case underscores that issuing a standard press release or fact-check is no longer enough. When designing countermeasures, authorities must take a more comprehensive view, considering how different actors in the information environment may react, and adjusting their strategies accordingly.
This case also underscores the limitations of a piecemeal response approach. In a fragmented information ecosystem, effective mitigation requires collaborative action among diverse actors, which requires fostering long-term, society-wide cooperative networks and response systems rather than relying solely on government efforts. When governmental responses are designed in isolation and deployed in a similarly detached manner, they inevitably fail to communicate effectively with distinct audiences across varying contexts.
This issue is further exacerbated by acute politicisation. In our analysis of Taiwan’s energy-related misinformation posts, it is evident that the information space on TikTok is highly partisan; energy issues themselves are not the primary focus of discussion, but are instead used as material to attack political opponents. Both the media outlets producing energy misinformation and the TikTok accounts sharing it display strong political stances. Furthermore, comment sections are also largely inundated with political rhetoric attacking the government and its renewable energy policies. These narratives commonly allege that the ruling party was leveraging the promotion of green energy to pursue personal enrichment and hollow out Taiwan’s economy, leading to environmental pollution and public health hazards, while advocates of green energy development were routinely vilified as henchmen of the regime. Even independent fact-checking organisations and environmental groups came under attack, accused of being government proxies serving the interests of those in power. This effectively supplants factual discussions with ideological and emotionally charged discourse. Under these circumstances, government-led interventions and communicative space become more constrained, making effective outreach increasingly difficult.
The complexity of the audience targeted by such misinformation adds another layer of difficulty to the problem. There is a tendency to conceptualise consumers of misinformation as a monolith, as if discovering a single, potent counter-strategy could neutralise its impact across all audiences and scenarios. In reality, however, the groups affected by each wave of misinformation vary significantly—encompassing factors such as geographic location, occupation, age, and media consumption habits. Consequently, each incident demands tailored strategies executed by the most appropriate actors, whether they are from government agencies, civil society groups, local communities, or the private sector.
This challenge is clearly not unique to Taiwan, as nations worldwide increasingly confront the threats to climate information integrity, alongside the limitations of traditional government-led approaches to tackling these issues. Consequently, the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change launched the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change at COP30, emphasising that addressing the climate crisis requires broader engagement across all segments of society beyond government—including communities, businesses, civil society groups, media organisations, and academia- and that information integrity serves as an essential foundation for fostering this collaboration. Conversely, collaboration among these actors is equally critical to maintaining information integrity. By empowering society and fostering collaboration among key stakeholders, we can build a more resilient information ecosystem to counter energy misinformation and enable more effective climate action.
To safeguard Taiwan’s information integrity and promote the energy transition, the government must abandon its piecemeal approach and rigid, point-by-point response model. These misinformation cases should be understood as part of a broader pattern rather than a series of isolated incidents, and a holistic and systematic counter-strategy is therefore required to effectively address this broader challenge. Taiwan has to elevate its strategy from incident-based crisis management to a structural assessment of the information landscape, and expand its response mechanisms into a collaborative network of diverse stakeholders. Only by treating these challenges as systemic vulnerabilities within the information ecosystem can authorities design a resilient framework to safeguard information integrity. Only through sustained, proactive engagement with all stakeholders can we develop and implement targeted interventions to reach specific vulnerable groups when misinformation emerges, or even pre-empt it before it takes hold.
Mingtse Hung is a researcher at Research + Action, an Australia-based intelligence infrastructure that partners with stakeholders across Latin America, Asia, and Africa to better understand climate opposition’s emergent tactics and act to outmanoeuvre them.