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The claim circulated as millions of voters cast their ballots in Taiwan’s Jan. 13 presidential and legislative elections, a closely watched vote as China ratchets up its rhetoric on the self-ruled island.
Voters rejected Beijing’s repeated calls to vote for Lai Ching-te of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), handing a comfortable victory to a man China’s ruling Communist Party considers a harmful separatist.
Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its territory and has never relinquished force to bring it under its control, responded to Lai’s victory by saying it would replace China’s “inevitable trend of reunification. “
The same screenshot accompanied by the same fake message was shared on X here and here before the messages were deleted.
Police in Tainan city — traditionally a DPP stronghold — told AFP that there were no stabbings reported at its polling stations on election day (archived link).
“Up to now, all polling sites in the city are in good order, with police officers on duty at all times to maintain the safety of the voting public, and there have not been any violent knife attacks as rumoured on the Internet,” Tainan City Police Department said.
Facebook users shared a link to the My Formosa report, which now redirects users to the site’s homepage, here, here, and here.
Mi Formosa told AFP in a January 15 email that they “immediately got rid of the story” after discovering it was not true and reported its source, a message on a Telegram channel, to police.
AFP also found that the main symbol shared the ancient false claim.
An opposing symbol looking for the photo of the wounded man led to a report published on September 15, 2016 through Chinese state media outlet Haixia News about a stabbing at an Internet café in southeastern China’s Fujian province (link archived).
The report includes an uncropped edit of the photo in the posts, which shows a wounded man with a bloodied face and a bandage over his left eye.
Below is a comparison screenshot of the symbol shared in the fake posts (left) and the photo from the Haixia News report (right):
AFP can trace the source of the other three images, but there is no evidence that they resemble knife attacks in Taiwan.
My Formosa’s original report stated the knife attack claim and photos were shared on a Telegram channel.
AFP found the Telegram messages have since been deleted from the channel. They were written in a mix of simplified Chinese characters — used in mainland China — and traditional characters used in Taiwan.
“In the morning, my husband and I went to the polling station to vote. As we waited in line, a white van appeared out of nowhere and stopped in front of the polling station, and then a dozen men ran out of the van, knife in hand. They attacked other people randomly,” one message read.
“We are afraid to go to the polls again. The other people of Tainan deserve to pay attention today,” another message continued.
AFP here and there debunked false claims about the elections in Taiwan.