Taiwan's Legislative Yuan has sharply cut the Mainland Affairs Council's (MAC) media-outreach budget, and academics and the ruling party warn this is bad news for Taiwan's information defences, making it easier instead for Chinese messaging to penetrate.

• With the central government's general budget for this year passed on its third reading, media-outreach funds across all ministries and agencies were uniformly halved, and the MAC was cut even more severely: its media-outreach budget of about NT$13 million was almost entirely eliminated, leaving only 12%.
• Scholars point out that even if the government understands China's united-front tactics towards Taiwan and the risks of cross-strait exchanges, it has no money to convey this information effectively to the public.
• China can push messaging into Taiwan through social media, short videos and cross-strait exchanges, yet the government's resources to counter this are being constrained, widening the information gap.
• DPP legislators warn that if the public is unaware of the direction of China's legal changes, those travelling to China could be detained, which both endangers their personal safety and allows China to use this to claim it holds jurisdiction over Taiwan.

Outlook: In the second half of the year the MAC will find it harder to counter cognitive warfare originating from China, and the risk of the information gap may be borne by Taiwanese society.