“Thirty to forty thousand people saw the article within four hours, and that caught Facebook’s attention,” recalls A-hua. Because of this, he nearly couldn’t collect the $400 Singapore dollars he earned from the article. “Evan blamed it all on me.”

Thinking back to his time on the Big Durian platform, A-hua says in his heyday he could make more than $2,000 USD a month. He said the key was to copy articles from mainstream sources and then insert his own opinions. The most important thing was “knowing who your fans are.” For example, on Ghost Island Mad News “you would praise Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), say that he had a hundred thousand supporters, then curse Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and the article would do well.” He voted for Han last year, though he says he doesn’t have a party or an ideology, and that writing political articles is just a hobby. When talking about others in his line of work, he admits, “sometimes you have to, you know, make things up.”

A SOUGHT AFTER COMMODITY BY BOTH PARTIES

For this upcoming election, A-hua said that the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je’s (柯文哲) Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have all enlisted their own internet armies. He himself received messages from strange Facebook accounts, asking him to work for both the pan-blue and pan-green camps. The accounts all appeared to be foreigners, but when they realized that A-hua wasn’t interested, the accounts would vanish. These methods of contacting him are meant to leave no trace, since according to A-hua, “politicians are very afraid of being associated with these internet armies right now!” Because he had no information on who was behind the messages we could not verify his claims. He did say, however, that a Japanese media company had come to Kaohsiung to interview him, asking him to give analysis on Taiwan’s political internet battles.

Interest in recruiting A-hua stems from his rich experience in the field. He was a participant in the White Justice Union (白色正義聯盟) a Facebook page opposing the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement. In 2016 he joined the Association for the Promotion of the Proper Direction for a Lawful Society in the Republic of China (社團法人中華民國端正選風促進會) and helped to organize a pan-blue internet army. He also helped to create the Blue-White Sandals Counterattack (藍白拖的逆襲), a fan page with over 30,000 followers that supports the KMT. His original vision for the group was to strike a moderate pan-blue perspective, but as the members became more radical he decided to quit the group.

Even with years of experience, A-hua says the business is getting harder. He was once taken to court and fined more than 30,000 NTD for creating fake news. In the 2020 election year, he felt pressure from all sides, owing to national security officials and Han Kuo-yu supporters. Boss Evan has also put pressure on him: “Evan is Chinese, so if you criticize China he will delete your article.”

In his view, if you want to make money manipulating public opinion, then you have to make a lot of noise via images and videos on community platforms to attract a large number of fans. “If you curse someone harshly enough, then people will throw their money at you...right now, the green camp has more money.” In the January 2020 presidential election, A-hua planned to vote for Han Kuo-yu. After political articles were banned on Big Durian, he switched to ViVi (ViVi視頻), a video content platform from China, to continue to air his political views and conduct his business.

But how much can self-employed individuals such as A-hua influence Taiwanese public opinion?

The content farm with the greatest influence in the pan-blue camp is Mission (密訊). After Facebook blocked Mission, fan pages that usually shared their videos switched to sharing videos from Big Durian. We collected two months of statistics and found that a total of 460,000 supporters in 10 pan-blue Facebook pages posted 8,886 times, mostly from Mission and Ghost Island Mad News fan pages, of which 3,298 articles originated from Big Durian. From this data, we discovered that Taiwan content farms have a transnational character to them.

A-hua is optimistic about his prospects. He has 500,000 NTD in “start-up funds” to create his own platform for video content, modeled after Big Durian. He stressed that by working with coders from China, he could continue to dominate Taiwan's political information market at a quarter of Taiwan's cost.

FOLLOW-UP AND REACTIONS

On December 27th, after the publication of this article, Boss Evan finally accepted our request for an interview to discuss his views on content farms. He was only willing to conduct an interview via text, and not orally. When we asked if he was a Chinese citizen, he said it was a secret. We spoke for three hours, where he stressed that his work should be separated into two categories.

There is the Flashword Alliance, which is a self-publishing platform open to anyone; Boss Evan says the platform is committed to freedom of expression, and he takes no responsibility for any content. The other websites, KanWatch, beeper.live, and Qiqu News, are content platforms. In his view, the biggest content farm in the world is YouTube.

Below is a first-person summary of our interview with Boss Evan

A-hua once published a political article that hit number two on Facebook’s popularity rankings in a single day. I thought such politically risque content brought unneeded attention to the platform, so I banned it. At the time I knew of only two people who made political content, one was Holger Chen (館長／陳之漢) and the other was A-hua. That day I blocked both Holger Chen and Ghost Island Mad News, and deleted anything about Tsai Ing-wen, Han Kuo-yu, or Taiwan’s elections.

There are a lot of opposing political ideas on my platforms and I don’t advocate for any of them. I have no idea whether people who use my platform are being paid by the DPP or KMT. There’s too much risk in political content these days, so I deleted all content related to cross-strait issues or Hong Kong from my content farms. My good friend from Taiwan once told me not to touch politics. I didn’t pay too much attention because there wasn’t much political content, but now I’ve completely banned politics, and violators get deducted double revenue. But, I haven’t banned politics on the self-publishing platform. Everyone has free speech there, and if the DPP writes something I won’t ban it. There are DPP supporters there, but not as many. I am not trying to influence public opinion, and I haven’t taken money from anyone to write articles.

Who else is doing content farms?

There are two kinds of farms. One kind makes money by sharing trivial articles. The other kind has an agenda, what kind of agenda I don’t know, but there’s some kind of motivation behind their actions. Right now, I know about six major content farms run by Chinese; but the article you wrote only mentions the articles I personally wrote, and makes it seem like I run every content farm on earth.

Fan pages in Taiwan, aside from mainstream media, are all content farms. I know three major Taiwanese content farm companies, with a total of over 100 million followers. Of course, some of their followers are repeats. These companies work together with LINE and Facebook. I don’t want to say who they are, I’m afraid of retaliation. Taiwanese content farms are all companies, with ten or so sharing an office. You can’t get inside, so we don’t know much about them. I just write code for this platform, I don’t write content. Those big companies have a lot of employees, and they do everything themselves. These content generators are the ones who are truly scary, because whatever they write, their boss says, okay. These companies are all Taiwanese, and they have bots that spam people. Spam bots aren’t my domain... I don’t really use LINE.

How do you suggest we look at information from content farms?

Farms are just farms, don’t think about it too much. Most content farms are just trying to profit, and have no interest in politics. The political content that appears in content farms is only there because it just so happens that a member has that political view, and doesn’t represent the view of the managers. Political thought is often very extreme and can’t view things objectively. People just take some content that aligns with their views and write about it, and they tend to miss the forest for the trees. For example people have strengths and weaknesses, and people who like them will write about their strengths, people who hate them will write about their weaknesses. It seems like both sides are right, so what’s the problem, but if people write too much, they become biased.

I hope you can write objectively and fairly. That essay about yam leaf milk, with 830,000 views on YouTube, is more than the number of clicks I get on my website on any given day. The article only talks about me, but please also say something about the number one content farm, which is YouTube.