Audrey Tang: When did you arrive?

Shari Bryan: We arrived either last night or Manpreet arrived this morning at five o’clock.

Audrey Tang: Wow. Jet lagged?

Manpreet Singh Anand: Perhaps later in the day.

Audrey Tang: Still feeling OK now?

Manpreet Singh Anand: Yeah, still feeling OK.

Audrey Tang: I’ll speak in my normal speed then.

Shari Bryan: Not too fast. I know you can speak really fast.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. What would you like to talk about? I understand you just came from the DPP?

Shari Bryan: We came from DPP. We’re going to be meeting with a variety of people in government, outside of government. We’re attending a conference starting tomorrow on INFO/tegrity and disinformation. There’s another conference that we’re going to stop in.

Manpreet Singh Anand: AIT is working with TFD for the conference on INFO/tegrity, but then there’s also a launch of the Indo Pacific Governance Consultations…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. I’ll probably be there too.

Shari Bryan: OK.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Oh, OK. We’ll see you there as well.

Shari Bryan: We’re not there for the entire thing, but just for one section.

Manpreet Singh Anand: No, just for the civil society portion. We’re going to meet a number of folks in government, in the private sector, foundations, interspersed throughout the week.

Shari Bryan: It was a combination of TECRO had invited us to come and visit. Then we also had this INFO/tegrity conference that NDI is part of the planning process, so we decided to do all of it this week, and it just coincided with this other event.

Audrey Tang: I think the Taiwan model of fighting disinformation I’ve outlined actually in my NDI speech of the placing the power in the community sector -- as we say here, the social sector -- rather than the private or the public sector, if you have any thoughts around that.

Audrey Tang: At the end of this month I think our let’s say alternate model, a Singaporean model, is going to take effect in Singapore, where the minister like me can auto correct anything on any media. It will be very interesting looking at the two. Neither are take down cyber norms, but concentrates the power in very different directions and how it plays out.

Shari Bryan: I don’t know. Your presentation at NDI was so amazing. I don’t know what you were thinking about sharing. Because Manpreet wasn’t able to meet with you, he had not joined NDI at that point, I think it would be great to have some version.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I’ll quickly, because we have 40 minutes, maybe take 10 minutes to go through my slides that talk about the Taiwan model without making any specific technological references. If you want to dive in on any specific part, just interrupt me, and we can talk about that specific part.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Kip may want to dive in.

Manpreet Singh Anand: (laughter)

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Kip Wainscott: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: It’s just saying I’ll not begin by speaking in JavaScript or something.

Audrey Tang: (laughter)

Shari Bryan: We all appreciate that.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the Taiwan model of countering disinformation is centered on the principle of the SDG Target 17, which is, encourage effective partnerships, relying mostly on the social sector to counter disinformation. We call it the Search for Collective Solutions.

Audrey Tang: It is not a single company or a single minister saying, “This is the solution.” This is us initiating a collaborative search for collective solutions. We have witnessed the more open the society is, the more authentic journalists there are in a society, interestingly, the more threat disinformation is to that jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: To talk about this phenomenon, we don’t use the F word, which is very misleading because 新聞 in Mandarin is a translation of both news and journalism. Someone worked at news is 新聞工作者. Saying the F word, referring to the news, is also a affront to journalism. That’s a specific, original linguistic issue. Both my parents are journalists, so out of filial piety…

Audrey Tang: (laughter)

Audrey Tang: …I simply cannot use the F word. [laughs]

Shari Bryan: That’s interesting. That’s important.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we call it disinformation, or 假訊息. We have a legal definition, defined by Minister LO Ping-Cheng, in charge of the policies. The definition, legally, is intentional, harmful, untruth. All three conditions must be met, and harmful must be to the public.

Audrey Tang: For example, the foundation of democracy is public health. When SARS, for example, is spreading, an epidemic is spreading, and you’re spreading disinformation intentionally to harm people’s body, democracy simply doesn’t work without living people. That is disinformation, and that is not to be protected by free speech.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, democracy is founded on the factual deliberation of policies during an election. During an election, if you attack the very foundation of the facts, then again, that harms the public, not just the image of a minister or a candidate. Those are just good journalism, because they’re not harmful to the public. Here we mean public harm.

