Audrey Tang: On the record, we will be making a transcript and email of you about what everybody has said, but we will not publish it right away. We’ll publish it only after 10 days of co editing. If you want more time as to embargo this transcript so that we publish after you do, it’s also OK. It can be arranged.

Audrey Tang: After all of you publish, we can then publish the transcript if you have concerns about that. If that’s OK with you, we’ll be on the record.

Audrey Tang: OK. Welcome to Taiwan! Is it your first or second day?

Brendon Hong: Second day.

Audrey Tang: The second day. I hope the jet lag isn’t too bad?

Judith Hecht-Kontojannis: Thank you very much for inviting us and for your generosity. We are very happy to meet you. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. We have an hour and a half. This is a free form discussion. I will begin with maybe five minutes of self introduction and my position within the Taiwanese government.

Audrey Tang: Then the floor will be yours, and I will answer whatever your question is. It may or may not have anything to do with digital. [laughs] I understand that you have a wide range of concerns and questions, and it’s all OK. If I don’t know, I’ll just say I don’t know, if that’s OK with you.

Audrey Tang: My position is called the digital minister. It’s a new position as of this cabinet. I’m somewhat unique in that I work with the government, not for the government. If you take a look at my name card, it doesn’t say that I represent anything. I present some work from Taiwan, but I don’t represent anyone but myself.

Audrey Tang: My work is at a Lagrange point, a midpoint between the movements on one side and the government on the other side, meaning that I spend my time, most of the time, not in this office, but actually in that office. That’s my real office, [laughs] near the Jianguo Flower Market, near Central Park Taipei, the Daan Park.

Audrey Tang: This place is open for everybody, it opens from 7:00 AM to 11:00 PM. Every Wednesday, everybody can book 40 minutes of my time and just walk in, have a chat, enjoy food, and meet me. All the meetings that I have with anybody in the Social Innovation Lab is subject to my working condition, which is called radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: Radical transparency means that everybody can see. After becoming the digital minister, I have spoken to more than 4,000 people in more than 200,000 speeches, in almost a thousand or so meetings. This applies even to internal meetings that I’m a chair of.

Audrey Tang: In this sense, everybody from the public sector can see what the social sector and the private sector is up to. Everybody in the private and social sector can see what the government is up to when it comes to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Audrey Tang: The Sustainable Development Goals, as you probably know, is a set of 169 targets, as determined by the 70s UN meeting, that every jurisdiction must reach by the year 2030. In each and every conversation, for example Facebook Civic Integrity visits on August 3rd, this is not just a summary.

Audrey Tang: Rather, this is a completely transparent recording. Each and every one has its own URL so it could be quoted, it could be cited, it could become a social object. That determines then what people in Taiwan have contributed or is contributing to each and every Sustainable Goals in each and every county or cities.

Audrey Tang: If you click, for example, the Pingtung County, you can see which SDGs are most focused on that county. Indeed, Taoyuan and Taipei City are making their voluntary regional reviews, like New York City does, to tally whatever social enterprises, co ops, charities, foundations, or with profit companies in that county are working toward, as well as in these SDGs, what their natural partners are internationally and domestically.

Audrey Tang: This is a new governance system. Instead of making the government the arbiter between the economic and environmental forces or the innovation and social justice forces, instead of saying that we are the organizer and we’re the arbiters, we see ourselves as providing a space where people of different positions can discover each other, through radical transparency, their common values.

Audrey Tang: Based on those common values, deliver innovations that are social innovations, meaning everybody can participate, such as those self driving tricycles that solve a real social issue. Everybody can contribute to make a social good.

Audrey Tang: For example, they can tinker openly the hardware, the software, and the data of those self driving vehicles, so it doesn’t feel like a capture from the law or from the public sector to the norms. We instead do a norm first design, where people just live with those self driving tricycles for a year or so for the market to understand what people truly want.

Audrey Tang: That turns into algorithm, into code, and finally, legalized into law. A norm first, instead of a law first design, is what Taiwan is paving the way forward in what the UN now calls the collaborative governance, or Co Gov.

Audrey Tang: That is the new governance model that we are pioneering toward. We have a lot of examples, depending on your interest. I promised I will spend five minutes, and we are at five minutes. Any questions? Yes.

