AI-Generated Social Media Accounts Used in Political Defense in Taiwan
Taiwan's Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an's office reportedly deployed AI-generated social media accounts claiming to be his son's classmates to defend him against criticism, but the campaign backfired when users discovered identical posts from Indonesia-based accounts, one explicitly naming itself DeepSeek, and found undeleted payment instructions and misspelled names in the posts.
What happened
Multiple AI-generated accounts claiming to be classmates of Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an's son posted identical defense posts on Threads to counter criticism of his enrollment practices and failure to recuse himself from related matters.
Network users traced the accounts' IP addresses to Indonesia and found one account openly named 'iamdeepseekandanindonesian' (I am DeepSeek and an Indonesian person), directly advertising its AI origin.
Reported impact
The defense campaign backfired, becoming a public scandal rather than damage control.
Index analysis
The posts contained identical text copied verbatim across multiple accounts, failed to disguise their foreign origin, and included operational errors such as misspelled names and undeleted payment instructions reading '(one post 1000 remember to delete)'.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.