Let’s be honest: Taiwan’s renewable energy journey has never been only about technology. It has always been wrapped up in stories, fears, and political battles, and those battles have become more intense in recent years. After Typhoon Danas struck Taiwan, tens of thousands of solar panels in the south were left shattered and scattered across fields and fishponds. The visual alone was alarming, but the real damage came afterward, when old, discredited rumours about solar panels leaking toxic chemicals and heavy metals crawled back to life. These falsehoods mutated and spread through social media and even mainstream outlets, making the information environment around green energy more hostile than ever. The government’s response, however, was slow and fragmented. By the time officials tried to correct the record, the rumours had already gone viral and hardened into belief. As Ming-tse Hung’s research makes clear, this is exactly the wrong way to handle misinformation. Taiwan has been fighting these narratives with a fire extinguisher instead of building a firebreak. The country needs a proactive, comprehensive strategy that understands how misinformation actually spreads and how people actually consume it. Without that, it is nearly impossible to hold a rational, informed conversation about climate and energy policy—and without that conversation, Taiwan’s chances of building a resilient, sustainable energy system are seriously weakened.
The challenge has become even more urgent because of how quickly Taiwan’s media habits are changing. Facebook is still important, but short-video platforms have surged in popularity. The numbers tell the story: the percentage of Taiwanese people who said they watched content on TikTok jumped from 18.7 percent in 2019 to 47.5 percent in 2025. That is not just a shift in technology; it is a transformation of the public sphere. TikTok’s design rewards short, emotional, provocative clips, and its algorithms push users into echo chambers where they see more of what they already agree with and less of what challenges them. This creates ideal conditions for misinformation. Researchers who analysed TikTok posts about Taiwan’s renewable energy in 2025 found many videos using unattributed, heavily edited footage to attack green energy. One common false claim says solar panels are cleaned with toxic chemicals. Videos of cleaning workers in China are presented as evidence that workers in Taiwan are poisoning drinking water supplies. Another old rumour about hydrochloric acid being used on panels keeps resurfacing in edited clips, even though it was debunked years ago. There are also videos that repurpose footage of solar farms in China to falsely claim that Taiwan’s mountains are being buried under solar panels. Meanwhile, official clarifications and independent fact-checks are sparse, confined to a handful of platforms, and rarely reach the audiences most vulnerable to these lies. That gap is exactly what allows falsehoods to take root.
A particularly telling case shows why simple fact-checking is no longer enough. After Typhoon Danas, Taiwan’s government tried to address fears about heavy metals from damaged panels by conducting a rigorous scientific experiment. The Ministry of Environment took debris from the panels and immersed it in strong acid for months, a far more extreme test than anything that would occur naturally. The results showed that the release of heavy metals was negligible. But instead of ending the rumours, the data were immediately twisted. Critics of renewable energy compared the experimental acid-leaching numbers directly to drinking water safety standards, even though those standards are designed for completely different conditions. They then claimed that solar panels in reservoirs could release lead at levels far exceeding legal limits. That distorted narrative became one of the most widely shared misinformation themes on TikTok. The lesson is crucial: in today’s information environment, facts alone do not win. Data can be weaponised within hours. A press release, no matter how scientifically sound, can be turned into a weapon by people who understand how to exploit public distrust. To avoid this, authorities need to think several steps ahead. They need to anticipate how different actors will react, what false comparisons they might make, and what emotional hooks they will use. They also need to understand that piecemeal responses—a fact-check here, a statement there—are structurally incapable of keeping up with narratives that mutate as they move across platforms. What is needed is a coordinated, collaborative approach involving many different voices, not just the government speaking into the void.
The problem is made even more difficult by politics. In Taiwan, energy misinformation on TikTok is not really about energy. It is about political warfare. The posts analysed in the research show a deeply partisan information space, where renewable energy is used as ammunition to attack political opponents. The media outlets producing misinformation and the accounts sharing it tend to have clear political allegiances. Comment sections are flooded with angry rhetoric accusing the ruling party of using green energy to enrich itself, hollow out the economy, and poison the environment. Green energy supporters are routinely vilified as loyalists of the regime, while independent fact-checkers and environmental groups are smeared as government proxies. The result is that factual discussion is replaced by ideological and emotional combat. People are not evaluating evidence; they are expressing identity and anger. This makes government-led communication incredibly difficult. When every official statement is seen through a partisan lens, even an honest clarification can be dismissed as propaganda. The article argues that any credible strategy for addressing misinformation must take this political dynamic seriously. That does not mean the government should pick a side in a partisan fight. It means understanding how these narratives are used to mobilise anger, and finding ways to communicate through voices and channels that are not already seen as tainted by political alignment.
Another common mistake is treating people who consume misinformation as one giant, uniform group. In reality, the communities affected by each wave of falsehood are diverse. A rumour about solar panel pollution may resonate deeply with fish farmers in southern Taiwan, whose livelihoods depend on clean water, but it might barely register with urban professionals in Taipei. Age, occupation, geography, and media habits all shape how people receive and interpret information. Because of this, there is no single magic-bullet solution. Each incident requires a tailored response from the actor best positioned to reach the right audience—sometimes a government agency, but often a local community leader, a civil society group, a village organisation, or a private company. This is not just a Taiwanese problem. Governments around the world are increasingly confronting the threat that misinformation poses to climate action, and they are discovering that traditional top-down approaches have serious limits. At COP30, the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change launched the Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change. The message was simple but powerful: solving the climate crisis requires broad engagement from every part of society, and information integrity is the essential foundation for that engagement. But the relationship works both ways. Just as information integrity enables collaboration, collaboration is also the only way to protect information integrity. Communities, businesses, civil society, media organisations, and academia all have a role to play. Without that two-way relationship, neither clean energy progress nor trustworthy information can survive.
So what should Taiwan actually do? The first step is to stop treating each misinformation outbreak as an isolated incident and start seeing it as a systemic challenge. These falsehoods are not random blips; they are symptoms of an information ecosystem that rewards outrage and punishes nuance. Taiwan needs to move from incident-based crisis management to a structural understanding of the information landscape. That means mapping how narratives travel across platforms, identifying the networks that amplify them, and predicting how they might mutate. It also means expanding the response system far beyond the government, building a collaborative network that includes civil society, local communities, media organisations, academics, and even technology companies. Such a network could detect false narratives earlier, respond more quickly, and reach vulnerable groups with messages that respect their concerns and speak their language. It could also help Taiwan pre-empt misinformation, addressing potential fears before they are exploited rather than scrambling to debunk the latest viral clip. None of this is easy, and no single policy will fix it. But if Taiwan truly wants a successful energy transition, it has to treat misinformation as a first-order strategic challenge. The future of renewable energy in Taiwan depends not just on better solar panels, better grids, and better investment, but also on better stories, better trust, and better systems for keeping the truth intact in a digital world that is fast, polarised, and full of noise. The choice is clear: keep fighting the old way and watch each rumour do its damage, or build a proactive, collaborative strategy that gives the truth a real fighting chance.