Brendon Hong: If I may start?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Brendon Hong: First, do you have a WiFi here?

Audrey Tang: Yes, we actually do, and it’s free WiFi, called iTaiwan. In Taiwan, we have broadband as human right. If you don’t have WiFi, or indeed, broadband connection, that’s my fault. Joel can help you actually setting up the WiFi.

Brendon Hong: That would be great. Now, a real question.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Brendon Hong: You mentioned this concept of radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Brendon Hong: You also said that you are not working for the government, but with the government. Very general question. What do your, let’s say, colleagues, how do they perceive this concept of radical transparency?

Brendon Hong: For example, I am sure that in my country, there will be people in the government saying, “You cannot operate like this.”

Audrey Tang: “This is crazy,” right? [laughs]

Brendon Hong: “This is crazy.” Yes, crazy is the right word. In general, how it is perceived in the government, this concept, and what you are doing? I don’t want to be rude.

Audrey Tang: No, you can be rude.

Brendon Hong: Isn’t it a little bit of show off for somebody? They say, “OK, this lady just there, talking to people, and blah, blah.” Within the government, how is this perceived?

Audrey Tang: Great question. It’s actually two questions. The first one is those other ministries see something that they can imitate, or they see it as a kind of show.

Brendon Hong: Do they see and evaluate…

Audrey Tang: As a show. Whether it delivers a public governance value, that’s the first one. Second is the resistance from the public servants, career public service, because they are two levels.

Audrey Tang: The ministers have to buy in those, but the public servants have also to see that this is truly a value. Otherwise, there would be a lot of resistance, even when the ministers say that this is a good idea. That’s two different.

Audrey Tang: Joel, are you OK with the Wifi. It should work. If it doesn’t work, just hand it to me. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It shouldn’t need password. It should just work.

Jolson Lim: It’s work.

Brendon Hong: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK, great.

Brendon Hong: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I have to explain the position of digital minister. In Taiwan, there is 32 ministries and councils, each with a chief commissioner or a minister. These, we call the 32 vertical ministries.

Audrey Tang: By vertical, it means that it’s the usual come in and control, tree shaped bureaucracy hierarchy. Above the 32 vertical ministries, in the Executive Yuan itself, are nine horizontal ministers. I am one of the nine. The horizontal ministers, we don’t have any specific ministry assigned to us.

Audrey Tang: Rather, our work is in our mandate. For example, for me, it’s open government, it’s social innovation, it’s youth engagement, etc., to work horizontally with all the ministries related to that idea to find common values and to resolve their disputes.

Audrey Tang: By design, this position is one that touches each and every ministry. While each ministry has a regulation and a law, indeed, that determines which sections they have and so on, there is no law or regulation that determine a horizontal minister’s office. Every one of us get to decide how do we form our office. My office is one voluntary person from each ministry.

Audrey Tang: For example, here is our foreign affairs delegate, and we also have delegates from the ministries of culture, of national development, of communication, of education, of interior, and so on, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Theoretically, I can have 32 colleagues but at the moment I have 22 colleagues meaning that indeed, as you said, not all ministers from all ministries think radical transparency is a great idea. There are some ministries that never sent anyone.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Ministry of Defense never send anyone, I wonder why. Council for Continental China Affairs never sent anyone, I wonder why. Maybe they’re not ready for radical transparency.

Audrey Tang: My second working condition, aside from radical transparency is voluntary association, meaning that I’m not going to tell the minister of defense tomorrow, oh, you’re going to publish all your minutes, this is not what I’m doing.

Audrey Tang: I’m saying if you’re willing to delegate one person to my office, and cocreate this way of working together with the private and social sector, and willing to work with your ministry without giving that delegate any direct order, and indeed they all rank and score themselves, and Joe can attest to that, [laughs] I never gave him any direct commands nor score his performance, that’s all done by his ministry.

Audrey Tang: The question to your second part of your question, is that many public servants think it’s a good idea because previously, and this is maybe even more so in foreign service, previously career public servants, they’re very diligent, and they do a lot of innovative stuff. But if they step out of the precedents, then sometimes it doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: If it doesn’t work, the MPs will question them, and then their minister will have to respond. The minister could always say that the public servant did not achieve my vision. That is the usual way of responding. But, if it does work, then everybody thinks it’s the minister’s brilliant idea. This is the nature of a vertical ministry. They sometime take the risk, but they don’t get due credit.

