Audrey Tang: Hello and good local time everyone.

Julian Morrow: [chuckles] Audrey, after Donald Trump’s presidency, I think it’s pretty common, especially in Australia to see new technology, and especially social media as a threat to democracy as it’s been traditionally understood, but Taiwan today is a model of how that might not be the case. Could you outline for us, some of the key digital initiatives that Taiwan has undertaken to enhance democracy?

Audrey Tang: Certainly, so we have our own prosocial social media that’s maintained by seated National Taiwan University, the name’s called PTT, and It’s been for 25 years free of advertiser or shareholders, squarely in the social sector as a public forum, and so that is the place.

Audrey Tang: For example, in 2019 December, when Dr. Lee Wenliang from Wuhan did his whistleblowing to highlight that there were, and I quote, “Seven SARS cases in the Huanan Seafood Market,” it gets reposted on PTT almost immediately which resulted in people triaging these news. The very next day we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That shows that the government trusts the citizens to raise the alarm bell and have a really good solid discussion about the whereabouts of the new SARS variants. Also, that the citizens trust each other enough to talk about this publicly.

Julian Morrow: What sort of digital mechanisms are there for individual citizens in Taiwan to participate to policy making?

Audrey Tang: It varies. For example, a really young boy, I think a middle schooler called this toll free number, 1922 which we set up to enlist everyone’s help in reporting what’s actually happening when it comes to counter pandemic efforts.

Audrey Tang: More than two million calls were placed, last year alone to this toll free number. This call center listened to this young boy saying, that April saying that, “Hey, I only got pink medical mask for your rationing out mask, but I don’t want to wear it to school because all the boys in my class have navy blue mask. I will be laughed at,” and so on. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: On the very next day, on the 2:00 PM daily Central Epidemic Command Center, CECC press conference, all the medical officers including the minister wore pink. Minister Chen even said that, “Pink Panther is my childhood hero.”

Audrey Tang: The boy became the most hip boy in the class for only he has the color that a heroes there and here wear, I guess.

Audrey Tang: This toll free number, it seems not much, but it’s what we call listening at scale. People who have Internet access, we have broadband as human right, of course, can watch the live stream and post your ideas on, say, the Join platform, which is a national petition platform.

Audrey Tang: After eliciting 5,000 signatures, the ministers have to just respond, point by point, to the citizens’ petitions but sometimes just a single phone call changes how people view pink masks.

Julian Morrow: That’s fascinating. The Join platform, you said that the trigger there is 5,000 digital signatures, is that right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Julian Morrow: How often is that trigger met? Do those petitions result in substantial policy changes?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. About half of the petitions that went above the 5,000 thresholds resulted in actual regulatory or law changes. Half doesn’t sound much, but considering that for some contentious and controversial topics, there’s literally two competing petitions, one for and one against. Not likely that will be significantly more than 50 percent.

Audrey Tang: For example, there was a young lady, who just turned 17 when she proposed that we ban plastic straws from the take outs of the national identity drink, such as bubble tea, but really, all drinks. That elicit 5,000 signature very quickly. Because we allow pseudonyms, we didn’t know that she was just 17 at that moment, with a very serious environmental activists, so that 5,000 people joins them very quickly.

Audrey Tang: When we met her, we asked, “So why are you raising this petition, it’s obviously catching on?” She said, “Well, it’s my civics class assignment.” [laughs] Obviously, we are now seeing a lot more young people, more than one quarter of the petitions. Successful petitions were started by people younger than 18.

Julian Morrow: That’s fascinating. I understand that the Join platform is — and forgive my technical ignorance here — it operates using a system called Pol.is, is that correct?

Audrey Tang: For the particularly controversial topics, we enlist the help of the Pol.is, it’s a machine learning system. We use Pol.is only when there is more than three ministerial angles so that even within the government, we couldn’t quite get to the same viewpoints.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, Pol.is is a kind of a machine learning moderator. How it works is that for issues like Uber, when Uber first came to Taiwan in 2015, it work with people without professional driver license calling a UberX. We enlisted the help of police asking all the Uber drivers, taxi drivers, passengers and so on to go to this platform, which is like a survey.

