Chinese scholars and Xiaohongshu engineers published a paper that showed how 10 million virtual avatars could be used to interact and simulate public opinion in Taiwan. Some scholars warned that this could be used to conduct cognitive warfare against Taiwan.
The paper website arXiv published a paper titled "A Social Simulation World Model Powered by LLM Agents and a Pool of 10 Million Real Users," claiming that its SocioVerse, a world model driven by large language models (LLM) agents that can be used for social simulation, has been verified through large-scale simulations in the three major fields of politics, news, and economics, and can reflect large-scale population dynamics, ensuring diversity, credibility, and representativeness.
Wang Hongen, associate professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, warned on the 24th in an article titled "When open data is used to simulate an entire country" on the "Thought Tank" website. This research breaks through the limitations of insufficient computing power, insufficient amount of information, and insufficient model complexity in the past, creating tens of millions of virtual avatars and allowing these virtual avatars to interact, just like simulating an entire country with a population of tens of millions.
Virtual avatars simulate and predict public opinion, becoming a powerful tool for unification efforts against Taiwan.
Wang Hongen mentioned in the article that the Taiwan Research Institute of Xiamen University in China established the "Cross-Strait Integration Development and National Unification Policy Simulation Laboratory" in 2018, claiming to "realize the major strategic needs of the complete reunification of the motherland" and using Taiwan's data to conduct computer simulations to predict various possible situations of cross-strait reunification, which is doing the same thing as the research in this paper.
Wang Hongen explained that this research utilized the past activity data of 10 million users of Platform X and Xiaohongshu, using algorithms such as Llama, Tongyi Qianwen, and Deepseek to create 10 million AI avatars. These avatars provided close-to-real-world answers to traditional polling questions, such as those on voting intentions for the US presidential election and the state of the US economy, rivaling telephone polls. Even Xiaohongshu, a platform previously apolitical, became an AI model, allowing China to conduct simulations targeting the entire Taiwanese population with more comprehensive data on Taiwan. This allows China to directly simulate the impact of various united front strategies, Taiwan-related policies, and rhetoric, undoubtedly strengthening its capabilities in united front work against Taiwan.
The Taiwanese fan page "Kaohsiung Happy Day" also questioned whether the CCP is building a large-scale model of Taiwan's internet users to predict and manipulate public opinion. The article mentioned that a group of Chinese scholars, primarily from Fudan University, and Xiaohongshu engineers scraped posts from 1 million public accounts on Platform X and 9 million Xiaohongshu accounts. Using LLM, they annotated 15 demographic labels and, after manual fine-tuning, generated "digital twins" of these 10 million people, which the authors call SocioVerse. They then used a "social environment" constructed from social structure, news updates, and personalized content, and simulated "scenarios" such as polls and interviews to allow these 10 million "digital twins" to interact with each other.
Happy Life in Kaohsiung" pointed out that the scary thing about this model is that the more social and personal data it collects, the more realistic simulation results it can produce. It can easily throw materials in to simulate the effects of cognitive operations on polls and even voting behavior.
Wang Hongen further pointed out in the article that the 2022 external bidding documents for the data center and information center under Xiamen University's "Cross-Strait Integration Development and National Unification Policy Simulation Laboratory" show that the center systematically collects Taiwan information such as "information flow" in the fields of economy, trade, politics, military, and culture, conducts analysis, and makes decisions, including the distribution of power of Taiwanese politicians, political and business relations, and the display of Taiwan warship cruise information, covering national defense and military, cross-strait exchanges and other content.
The "Kaohsiung Happy Days" fan page also mentioned that in 2024, the Xiamen University Cross-Strait Urban Planning Institute published an article titled "Starting Preparations for a Takeover of Taiwan as Soon as Possible," which included proposals for "consolidating anti-Taiwan independence forces on the island," "establishing a pilot zone for Taiwan governance," and "bringing in retired Taiwanese military, public servants, and teachers to assist in formulating takeover details." Compared to China's active development of "United Front AI" and "Infiltration AI," Taiwan's corresponding measures are far from adequate to meet the urgent needs of information warfare.
Establishing and protecting AI sovereign data
Wang Hongen also called on Taiwan to establish the concept of AI sovereignty data. Important data that affects national security should be protected as much as possible for free use domestically and strictly reviewed abroad. Relevant protection measures should also be updated with the times based on the data collection and compilation methods.
Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council, which is responsible for cross-strait affairs, stated that relevant government departments continue to monitor the situation of the CCP's cognitive warfare against Taiwan, and will strengthen social communication against information warfare and cognitive warfare, actively promote national security legal reform, expand the construction of a national security network, enhance social resilience, and promote internal unity in Taiwan to prevent the CCP's united front infiltration and cognitive warfare from harming national security.
Will criticism of the CCP and the truth about June 4th be blocked?
Zeng Yishuo, an associate researcher at the Institute of Cybersecurity and Decision Simulation at the National Security Research Institute, a Taiwan think tank, pointed out in an interview with Radio Free Asia that the Xiamen University Taiwan Research Institute collects public information, and whether to further create virtual personal avatars to interact to simulate social pulses and whether a lot of content has been filtered out must be considered.
Zeng Yishuo said, "They internally block certain language taboos. For example, Taiwanese criticism of the CCP and discussions of the June Fourth Incident are also part of the social pulse. Will they also be included in the Xiamen University Taiwan Research Institute's simulation? If they can overcome the internal self-imposed limitations, they can certainly be closer to the Taiwanese context, which may not be a bad thing. It can avoid misjudgments, rather than relying on self-righteous ideas or only citing the views of a few Taiwanese people, combined with public information, and then letting their imagination run wild at the keyboard."
Wu Se-chi, a researcher at the Cross-Strait Policy Association, told Radio Free Asia that Taiwan is a democratic society, and the government's public statements and research are open, making them vulnerable to exploitation by authoritarian regimes. The Chinese Communist Party will also adjust and revise its policies toward Taiwan to make its united front work more precise.
Wu Se-chi said, "Taiwan must pay more attention to whether anti-united front work can be proactively deployed and responded to immediately. This is a problem faced by all democratic countries. The management and use of this data requires the careful consideration of government agencies and relevant professionals."
Wu Se-chi believes that a complete closure or ban on its use is difficult in democratic countries like Taiwan. He argues that when the CCP uses Xiaohongshu and related apps during simulations, the Taiwanese public should be aware of the risks and prevent leaks of personal information and people's software habits. The Taiwanese government should focus on strengthening Taiwan's resilience.
According to the official website of Xiamen University, the "Cross-Strait Integration Development and National Unification Policy Simulation Laboratory" was established on the basis of the original Big Data and Public Opinion Polling Center, Documentation and Information Center, etc. It conducts research and teaching in the directions of national unification situation analysis and prediction, national unification scenario simulation, cross-strait integration development policy simulation analysis, and "one country, two systems" Taiwan plan simulation analysis. Through artificial intelligence, virtual simulation, experimental teaching, case teaching and other methods, it strives to build a policy simulation platform that can enhance the understanding and support of the mainland, both sides of the Taiwan Strait, Hong Kong and Macao, and the international community for the "Cross-Strait Integration Development Policy" and "National Unification Policy."
On the 28th, our station called the laboratory director, Director of the Institute of Political Science Chen Xiancai and Professor Liu Guoshen's hotlines several times, but no one answered.