Audrey Tang: Through radical transparency, it’s exactly the other way around. Everybody can see, even in the drafting stage, who is the public servant that proposes an innovative idea. I can show some examples. If it doesn’t work, because as far as I know, I’m the only anarchist minister in the world, and so it’s always my fault. They can always blame me, and it’s all on public record.

Audrey Tang: It’s specifically for the investigative journalists to be as quick as the real time “journalists” so you don’t have to waste your time getting the scoop, so to speak, because the entire transcript after each meeting is made available. The journalist can do journalism, instead of asking four different sources, each reporting the same meeting like four different worlds and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It empowers the journalism which empowers the public servants to receive due credit. I’ll not pretend and say the entire Executive Yuan has bought in into this working method, but at least 22 out of 32 have done so, so that’s the second part. The first part is about the ministers themselves. Well, it took the foreign service a year before sending anyone here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It takes time for them to see that this is a good idea.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have five branches of the government. Previously, when in 2016 when I become digital minister, only the judicial branch is publishing the entire transcript of their educations and judgments, aside from of course cases pertaining to minor or sexual sorts, you know the deal, but they are being transparent by default. The other ones aren’t that transparent.

Audrey Tang: For example, party negotiations during the legislative sessions, these are not published and indeed they are not live streamed. In 2016, I think, they become radically transparent and live streamed.

Audrey Tang: Corrective Yuan used to do the auditing of campaign donation themselves, but they only published the statistics in summary to the public Internet, but just this month, actually, they put up online in the previous campaigns, role by role, individual donations.

Audrey Tang: This enables everybody to do independent analysis, not only the Corrective Yuan can do the analysis. Now we are in an administration, we are not leading this movement, we’re following the movement from the judicial, legislative, corrective to a radical transparency. We’re somewhat lagging behind, but we’re playing catch up, I think, quick enough.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, this is a general will of the people to see radical transparency from each and every branch of the government and it doesn’t mean that I’m being particularly radical when you compare to other branches of the government. All the ministers are getting used to it. That is because in 2014 we occupied the parliament, demanding exactly that. That was kind of a popular will, starting 2014, and we took five years now to implement it in all branches of our government. Yes?

Teresa Aburto Uceda: Hi, I’m Teresa. I would like to know, Taiwanese citizen have this direct together, what would be the legislation for enterprise like Uber, Airbnb, with debates, so I would like to know why do you think it’s not done in other countries, and if it could be done, would you recommend to export your model? Until what point do you think you could take this citizen participation, and if you think a country could make all their decisions through citizen…

Audrey Tang: Participation.

Teresa Aburto Uceda: …participation, and referendums.

Audrey Tang: One of the reason why we have a vibrant social sector, used to be called third sector, but now they’re more dominant in legitimacy, so they’re no longer the third, we’re just call them the social sector, is that we have in our region, at least, the most open, meaning freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and so on, as tracked by the CIVICUS Monitor.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, the CIVICUS Monitor shows each violation of the freedom of assembly, or overconcentration of privileges into the administration and each time it happens, that jurisdiction decrease score and finally becomes red. Taiwan is alone in our region. Japan is doing OK, but everybody else is obstructed, repressed, or closed.

Audrey Tang: If you have a obstructed or oppressed civil society, there is no point of asking anybody anything, right? Because they’re just going to say whatever the administration want them to say, because if they say the opposite, they risk disappearance.

Audrey Tang: This is a real issue in our nearby jurisdictions. So because of that, our civil society always think, and sometimes rightly so, that they know more, and is more legitimate than the public sector. That is the first condition of this way of working, is by the civil society assuming that they have more legitimacy, so that’s the first one.

Audrey Tang: The reason why, by the way, is that when the martial law gets lifted, and a freedom of press opened, it’s not until another decade that we have direct presidential election. The social sector has 10 years of head start to build legitimacy until we have direct presidential election, which then gradually the public sector start building legitimacy. That can still be felt, today, that’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is now when we’re making ourselves, the state, radically transparent to the citizens by publishing each and every government budget, KPI, everything, for public commentary, it assumes that everybody can get access to this.