Audrey Tang: The survey is created by people sharing how they feel. Instead of the government doing the survey, the people wikisourced  crowdsourced the agenda. There’s people saying, “Oh, I feel much more safe if the passenger liability insurance is allowed on the UberX cars, and there’s people who say, “Oh, I want them to not undercut existing meters,” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: After three weeks of reflection, we get this very beautiful picture of people agreeing to disagree on just a few ideological issues, whether it’s sharing economy or gig economy. Most of people agree with most of their neighbors and most of the time on the more practical issues. We simply took that and made a multipurpose taxi law. Uber is a legal taxi now that the few taxis in Taiwan.

Julian Morrow: How do Taiwan’s digital democracy initiatives affect, if at all, its risk profile in terms of cyber warfare?

Audrey Tang: I believe if people have listened carefully to all the sides, they don’t have to take all the sides. Just listen carefully to all the sides. They’ve become much more immune to disinformation campaigns and to what the WHO calls the infodemic, infodemic is not necessarily false, is just overwhelming amount of noise or a signal you don’t really know anymore.

Audrey Tang: The contextualization service that people participate in a Join platform, in Pol.is and so on, allow people to take a much wider perspective so they are less likely to be outraged just by one biased photo, deepfake or something and just blindly share it. Rather, they will see that it’s not likely because they’ve seen the arguments from the other side and they don’t look quite like that.

Audrey Tang: I would say that this deliberation, both online and in person deliberation, is like a vaccination of the mind. People who have seen the issue from various perspectives gained this media competence and are less likely to be taken over by disinformation.

Julian Morrow: What proportion of the Taiwanese population engage with these platforms?

Audrey Tang: The Join platform — our yearly active participation count is around 10 million people. That’s roughly half of our adult population. The 1922, as I mentioned, probably has more than four million calls now. People are aware of these platforms, but of course, they do not follow each and every deliberation subject.

Audrey Tang: If they identify something that affects them personally or if they really want something to get absorbed quicker than the four year election cycle, then they know that this platform is a place to go.

Julian Morrow: On Sunday Extra we’re speaking with Taiwan’s digital minister, Audrey Tang, about the initiatives of digital democracy that have attracted the attention of the world in Taiwan.

Julian Morrow: Audrey, I understand that the open democracy model of Taiwan very much stems back to the Occupy movement and the Sunflower movement. Could you recap those events for the Australian audience and tell us how you feel they reshaped Taiwan’s politics?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. In 2014 much, I personally participated in the Sunflower movement and the movement was a demonstration against the parliament’s sudden ratification of the Cross Strait Service in Trade Agreement, or CSSTA, was the Beijing regime, because the MPs were refusing to deliberate in substantially line by line, the people occupied their office to do their job for them.

Audrey Tang: I guess that’s the legitimacy theory anyway. [laughs] For three weeks, people occupied the parliament, but not a demonstration in the sense of protest, but rather a non violent demonstration. This is a demo.

Audrey Tang: With the help of more than 28 NGOs, each deliberated on one particular aspect of their trade deal. For example, there’s one corner of their Parliament Street deliberating about whether we want to include the PRC made components into our brand new 4G infrastructure, whether that makes market sense or whether it will incur additional costs on cybersecurity audits.

Audrey Tang: Of course, for the past couple years, everybody else around is having the same conversation, but it is 5G. We did that conversation on the street, with half a million people on the street and many more online. After three weeks, almost magically, we reach a sense of good enough consensus, which was then ratified by the head of the parliament. The Occupy was, in a sense, a victory.

Audrey Tang: Right afterwards in the end of 2014, in the mayoral election, all the mayor candidates that supported Occupy get elected, sometimes surprisingly even for themselves. The people who did not support urban government and civic participation didn’t win.

Audrey Tang: That’s when the major parties stopped arguing on how to be transparent or whether to be transparent, but everybody understand exactly how and why. They just compete on being more transparent than other parties.

Julian Morrow: Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your personal role in the Sunflower movement, because you were something of the hands on IT professional when it came to the Occupy protests, didn’t it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s right. There were some lawyers working pro bono to protect the legal rights of the Occupiers. There are medical professionals who provide pro bono service for the health of the occupiers. I guess I’m part of the g0v or gov zero community that provided free broadband communication to protect the right to communicate in an occupied place.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, rumors spread very quickly, but through live streaming so that people walking across the street of the parliaments can see what’s going on in real time projection and real time stenography. The court reporters are working within the occupied parliaments, they can follow exactly what’s going on. That are, in turn, translated into multiple languages.