Audrey Tang: We are the only jurisdiction nearby that have not compromised in any way on this core principle in response to disinformation, as evidenced by the CIVICUS Monitor, which you might be very familiar with. Japan is doing OK, but everybody else is seriously considering or already adopting a model that recentralizes power in response to disinformation crisis.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan model basically is three defenses and three proactive actions. The first defense is that from a rumor to a clarification across all ministries is 60 minutes. The latest, when we see a trending rumor, the latest is that it’s expected there’s within an hour a clarification. We call it mimetic engineering, that we must make a clarification that is funny, that goes viral, that reaches more people than the disinformation.

Audrey Tang: You cannot just say that it’s false, because if you only say it’s false, in Taiwan, we have a word, 打臉, a slap in the face. It tend to reinforce the conspiracy theorists. It doesn’t actually promote partnership for the goals. This is a typical clarification message pushed within one hour after a trending rumor.

Audrey Tang: It says, “Popular rumor, perming your hair will be subject to a one million NT dollar fine next week. That’s not true.” Then our prime minister shows a photo in his youth and he’s saying, “I may be bald now, but will not punish people who have hair,” said Premier Su. The fine print that says, “A labeling requirement we just introduced is for hair products and it take effect only on 2021.”

Audrey Tang: That’s the factual part. The second image, that’s the mimetic engineering, which I didn’t translate that. I’ll translate it now. It’s the premier as he looks now. It says, “However, if you perm your hair many times a week, it would damage your hair. When serious, you will end up looking like me.”

Audrey Tang: That is a kind of anatomy of our clarification message. It’s genuinely funny. It’ll reach far more people than the original rumor and will have the so called triple two principle. The title must be less than 20 characters, the body less than 200 characters, and at least two images. It has to fit a portrait screen on the phone.

Maeve Whelan-Wuest: How did you decide that this was the appropriate way to respond?

Audrey Tang: We didn’t as much decide as evolved. Like every other frame didn’t work.

Manpreet Singh Anand: So trial and error.

Audrey Tang: It’s a trial and error. I mean, in 2017, I remember raising in a Cabinet meeting that this timely clarification is my suggestion to all the minister, that they have to be timely, that they have to be open, and that they have to be structured. The timely and openness gradually improved.

Audrey Tang: The credit should go to the two spokespersons during this time, Minsiter Hsu Kuo-yung and Kolas Yokata. As for structured, it took us almost two years to reach this structure. The earlier structures weren’t that viral. They weren’t maybe as viral as the disinformation. Now we arrived at this structure, thanks mostly to Kolas Yotaka and her team, that almost always is more viral than the rumor.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Does it mean that you need to -- I’m just thinking from a mechanical standpoint -- have to start building capacity within each of your ministries for people who…

Shari Bryan: Are funny.

Audrey Tang: Who are funny. That’s right.

Manpreet Singh Anand: …are funny, can be responsive, understand?

Audrey Tang: We have to poach people or fight against the likes of 9GAG and so on. Like professional memetic engineers into the ministries. Also, the policy people and the politics people. Each team in each ministry, at least five functions.

Audrey Tang: Our spokesperson Kolas Yotaka has a complete list, and they also have a kind of dashboard that shows how quickly, how structured, and how viral every other ministry is doing. It’s like a friendly collaboration.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Competition.

Audrey Tang: Because they often respond to each other, so it’s very dynamic.

Shari Bryan: This power of using humor, I think, is so interesting. I’m more interested in this right now, because NDI this year, every year, we have an annual event, where we give our Democracy Award to some famous person around the world. This year, we’re giving our award to humorist and satirist.

Shari Bryan: We’re looking at countries that have started the equivalent of a “Daily Show,” and the role of satire and comedy, political comedy and humor, in an evolving democracy. We’re just starting to learn the impact of this, and that there actually is data and research that shows that people are more susceptible to understanding the message when it is done in a humorous way.