Audrey Tang: In a different configuration of territories, if sometimes people rely on dial up to get to the Internet, and only in larger municipalities do people have 10Mbps broadband to the Internet, then it creates asymmetry, indeed violates the social justice and democratic principle, because essentially only people in the city can access to the bidirectional live stream that determines the policy, and the people in the rural area, or indigenous area, or higher mountains could not.

Audrey Tang: That would not be embraced by the central government because it would decrease their democratic legitimacy. In Taiwan, as I said, broadband is a human right, even on the topmost of the Jade Mountain, which is almost 4,000 meters high, you have 10Mbps, you can do high quality video conference. Even in the Dongsha Island, you have 10Mbps.

Audrey Tang: Anywhere in Taiwan you don’t have 10Mbsp, it’s personally my fault. You can talk to me. Because of that, we can then roll out those broadband based consultation mechanisms without worrying about the digital exclusion or the digital gap.

Audrey Tang: Our methodology, frankly speaking, we run workshops in these areas and they’re mostly not countries. Because when the city government wants to make a decision, most of their citizens in the city do have broadband as human right, not as cheap as Taiwan, but at least affordable.

Audrey Tang: If you scale this, for example not just Toronto, but the entirety of Canada, or not just New York City, but the entirety of the United States, then you run into the issue that I just mentioned. A free civil society with more legitimacy than the government, and broadband as human right. These are the preconditions of running the participatory governance system that you just introduced. Thank you. Yes?

Judith Hecht-Kontojannis: When did you realize that transparency is a must? When did you begin to create spatial transparency, was there any key situation you realized that was so important?

Audrey Tang: Personally, right? [laughs]

Judith Hecht-Kontojannis: Personally.

Audrey Tang: Personally, I dropped out of junior high school when I was 14. At that time, I drop out not because my principal didn’t like me, rather it’s because the principal really liked me. I participated in the science fair, got a first place and so on, by doing research online and that was the first serious community that I participated, it’s still around. It’s called archive.org.

Audrey Tang: Some of you may have visited or one of their sibling websites such as socialarchive.org, and so on. archive.org maintained now by the Cornell University, is like Reddit. It’s like a Internet forum, but instead of the Reddit boards, these are the sciences and applied sciences of each and every preprint. Preprint meaning that the researchers publish to this place for peer review, even before they publish to the journal.

Audrey Tang: The preprint archive is literally the cutting edge of research in these domains. Even after becoming the digital minister, I also publish our work on WeTaiwan and so on to the social archive as a contribution back to the community that I belonged to in 1994.

Audrey Tang: My principle, I explained to her, that instead of taking 10 years of getting GRE, going to a lab, working as post doc or post post doc with the professors that I like to co author something together, I actually just replied to my favorite professors’ papers here.

Audrey Tang: To them, they don’t know I’m just 14 or 15 years old, for them, I’m just another contributor. We started working together immediately. This movement now is called open access, meaning that anybody, even without any university degree, should be able to access the cutting edge of research and contribute to the cutting edge of the research.

Audrey Tang: My principal, after I showed her the emails, the printouts of my exchange with the professors, she said, “OK, tomorrow on you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I will cover for you,” because at that time it was mandatory education. So she actually faked record to the education bureau. Of course, nowadays not a problem anymore.

Audrey Tang: Homeschooling and experimental schooling is actually one of Taiwan’s fortes. People who are younger than me can homeschool totally legally. At my time, it took courage from the principal, which is why I am very optimistic about bureaucratic innovation. That was my first experience.

Audrey Tang: Open access along with the free software movement later on rebranded as open source movement, are my tribe. It is the first community that I believed in. I discovered that the Internet society indeed builds the legitimacy, because nobody is forced to use TCP/IP, or to use HTTP, or any of whatever P, the protocols that we in the Internet community invented. It only took voluntary association from each and every jurisdiction to make Internet work.

Audrey Tang: Internet doesn’t have a navy, it doesn’t have an army, so how does it work as a “sovereign” entity, it’s through radical transparency. It is through the idea that everybody with an email account can participate in the governance of the Internet as a whole, as a system.

Audrey Tang: After the Internet Society declared “independence” from the US Department of Commerce just a few years ago, it is one of the shining example of truly multi stakeholder governance system that doesn’t report to anyone, but runs with the UN ITU once every year, to run the Internet Governance Forum, which I also gave a speech to two years ago, just by Taiwan not being a member nation. All of this is kind of my first indigenous experience in the Internet governance.

