Speech: Post-Truth, Deceptive AI, and the Politics of East Asia
Speaker: Professor Florian Alexander SCHNEIDER（Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Institute for Area Studies, Leiden University, Netherlands）
Host: Professor Chang-Ling HUANG（Director of the GARC and Professor of the Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University）
Time: 12:30-14:00
Date: 15 May, 2026
Venue: Room 108, College of Social Sciences, National Taiwan University
About Kim-Koo NTU Professor Public Talk
Each year, the College of Social Sciences and the Global Asia Research Center invite a globally renowned scholar to serve as the NTU-Kim Koo Professor and teach a mini-course. This annual NTU-Kim Koo Professorship Lecture Series enables students and faculty members to exchange scholarly ideas with distinguished scholars beyond Taiwan. This year, we are more than honored to have Professor Florian Alexander SCHNEIDER from Leiden University to talk about Post-Truth, Deceptive AI, and the Politics of East Asia.
Speech introduction
In China, a number of young men become convinced they have caught HIV/AIDS, despite all medical evidence to the contrary – online, they find likeminded people who share their peculiar affliction. In Japan, when a typhoon hits Kansai airport, malicious rumours about the Taiwanese travellers stranded there drive a diplomat to suicide. And around the world, news readers marvel at the brutality of the North Korean regime, as false claims make the headlines that Kim Jung Un fed his uncle to the dogs. We live in societies shaped by rumours and conspiracy theories, and despite hopes that advances in ICT would create ‘see-for-yourself’ cultures in which citizens can ground their politics in easily accessible, verifiable facts, digital networks have instead become sites of struggles over beliefs and personal truths. Innovations in generative artificial intelligence seem to further amplify these trends, enabling new but often deceptive human-machine interactions. Drawing from his work on mis- and disinformation, and on digital politics more broadly, Florian Schneider asks what conflicts over information and meaning-making in digital Asia can tell us about politics in advanced networked societies. Using examples from East Asia, and especially the Chinese-speaking world, he argues that unverified information is part of near-ubiquitous political practices, and that corporate social media and AI threaten to amplify those practices in ways that lead to a decoupling of realities. Digital processes in East Asia are a crucial site for researching such practices, as the region features a long-standing engagement with polarized online debates and struggles over unverified digital information. This talk explores the anatomy of contested information, its genealogy across complex socio-technical systems, and its pathologies, that is: the way such information is a product of, and in turn produces, power in local and regional networks. The talk concludes with lessons from Taiwan, most notably the need for a calm, deliberate approach that emphasises personal interactions and empathy.
About Florian Alexander Schneider
Florian Schneider is Chair Professor of Modern China at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies. He is managing editor of Asiascape: Digital Asia, academic director of the Leiden Asia Centre, and the author of several books, including: Studying Political Communication and Media in East Asia – A Playful Approach (Amsterdam University Press, 2025), Staging China: the Politics of Mass Spectacle (Leiden University Press, 2019, recipient of the ICAS Book Prize 2021 Accolades), and China’s Digital Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2018). His research interests include questions of governance, political communication, and digital media in China and East Asia, as well as international relations in the region.