Audrey Tang: Humorous way, and a highly interactive way.

Shari Bryan: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: That’s what I mean by openness. People will see that the deputy premiere and the premiere have a public dialog on social media around this clarification. That’s very important. Also, I will also add to that point that live stream is a really good way for interaction, because people can keep commenting on a social object that evolves with time.

Audrey Tang: We have our deputy premiere, for example, live stream a session where he play a popular Taiwanese video game. It’s very funny, actually, to just watch him stumble.

Audrey Tang: It’s a horror game, by the way, so strong emotions, but very social. I think hundreds of thousands of people watched concurrently.

Kip Wainscott: Wow.

Audrey Tang: It’s a huge number. It’s a huge number. It reached a very large amount of people, just looking at our deputy premier playing a video game…

Audrey Tang: Which is called Devotion. That is actually, went internationally famous when there was a Taoist rune in it that contained the word “Winnie the Pooh” and gets banned by the PRC.

Manpreet Singh Anand: I heard about that.

Audrey Tang: He was playing that game right before Steam took it down. [laughs]

Kip Wainscott: Oh, really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so, it’s also very political. Then it’s also very humorous, in fact.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Yes, Winnie the Pooh. Never would have imagined it took on such political connotations.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. I’ll move on. That’s our first line of defense. Our second line of defense, which thanks partly to NDI’s contributions, is essentially a crowdsourced community that does fact checking. We have two tiers of that. The first tier, you’re already very familiar with, is a Line bot called Cofacts. Anyone can flag something as spam by forwarding it to the bot.

Audrey Tang: The bot goes with a response, just like a wiki that says, “Here are our netizens’ input of fact checking”    there may be several    “about this one.” A bot from Trend Micro, which is our leading antivirus company here, then if you invite that bot into your chatroom, they automatically scans each incoming message. They didn’t keep a log, but they check it against the fact check Cofact provides.

Audrey Tang: Then immediately responds if it is actually already clarified disinformation with a hopefully more funny clarification message. It’s true social sector private sector partnership. Because the social sector also has a bot called Meiyu that looks very much like the Trend Micro bot, actually works very similarly, and is open source.

Audrey Tang: Even if you don’t believe that Trend Micro is discarding all the logs, your community can easily set up one. That’s the first line in this second approach.

Audrey Tang: Part of the second approach is also have media specialists and professional journalists relying on crowdfunding, and with no money coming ever from politicians and parties, to have a Taiwan fact check center, which is part of the Poynter IFCN, International Fact Checking Network.

Audrey Tang: They do the fact checking by looking at the crowdsourced trend, as well as the crowdsourced leads, and then do a very rigorous fact checking in a journalistic fashion, but publish it publicly, and say that it is false or it is true. Of course, they’re part of the network formed by Line, Facebook, Google, PTT, the usual suspects. They all signed on this counter disinformation, self regulation cyber norm package.

Audrey Tang: Then they took these from Taiwan Fact Check Center that anything they classify as false, with a public account, Facebook demotes its preference. Essentially, move it to the junk mail folder, to use an analogy. Then you have to swipe really hard to see that. Its virality is reduced, then, to only a small fraction, like less than one fifth, or even less than one tenth, of its original reach.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like people donating their private emails as spam by flagging it to Spamhaus, which puts on the DBL, but for everybody else to look at and audit. Then all the email providers, like Gmail or Outlook, then look at that and match the signature using machine learning.

Audrey Tang: Then all the incoming email from that particular center will then land to your junk mail folder until sufficiently, people say that it’s not junk mail again. It’s exactly the same model of the counter spam model. That’s our second approach.

Maeve Whelan-Wuest: How fast does that happen in real time?

Audrey Tang: LINE and Taiwan Fact Check Center has both a dashboard of the average response time. We can look at a real dashboard. We don’t have to rely on historical numbers. That’s Cofacts. Oh, wow, it’s all replied now. There’s nothing that’s not replied, sadly. [laughs] Obviously, it’s pretty quick. The last clarification was seven minutes ago.