Julian Morrow: Audrey, in Australia and around the world, there’s been much debate about political advertising and political information, particularly on social media platforms. What has Taiwan’s approach been to this issue?

Audrey Tang: The gov-zero, g0v community, the civic technologists feel very strongly about campaign expenditures, transparency. Even before the National Auditing Office in Taiwan opened up that data, its open data previously in 2015, it only provided as Xerox copies, like A4 copies with watermarks on it.

Audrey Tang: The g0v people, me included, walked into the Control Yuan, the office, brought out the Xerox copies, digitized them, scanned them, and asked people to participate in reverse engineering it into the Excel spreadsheets.

Audrey Tang: Because of the structure data was reverse engineered, the Control Yuan and the legislature were forced pressured by the social sector to pass a new act amendments that made campaign donation expanded so it’s free as open data so that investigative journalists can follow.

Audrey Tang: Because the strong norm is here already, when Facebook and other social media tried to say, “No, these are advertisements. These are just social and political issues during election seasons,” the people will have none of it and actually threatened social sanction if they treat it the sponsored advertisement differently than campaign donations.

Audrey Tang: In 2019, Taiwan became one of the first, if not the first, jurisdictions where Facebook agreed that all the political and social advertisement are treated as campaign donations, meaning that only domestic funding sources are allowed, and exactly how this payment are made must be made in real time transparent just like our National Audit Office does.

Julian Morrow: You mentioned earlier the approach to disinformation. I gather that the strategy is summarized by the concepts of fast, fair, and fun, which is both very concise and also sounds a lot more engaging than perhaps some of the approaches that have been taken in Australia. Could you outline Taiwan’s fast, fair, and fun approach to disinformation for us, please?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. Fast, fair, and fun applies both to countering the pandemic with no lockdown and countering the infodemic with no takedown.

Audrey Tang: Under countering disinformation front, what we have is a very fast network of people who volunteer to report, even in end to end encrypted channels like Line, which is like WhatsApp. People, after they see something that’s dubious, just like flagging incoming email as spam. They could long press and flag it to, say, our leading antivirus company, the Trend Micro or to g0v communities, Cofacts initiative among others.

Audrey Tang: Now, once they flag it — and sufficient number of people do so — then we have a very quick map of what’s the trending disinformation candidates. We only focus our energy on the ones that have a higher than one basic reproduction rate. On average, more than one person will share it to more than one person that is to say going viral.

Audrey Tang: Focusing on debunking and adding context, we enlist professional comedians. In each and every ministry, there’s professional public servants that are in charge engaging the public.

Audrey Tang: The engagement or participation officers are sometimes comedians themselves, or they work closely with professional comedians. Like our Minister of Health and Welfare Preservation Office that lives was this very cute dog, Shiba Inu. The name is Zongchai.

Audrey Tang: For example, when there’s a disinformation about mask use, a very cute dog, a Shiba puts their food out their mouths and said, “Masks are there to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands.”

Audrey Tang: When people need explanation about physical distance, we say, “When you’re indoor, keep three Shibas away from one another. When you’re out there, keep two Shibas away.” It was this really cute picture.

Audrey Tang: Internet is built for sharing cute cat and dog pictures. Disinformation debunking clarification actually are more viral than the disinformation that we’re debunking, reaching a higher R value. Again, people who have seen this cute dog cannot unsee it, so they become inoculated against these conspiracy theories against mask use.

Julian Morrow: Another actual metrics which can demonstrate that the penetration of disinformation in Taiwan is significantly lower than other places in the world?

Audrey Tang: If you go to the fact checker.line.me, the Line end to end encrypted messenger offers such a dashboard. It shows that close to 500K disinformation pieces have been flagged and uniquely is about 100K so far. It shows exactly how many people are asking for clarification and exactly how quickly did a professional fact checkers and collaboration partners provide such fact checking results.

Audrey Tang: I think the numbers speak for themselves. We welcome comparison with many other jurisdictions when it comes to a real time response. In Taiwan, on average, our clarifications are rolled out around one hour after a viral disinformation are found, at most two hours.

Julian Morrow: That’s amazing. Audrey Tang, in the tech industry, innovation is often associated with a lot of failures and sometimes failures can create a kernel of biggest successes in the future. Are there some policy innovations that you look back on now as constructive failures or just failures?