Audrey Tang: I’m just bringing those ideas, that learnings of 15 years old, to the society. Yes?

Jolson Lim: Thanks so much for taking our questions. On the issue of radical transparency, I’m from Canada where I think our access to information laws are rather far from perfect. Journalists frequently complain to what we have is an Information Commissioner about documents that are highly redacted.

Jolson Lim: It’s unfortunately, but is there a balance that needs to be struck within government on how far can radical transparency really go before it, I guess, conflicts with sensitive information or information that people in government the public should not have access to?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. In Taiwan, we have also a FOIA, a Freedom of Information Act, and also we have a regulation, regulatory decree, that says any system that’s built less than three million NT dollars in the past three years, must publish its raw data by default.

Audrey Tang: This is why Taiwan has been placed for twice consecutive years on the top of the global open data index, before they decided not to run GODI anymore, Taiwan has been consistently in the top jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: This is not that we’re doing anything exceptional, this is just us publishing the raw data before even the public servants take a look at it. Once they take a look at it, of course they can make value judgment of redacting and so on.

Audrey Tang: If you’re saying you must publish an entire of collection, and if you don’t, you have to justify, that flips the default. By radical transparency, I don’t mean transparency by live streaming our meetings, I don’t mean that.

Audrey Tang: I mean transparency at the root, the root meaning when the data is collected. The root means when the policy idea is being brainstormed, the drafting stage as described in the four year long. Because of that, of course I don’t have any access to state secrets, to the top secrets, because these two of course, conflict with each other.

Audrey Tang: My working condition when I entered the cabinet, is I don’t see or touch a process, any top secret or national security documents, so I still don’t know what happens there, which is partly why the minister of defense never sent anyone. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any sense, there is a clear delineation of boundaries. A second part of your question, which is about how the radical transparency work with the sensitivity of the information.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the information is OK to publish as data, sometime after the fact, but not before the fact, that’s the usual consideration. For example, when I first started working as digital minister, we worked with the agricultural council to publish their storage of frozen vegetables in order to keep the price of the vegetables stable ish before and after a typhoon, for example.

Audrey Tang: These of course is one of the most important leverages that the council of agriculture have to regulate the market and to protect the consumers. Literally, they say, if you publish our storage and our release quantity, then the market will just adjust and so all of our by law correspondent obligations will be void. We just cannot publish this number.

Audrey Tang: I’m like, OK, you cannot publish this number in the same day, obviously, but even national secrets gets published 10 years afterwards. Top secret 20 or 30 years afterwards. Is there a time that you can tell me, like after 10 years, that this number is no longer sensitive, and I can publish it in non redacted way.

Audrey Tang: They took a week to have an internal discussion about it, and they came back to me saying, one working day. After one working day, the market has already concluded, it doesn’t matter anymore. I’m like of course, then, let’s just release the information one working day afterwards.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes with a justifiable date delay, in the aggregate, for example our meeting now is 10 working day, and so on, then we don’t have to go the route of redacting, we can just publish within a time delta where everybody think it’s no longer sensitive.

Jolson Lim: If I’m correct, the onus on transparency would be on the data collection agencies. In Taiwan, how does it look? Is there a degree of independence? How is that information posted online? In Canada, we have Statistics Canada.

Jolson Lim: I think a frequent issue, especially for journalists, as well as experts in the field and business people as well, is that the information is hard to translate from the website. It’s not very clear for, largely, the lay audience or one that isn’t familiar with accounting practices or data collection practices.

Audrey Tang: A domain expertise.

Jolson Lim: Yes.

Audrey Tang: This is a great question. We have the e participation platform, which he alluded to, and joined the gov.tw, which is managed by the National Development Council, which is like the Advanced Planning Agency and the Auditing Treasury Office. They used to be two ministries but they merged together around 2014.

Audrey Tang: The new NDC is both in charge of advanced planning, like 5 years, 10 years plus, but also making sure that the budget is spent in a way that is responsible to the democracy. They become the ideal place to run not only the e participation platform but also the National Open Data platform because they can hold each ministry to account.

Audrey Tang: They can also not approve an information technology procurement if they fail to publish in the machine readable format everything that can be consumed by human beings. We have made a regulation that in the template of information procurement.