Manpreet Singh Anand: It’s not relying on any humans to do any type of verification. Is that accurate?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s crowdsourced, meaning that anyone can…

Manpreet Singh Anand: I mean at Facebook or at any of these technology platforms, there’s nobody going through a deliberative process to…

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan Fact Check Center does that. They rely on social sector partners to essentially do the fact checking for Facebook.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Right, but that’s all user based. Is that accurate?

Audrey Tang: No, the first part, the flagging and contribution of alternate or clarifications, the sourcing part is crowdsourced. Then the Taiwan Fact Check Center take that and do a really rigorous journalistic check that, the latest one being, “Many states in the US is rising up and declaring independence from the federation.”

Audrey Tang: (laughter)

Audrey Tang: Oops, and starting from Alaska. It come from a, surprise, surprise, a Russian agency. Then they list their fact check, and how, what was the dispute points, what was checked, who was interviewed, and things like that. They usually complete this process within 24 hours, sometime quickly.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Oh, OK. I see.

Audrey Tang: That’s the two lines, the crowd and the professional defense. Together, they form a counter spam like, what we call a collaborative checking system. That’s our second line of defense. Any questions?

Kip Wainscott: Yes. Minister, with respect to Facebook in particular, on Line, I understand it’s an encrypted messaging platform. The responses themselves within the chatroom are the mitigating response, right?

Audrey Tang: You do have to voluntarily donate that, because Line doesn’t even have the access to the message.

Kip Wainscott: Of course.

Audrey Tang: They only have access to the stickers.

Kip Wainscott: Right. With respect to some of the other industry partnership, and with Facebook in particular, is there any evidence…Facebook data is notoriously difficult to come by. Do you have sense for whether they are actually…?

Audrey Tang: They publish the virality data to their IFCN partners.

Kip Wainscott: Oh, great.

Audrey Tang: TFCC do have those numbers.

Kip Wainscott: Oh, good. OK.

Audrey Tang: That’s OK? Let’s move on. The third line of defense, which is specifically during the election season. As I understand it, that there is a very similar act in your, I think, House and Senate both, that puts on a platform a requirement during election season to label the advertisement sponsors honestly. Maybe it has passed?

Shari Bryan: I don’t think it has.

Audrey Tang: There was a weird legal precedent that says that if your message is small as a pin, and therefore cannot fit a declaration, then they are exempted. Facebook somehow say bits are small.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really understand the logic, [laughs] but we didn’t have that precedent, so it’s easier for us to pass the same act here. We took that almost word for word from the US, and say, in this parliamentary session, which starts today, that we’re going to pass the Honest Ad Act from the US. You already are very familiar with that act, I am sure, so I will not recite the details.

Audrey Tang: Essentially, we must treat them as campaign donations, with the same transparency. Just like campaign donations in Taiwan cannot be donated by foreign people, if we track the advertisement sponsorship to an extra jurisdictional source, then the person who accepted that is a citizen, including the platform companies, will be subject to a 30 million NT dollar fine. That’s nontrivial.

Audrey Tang: Facebook has helped. They already implemented a system for honest declaration in Taiwan. Currently, it’s opt in, because the law has not passed, but we expect it to pass for the next election.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Before the next election, you said?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. Our campaign finance act is actually the most transparent in the world. First, we have a separate branch to track that. It’s called the Control Branch. It’s independent of the judicial and independent of the legislative. What the Control Yuan did do is that they look at all the individual campaign donations and analyze whether there are corruptions and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They only publish the summary, like a transparency report, of their work. This time, speaking as a civic tech hacktivist, we have campaigned really hard for the Control Yuan to publish the entire raw data as open data on open data of platform for everybody to independently analyze. They were like, “Yeah, but it’s not a social norm,” and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Finally, we, as in the civic tech community, walked in and printed the A4 papers. Using CAPTCHAs to crowdsource the OCR of those individual records and put on our own CSV files. The Control Yuan was like, “But you can’t be sure that this is 100 percent correct, even if three people have looked at it.” We’re like, “Of course, we’re not sure. So, publish it. That’s why you should publish it.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: They are like, “OK, OK, we will just put it to the legislation,” so they did. The legislators always schedule it in and push it on the last…

Shari Bryan: Right, last possible day.

