Video of Taiwan 2024 election rally misrepresented as footage from anti-Lai Ching-te protest

Published on May 9, 2025 at 09:38
3 min read
By Carina CHENG, AFP Hong Kong

An old video of a pre-election event resurfaced online alongside social media posts falsely claiming it showed a protest by Taiwanese opposition parties against President Lai Ching-te and his ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) in late April. The original clip showed a rally by Taiwan People's Party presidential candidate Ko Wen-je the night before elections on January 12, 2024.

"Taiwan island anti-dictatorship parade! It's useless. You have to live with the government you elected yourself, the beauty of democracy is that you believe them even if they are lying to you," reads the simplified Chinese caption to a video shared on X on April 26, 2025.

The 16-second clip shows an overhead view of a large crowd waving flags and torchlights packed into several streets.

Screenshot of the false post on X taken on May 6, 2025

The video surfaced elsewhere on X and Threads after Taiwan's opposition Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People's Party (TPP) held a protest against Lai and the ruling DPP on April 26, vowing to push for a motion to recall the president -- whom they accused of being a "dictator" (archived link).

The KMT claimed more than 250,000 supporters attended the rally on Ketagalan Boulevard, a major Taipei thoroughfare that leads to the Presidential Office.

Lai said the next day that the rally demonstrates that "Taiwan is a democratic country", the island's English-language media Taipei Times reported (archived link).

However, the video circulating online is unrelated and predates the protest.

Reverse image searches on Google, followed by keyword searches on TikTok, found the original clip uploaded to TikTok on January 14, 2024, a day after presidential elections in the island (archived link).

"At least we have tried our best. We also successfully proved to society that Taiwan is not just made up of blue and green," the traditional Chinese post reads in part, referring to the colours that signify Taiwan's main political parties, the KMT and DPP.

It also features hashtags for TPP presidential candidate and former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je, who won about a quarter of the votes and has since been charged with corruption and misusing political donations (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the video from the false post (left) to the original TikTok video

The scene in the clip corresponds to Google Street View imagery of Ketagalan Boulevard, where Ko's supporters gathered for a January 12, 2024 rally ahead of the presidential elections (archived here and here).

AFP also published a video of the TPP rally, which shows similar elements seen in the TikTok video, including a large TPP campaign banner and a Taiwanese flag in front of the East Gate (archived link).

Screenshot comparison of the image taken from the false post (left) and AFP video

Ko's 2024 presidential election campaign theme song, "Walk Steadily", can be heard in the background of the video (archived link).

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