Audrey Tang: It used to be, I think your country all have similar sections around people with blindness. If you make a website that can only be seen by sighted people but not by people with blindness, then that vendor is guilty of discrimination. They’re not put into prison [laughs] but they would be disqualified from government procurement if they don’t take care about accessibility and universal design.

Audrey Tang: We’re now saying machine learning is a kind of people and if you don’t publish it in a way that is structured data, you can also be disqualified by discriminating against robots. It doesn’t say that on the regulation but that’s the effect. Because of that, we can work with the domain expertise to interpret the data much more easily when it is in the form of raw data instead of transformed data.

Audrey Tang: This is datacollaboratives.org, the international advocacy organization that I am an international advisor of. Instead of saying it’s the government collecting all the data and it’s the social sector’s job to interpret and if you misinterpret, you’re not professional enough, which is seen in many other jurisdictions, we flipped this around.

Audrey Tang: We’re saying if the citizens care about air quality, they collect the data. They set the data standard. Indeed, they make the distributed ledgers, commonly known as blockchains, that make sure that people cannot mutate their data after the fact and can hold each other mutually accountable.

Audrey Tang: For all those 2,000 stations, none of them is funded by the EPA, by the Environmental Protection Agency. The civil society leads with data collection and data standard setting and we adopt the civil society’s standard by saying we cannot beat them, literally, and then, we must join them. By joining them, we mean that we run complementary efforts.

Audrey Tang: For example, we held consultations with the people collecting air quality measurements. Are there places in Taiwan that you feel that you should collect data but, somehow, cannot? It’s not on the eastern side because if you look at the eastern side, there’s not much air pollution anywhere.

Audrey Tang: It’s on the western side. There’s some industrial parks that are private land. They really suspect the industries there for polluting the air. The industries always say, “We’re not polluting the air,” but they cannot physically enter the private property and do the measurement.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that we own the lamps in the industrial parks. [laughs] We can use their air quality measurement device, called AirBox, and just mandate the lamps within the industrial parks to hang them and contribute to their blockchain, to their civil society data collaborative.

Audrey Tang: Or, if people say that we really want to see air pollution data to tell the domestic versus the continental influence on the air quality because the continental people sometimes export their air pollution, sometimes., then, they really want a measurement device there but they cannot fly drones there.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that we’re building renewable energy wind turbines there, so we can add a clause to the contract saying the wind turbine builders must participate in the AirBox data collaborative and so on.

Audrey Tang: The interpretation is always by seeing the same data across the sectors. The competition is between the data models that explains the common data but the data is always the same and led by the civil society.

Teresa Aburto Uceda: I’d like to ask you about social rights. Taiwan is the first country to get a same sex marriage. I would like to know what are the next social rights to work on?

Audrey Tang: We’re the first in Asia, important qualifier.

Audrey Tang: Marriage equality is just a milestone in a very long process that started in 2007 in the public sector in Taiwan. The year 2007 is the foundational year of a new regulatory regimen called the Impact Assessment Co Creation for Gender Mainstreaming.

Audrey Tang: As part of it, we set up the Gender Equality Council, I think, [non English speech] , which is designed, as I just mentioned, to have a majority of social sector leaders and a minority of government ministers in this council. It means that, as CSO leaders, if they are of one mind, always wins over the public sector. This is a deliberate design.

Audrey Tang: This council reviews, every year, 200 or so government projects and 20 or so government bills with no exception. Each draft of project or draft bill from the Executive Yuan must go through the measurements of inequality self assessment form and for the civil society leaders to do an independent audit of whether it’s true or not.

Audrey Tang: This is important because, as you can see, even for the Minister of Labor in the Employment Service Act, they must fill in what is the current status of women who leave the workplace.

Audrey Tang: What is the current status of protecting foreign women workers’ rights? What is the necessity of improving the social conditions? What are the policy goals to implement? Which groups will be affected? To these groups, do we run meaningful external consultations? This is just part of it actually.

Audrey Tang: After 12 years of impact assessment evaluation, even in the ministries, they think, totally aren’t related to gender equality, for example, the financial minister or the Minister of Sea Guard, things like that, they now have their policymaking all connected to the theory of change because whatever measurement they’ve outlined in those assessments become part of our gender dashboard that is measured even after the project is concluded.