Audrey Tang: …possible day, so it never gets completed. After the Sunflower movement, and after the Tsai Ing wen administration, the wind changes, because the party negotiations in the parliament is now also live streamed. Then they cannot refuse to put that into the agenda, so it did pass that law.

Audrey Tang: After that, you can already look in the Control Yuan’s website, the entire raw data of the previous mayoral election, and each individual record of donation, enabling independent journalists to make investigative reports. That’s really good, but that also forces foreign money to pour into the precision targeting platforms, because that route is no longer available to them.

Audrey Tang: Then we’re saying to the platforms, “OK, that might be our oversight. Maybe we should include you in the first place.” Now, we’re amending that, and they will be treated as campaign donations for radical transparency. That’s our three lines of defense. They are all reactive. Three proactive things.

Audrey Tang: First of all, we have a participation officer team in every ministry that is in charge of not just clarifying things, but also listening. Listening means that 5,000 people petitioning for the banning of the plastic straws, for example. That was two years ago led by a 16 year girl. If we didn’t have a e petition platform, I am sure that she would go to strike on Fridays.

Audrey Tang: We do have an e petition platform, so our Greta [laughs] did not get to strike on Fridays, but rather, sat down with the EPA, as well as all the utensil makers that use plastics and non recyclable material to make those one shot use things, spoons, straws, and so on. We sat down and talked. The industry said that they were actually businesses with a social purpose.

Audrey Tang: It used to be that many years ago, decades ago, they enter the business because hepatitis B was spreading in Taiwan. That was the only way to prevent the virus from spreading.

Shari Bryan: Interesting.

Audrey Tang: Hepatitis B is now cured. You have very accessible drugs that just clean the virus, and it makes everything go away. Original social purpose is gone, and they very much are willing to use compostable material, for example, sugarcane recyclable materials, to make straws. We reached a consensus of a gradual banning of plastic straw.

Audrey Tang: When you have participated in a meeting like this, which is at least twice a month, then there is no way for rumor to grow. Everybody understand the entire context of…The disinformation campaigns are opportunistic. You have to first have misunderstanding for them to act. When they act, it usually too late.

Audrey Tang: If we prevent misunderstanding from growing in the first place, like between the environmental and business values, then there is no way for disinformation campaigners to use that as a topic. That’s our first line of proactive defense. Just to wit, our transcript will be part of this. [laughs] Even internal meetings that I chair is, after co editing of 10 working days, published to the entire Internet.

Audrey Tang: People understand, even if we decide not to do some policy, there’s a reason for it. Then the social sector can pick it up. That, again, builds solidarity, instead of for rumor, for misinformation to grow. If people do have doubts, they can meet me for 40 minutes every Wednesday in the Social Innovation Lab, anyway, where I explain things face to face.

Audrey Tang: The only requirement is that we put it on this platform, SayIt, or YouTube. SayIt is, again, a mySociety contribution, [laughs] which we are actually taking over maintainership now to add new features. That’s our second line of proactive defense.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the third line of proactive is to make the flagging platform, like Line messaging where Cofact operations. Line now have their official count. It’s just like a report as spam used to be a browser extension, but then Gmail start building it in, or advertisement blockers started as extension. Now, everybody builds it in. It’s now a built in feature to Line.

Audrey Tang: Then they have also a social media part called Line Today, where they surface the funniest stories for people to see. If you look at LINE Today, then you will see that the first section is entertainment and gossiping. Then the daily news and disinformation clarification. Clarification is put actually on the third section, which is not too bad, actually. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It may come from the Taiwan Fact Check Center. The declaration of Alaska independence is false. It’s right here, right? [laughs] Like many, many other things. Actually, it’s mostly health related.