Audrey Tang: That’s an excellent question. Last February, when we invented this mask rationing idea, the idea is that because we have a country of 23 million people but only manufacture less than 2 million medical grade masks a day.

Audrey Tang: We basically set all the pharmacies all around Taiwan receive a fixed number of masks and people can use their national health cards to collect those masks. It sounds beautiful and we even overlate the pharmacist place with the population centers.

Audrey Tang: They align almost perfectly so that we can see that each person no matter where they are in Taiwan, they can reach the nearest pharmacy with a fixed number of mask, with exactly the same distance on average. But after we roll it out, it didn’t quite work like that.

Audrey Tang: A member of the Parliament MP (KAO, Hung-An，高虹安) , who previously worked as VP of Data Analytics at Foxconn, she knows something about data, she said that it’s not like that because not everyone own a helicopter. The idea is everyone has the same distance of access to pharmacy.

Audrey Tang: But for people in rural places where people have to take public transportation, the time, the opportunity cost is not the same. Sometimes they have to spend three or four hours just to reach the same distance. By the time they arrive to the pharmacy, it’s already out of stock. So obviously this data is biased.

Audrey Tang: We see the data on the map, but not everyone in a helicopter. Minister Chen simply said, “OK legislator, teach us.” The very next day, after working with the OpenStreetMap community, we not only changed the distribution of the mask to pharmacy but also included the 24 hours operating convenience stores into the distribution and introduced every ordering system.

Audrey Tang: Because of this creative feedback, any bias or any policy failures, are just failures for at most one week. We always say, “OK, very good idea. Let’s fix it next Thursday.””

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Our social innovations — fast and fun — are built upon the basic idea of universal broadband as a human right. No matter where you are in Taiwan, even on the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high, you’re guaranteed 10 megabits per second.

Audrey Tang: Actually, by directional exits, if you don’t, it’s my fault. People do hold me accountable. Writing the email, saying that Ministry guarantees broadband as human right. Unquarantined, it is Yao Ming Mountain place.

Audrey Tang: On this particular corner I don’t have any reception of the 4G network. We will install a new tower there in just a couple weeks’ time. But anyway, what I’m trying to say is that universal broadband and universal digital competence, that is to say, that people in primary, middle schools are not just learning about literacy, but fact checking the presidential candidates as they are debating, for example.

Audrey Tang: All these, I think, are universally applicable ideas and building upon that, then we have the room for social innovations.

Audrey Tang: We’re quite happy that people around the world are now having the same sort of conversation that we had on the street with half a million people during the Sunflower Movement in 2014, right? Our conversation around 4G eventually resulted in our National Communications Commission saying, “We do not allow any PRC so-called private sector components in our 4G infrastructure.”

Audrey Tang: Because every time there is a update we have to redo another system risk assessment to see they have been, de facto, taken over by the Beijing regime. I believe people around the world are now reaching very similar conclusions that we reached in 2014, so I guess we’re happy and we’re eager to have more dialogues around these topics with people around the world.

Audrey Tang: Definitely, I think when people experience democracy on a day to day basis, then people will understand that, well, it’s everyone’s business was everyone’s help, and therefore more aligned to the democratic ideals.

Audrey Tang: If someone has only experience to democracy is just uploading three bits for four years, which is called voting, by the way, which is very important, of course, but the democracy is not on our minds if the interval is just every four years.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, the system that I outlined, the social innovation platforms, Presidential Hackathon, regulatory sandboxes, participatory budgeting, epetitions and so on, on a very accessible Join platform, made sure that people understand exactly how democracy works.

Audrey Tang: Just like the Hong Kong foreign correspondents back in the ‘80s, when I was born, Taiwan was still under martial law at the time, helped Taiwan to voice its concerns, when it comes to the martial law situation.

Audrey Tang: We’re now also providing a safe space for people from Hong Kong, to voice their concerns, and also to hold for example, the Oslo Freedom Forum, among other international NGOs that want to still put a focus and pressure on the more repressive regimes happening around this region.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, live long and prosper.

Audrey Tang: I’ll just Dropbox the two local recordings and let me know when you’re publishing them and we’ll probably make a transcript and also publish after you do.

Audrey Tang: OK. Awesome. Thank you. Bye for now.