Shari Bryan: What’s the dog and the cat? We saw that on the other…

Audrey Tang: This one?

Shari Bryan: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan Fact Check Center says it is not true that a dog’s odor can prevent cancer. If you smell your dog more, there is less chance of getting cancer. That is false.

Kip Wainscott: [laughs] Oh, my gosh. OK. I’m glad to know that.

Audrey Tang: Right. The third line of proactive defense is just to make it headline news. It’s to make it really funny. You don’t have to wait for people to click add disinformation and show them a related link. The clarification by itself is a funny message. [laughs] Just give it a headline space.

Audrey Tang: Line invited Dr. Tsai, our president, and said that she is their first, like a model digital citizen. Mostly because she is not taking things down from that platform, but rather, promoting the cross sectoral clarifications. Finally, that’s the second proactive defense. The third proactive defense is just to use public money to make really popular TV series and put it into the K 12 curriculum.

Audrey Tang: That takes effect last week. I was a co-developer, so I am really happy about that.

Shari Bryan: Oh, nice. Congratulations.

Audrey Tang: That puts media literacy, critical, creative thinking right in the first primary grade, and all the way through K 12.

Shari Bryan: What kind of TV series are they?

Audrey Tang: “The World Between Us,” for example, sponsored by the public TV -- now, I think, airing and trending on Japanese viewership through HBO Asia -- is a 10 part, hour long series that follows the aftermath of a mass shooting, where the fates of all parties involved are intertwined.

Audrey Tang: They basically teach media literacy by having the perpetrator of the mass shooting’s younger sister working anonymously, because she had to change her name after the mass shooting, in a TV news broadcast channel that covers this. It’s complicated point, but it shows, and every part in the 10 part series starts with people’s commentaries and typical shares on YouTube and on Facebook.

Shari Bryan: Wow.

Audrey Tang: It teach media literary in a very succinct way of how framing works, how fact checking works, how media bias perpetuates itself, how pressures from advertisers work, how content moderation works, and so on. All in all, using a very compelling, and on IMDb, 95 percent approval, first rate cast.

Shari Bryan: That’s very cool.

Audrey Tang: Just made it very, very popular. People who have watched this TV series are inoculated. They no longer see fabricated disinformation as something that they have to just instinctively repeat. They will ask themselves, “Oh, then am I participating in evil?” The Mandarin title is literally “The Distance Between Us and Evil.” This is the most active, but it takes the longest to act, of our three proactive defenses.

Manpreet Singh Anand: I wonder if that’s available in the United States.

Shari Bryan: I was just thinking how we could…

Audrey Tang: It might be. It might be, yeah.

Shari Bryan: We should look, see if we can get it.

Audrey Tang: It’s just called The World Between Us. I think it’s distributed by HBO Asia. If you ask HBO, you will probably get a copy. In Japanese, their title is even better. They just translated it “How Close Is Evil?”

Audrey Tang: Media literacy in the curriculum, using films like this. That’s it. We use an epidemic metaphor approach in our administration. We use our counter spam experiences, and we rely on the social sector and civic tech to complete the picture. We never use that as an excuse to make a minister’s word weight more than a journalist. That’s our approach.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Thank you.

Shari Bryan: It’s amazing. It’s amazing. It really is. How much time do we have?

Audrey Tang: 10 minutes or so.

Shari Bryan: 10 minutes?

Audrey Tang: It’s fine.

Manpreet Singh Anand: I’m glad that you brought this back up, because I’m interested that you started off with the SDGs. I’m just thinking, how can others learn from your experience? You mentioned a number of different frames and models, the SDGs, the epidemics, the spam model. Have you engaged other governments about their societies?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Manpreet Singh Anand: What has resonated with them? How have they taken what you’ve done and contextualized it for their own experience?

Audrey Tang: Great question. I gave a public speech in Bangkok, and we’re about to run a workshop there, bringing in people from Cofact, from the NDC platform, and so on. I’m just the philosopher here. They have to share their operational details. They are very interested in a working level relationship. By they, I mean like PBS, the equivalents of our public TV in Thailand, also, the academics and the journalists.

Audrey Tang: In my workshop in Thailand, where only I speak, and without the operational people, I think all the parties of Thailand came, and pretty senior at that. They are all, it’s just post election for them. Each of them have been harmed by disinformation. Fact check has been weaponized. You know how that goes. They are very much willing to work together again.

Audrey Tang: It’s after the election, but sometimes, it’s difficult. They really want the society to heal. I think that part resonates the most. Even the ministries, the agencies’ people, I think we met people from their judicial as well as their Digital, Economic, and Society Ministry, MODES, and so on. They are being very frank. They’re saying, “Before you appeared, we thought the Singaporean model is the only model.”

Audrey Tang: That, indeed, is something that would fit their cultural tradition, but they also have another cultural tradition that talks about Ahimsa, “not harming.” That talks about the middle way. That’s our approach. Their spiritual tradition agrees with our approach, while their recent political tradition maybe agrees with the Singaporean approach.

Audrey Tang: We offered them an alternate model, and they asked for English translation for all of our related materials. So far as I know, they are still deliberating. We also share it to our Japanese friends, Malaysian friends, and virtually ever other, Indonesian friends, also. Everyone in our nearby jurisdiction is grappling with this issue.

Audrey Tang: They are all facing a very different challenge, because instead of the UK parliamentary tradition of free speech and the idea of liberty, here, our idea is about common understanding. It’s about doing no harm. It’s about the middle way. This approach resonates, I think, with mostly the social sector, but even people working in the public sector.

Audrey Tang: If they are somewhat spiritual, they also understand the virtue of this approach.

Manpreet Singh Anand: I think that’s the piece that’s difficult, is the trust and working relationship between the public sector, and as you’re describing it, the social sector. We see a very uneven picture across Asia when it comes to that trust.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Each of the measures you put forward requires that level of cooperation.

Audrey Tang: A tri sectoral partnership.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Yes. That’s why I’m interested to see how much is actually catching hold.

Audrey Tang: I think we can start by just renaming things. If an organization insists that I am non government, it creates a distance. If an organization insists that we’re nonprofit, it creates a distance to the other sectors. If we are saying that we’re going to do a public private partnership, it distances the social sector. We intentionally changed all the wording.

Manpreet Singh Anand: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: The social sector, and then also, the social sector doesn’t have to be, they can work with profit. They just cannot work for profit, but they can work with profit. It indeed could be profitable to work on the sustainable goals. This entire social entrepreneurship, social innovation thing is an alternate frame of collaboration that encourages partnership.

Kip Wainscott: Minister, first of all, this is really inspiring work. I appreciate you making the time for us again. I’m based in San Francisco, you might recall, and I’m working really on engaging Silicon Valley stakeholders on technology’s impact on democracy. Your work, and the work of your colleagues and your teammates at Cofacts, it comes up so often. Just last week, I was in a meeting in San Francisco.

Kip Wainscott: I don’t think she would mind me saying, Dar Vanderbeck from CARE was talking about her positive working relationships and was just really holding you up as an example. This is a model that has important lessons for all of the stakeholders who are grappling with these issues. I just want to ask one question, in the pre electoral context.

Kip Wainscott: I’m wondering if there are any special initiatives that you’re undertaking with respect to electoral interference. One element of that might include, since you came to present at NDI, Facebook has updated their community standards to include voter suppression tactics and techniques among the prohibited conduct. I’m wondering if that’s an element of the approach that you’re taking.

Audrey Tang: Our main challenge in the previous election is that is also the referendum day. The Referendum Act, which is a different act, says that you can still campaign on the referendum day. Our election law says that you cannot campaign for your candidate on the election day, but they are the same day. There are mayoral candidates that are also petitioner for a referendum. It creates a…

Shari Bryan: A little confusing.

Audrey Tang: Confusing, and frankly speaking, non deliberative environment. They work in a way that, for the referendum, we adopted a Switzerland like model. The Swiss model requires a year long deliberation. If the referendum day is the same day as election day, all that deliberation over the past 12 months may be just canceled or nullified when you are being in a partisan mindset walking into the referendum booth.

Audrey Tang: Facebook, frankly speaking, at that time, privileged the outrage messages pertaining to referendums that dominate the discussion over the mayoral candidates’ platforms. I think that’s just a fact. We did our part, so it’s now on alternating years. It’s presidential election, referendum, mayoral election, referendum. Representation, deliberation, representation, deliberation, right? [laughs] We did our part.

Audrey Tang: Facebook also did their part. They, thanks to the prong by Twitter, I think, published for the first time that there a specific bloc of IP addresses coming in from the PRC territories that does not need special VPNs to have direct access to the social media. They all look like accounts that promotes, I don’t know, K pop or whatever.

Audrey Tang: When a political event comes like Hong Kong, they suddenly start spreading disinformation to their fans. Twitter, to their credit, before taking all of this down, published the raw material, instead of their previous tweets, and also, I think, IP addresses, and everything. This is a different cyber norm. They did not do that for the PRC territory in any way before. They now do that.

Audrey Tang: Facebook, after being notified by Twitter, they did not publish the raw data, only the statistics. That’s still something, because that actually will get them into a lot of trouble with the Great Firewall’s maintainers. Google also followed up a few days after. We’re witnessing a different cyber norm now.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Sorry, just to clarify, Twitter published all the raw data?

Audrey Tang: Mm hmm.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Facebook?

Audrey Tang: Is still considering that.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Still considering.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Just let me, yes. The thing with this is that, so here. All the accounts, as Twitter is blocked, some accounts did not actually require a VPN. They have a policy called platform manipulation that specifically says…This is the raw data of the Taiwan tweets.

Audrey Tang: They have a policy that specifically says, if you are a coordinated fake, spamming activity that bans from your jurisdiction, but is spreading in another jurisdiction, and you have evasion tactics, then it’s as bad as a traditional cyber security operation. Therefore, is not protected by our privacy terms of service. You cannot claim privacy when you are engaging in these activities. Twitter has that policy.

Audrey Tang: It’s just politically, they have never used it for PRC originated activities, so they can publish the raw data. As far as I understand, Facebook and ex Google+ did not have that policy. Therefore, they are still rethinking how they should work.

Manpreet Singh Anand: It’s fascinating.

Shari Bryan: Minister, you talked about Hong Kong. I just wonder if you can say a little bit more about the impact of what’s going on there now to what’s happening here in Taiwan, and in relation to the elections here in a few months.

Audrey Tang: Sure. The immediate impact is that none of the presidential candidates or hopefuls are saying, “One country, two systems,” anymore. It used to be that, when it was 2013, it’s that, “We respect that it’s their position, and we might want to talk about it sometime in the future, but not now.”

Audrey Tang: That was the party line of the KMT before 2013. Now, after Hong Kong, I think Mayor Han says that one country, two system, “You have to step over my dead body.” [laughs]

Shari Bryan: Wow.

Audrey Tang: So did Chairman Terry Gou, and then, of course, Dr. Tsai, and also, Mayor Ko. No one is endorsing even the possibility of putting one country, two system on the table now. That’s gone from the political narrative. That’s the most significant impact.

Shari Bryan: Very interesting.

Audrey Tang: We are at time.

Kip Wainscott: We’re out of time. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: If you do have any pressing questions, feel free to ask now, and/or email me later.

Manpreet Singh Anand: That’s what I was going to say. If you wouldn’t mind, we would love to stay in touch. As an institute, we’re also grappling with what our role should be in supporting those who are trying to stem this tide of disinformation. We would love to stay connected with thought leaders and, frankly, practitioners like yourself to help us think through what are the most effective measures to do that.

Audrey Tang: I am really happy to help as a technologist, as a spam war veteran.

Audrey Tang: OK. Thank you.

Shari Bryan: We appreciate your time so much, Minister.

Manpreet Singh Anand: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Shari Bryan: We’ll see you soon.