Audrey Tang: This only accumulates new statistics every time we pass a new project and every bill. Also, in our parliament, of course, we have around 40 percent of women parliamentarians. This is the slide I showed in Canada. I show our nearby and Canada’s nearby jurisdictions, so will probably not use this slide if I’m in the Scandinavian countries. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, this is a result of the constitutional court ruling and the referendums. It took our civil public service almost no time to get a rights bill, to ratify the constitutional court and the referendum’s collective will, which we legalized the by laws of marriage but not the in laws of marriage families. This is, evidently, the collective will as of that year.

Audrey Tang: What I’m getting at is that this is not one person’s political will but, rather, this is the preparation of 12 years of public service. Right after this, in the next year, we’re going to work with a foreign resident community. People, sometimes, they have a permanent resident certificate. Indeed, they have all the same rights and duties, other than voting, but they enjoy most of the same social rights.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, if you’re someone holding ARC, a foreign person living in Taiwan, even permanently, your national ID number differs from ours. Ours is, maybe, A12 something, something or A23 something, something. The foreign people are AA something or AC something.

Audrey Tang: When you order a movie ticket, when you book a restaurant, sometimes the computer system just rejects your booking because your ID card doesn’t look like a national identity card but there are no bills or regulation that says if you’re a foreign resident, you should not be able to book a movie ticket. This is entirely at a level of code, of computer code.

Audrey Tang: What we’re now doing, starting next year, we’re going to change everyone holding AA something into A8 something and A9 something so that it corresponds to the same checksum, meaning that the computer error correction algorithm has our national ID, so you will enjoy the same right.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, people who are from countries that accept nonbinary genders don’t have to get forced to choose between AA and AC when they get an ARC, as they do now, which is, frankly speaking, not respecting the human right of nonbinary people. We, now, introduced A7 something, something, so that if you are a nonbinary foreigner, you will be able, then, to also get a nonbinary identity number here in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: All of the computer code will have to be adapted and changed to work with nonbinary people. That is the next milestone. It’s already approved by the Ministry of the Interior. It’s just the question of time of how to renew and print those cards, likely by the end of next year. After that, of course, speaking as a stakeholder, I would be able, then, to get a zero something, something in my national identity card.

Andrej Matisak: You mentioned that the Internet doesn’t have a navy or an army but the Internet, clearly, does have an army of trolls and bots and hackers. This is a conflict domain. Clearly, there is a conflict going on there in the Internet virtual space.

Andrej Matisak: In 2011, during the Arab Spring, there were hopes that the next revolution will be tweeted out. We are in 2019 and I would say that any revolution can be suppressed by armies of trolls and bots. If you look at this virtual space, cyberspace, what do you see? Do you see a bright future for humanity or do you see some type of a dark, dystopian future?

Andrej Matisak: When, in fact, only the elite will be able to handle because, for example, you said that you dropped out from junior high school at 14, so you are, clearly, very bright. Most people are not like you. When I was 14, I was trying to buy beer illegally, not…

Audrey Tang: That’s a hack also.

Andrej Matisak: …not writing to professors. It’s very interesting to see that we can do a lot and we can achieve a lot, is this what we have? But I just feel that I’m not sure if it is not more for elites and they might not be so happy to share all the wisdom and all the things. What do you see?

Audrey Tang: …Hi.

Photographer: Sorry, I’m the photographer for the group.

Audrey Tang: No problem. I said the Internet doesn’t have an army to defend itself. I didn’t say the Internet doesn’t have an adversary. Your point is that the adversarial conditions are now everywhere on the Internet and that is true. That is true.

Audrey Tang: Although, I’m more optimistic about people who participate in social movements to not get destroyed by trolls. They may get hampered if the government shuts down Telegram but, otherwise, people are doing pretty well despite the trolls, as we are watching very closely now in a nearby jurisdiction, in Hong Kong. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Andrej Matisak: But, there’s one thing, if I may… You look at some kind of list of democratic countries, you see basically everywhere in the world, democracies are on the retreat. I think that one of the reasons is this.

Audrey Tang: I do agree. I’m not disputing the fact. I’m just being more optimistic about the future. [laughs] I will also say that the more open a society is, the more authentic journalism has room to operate. The higher the threat is, the people who only have access to the official social media with official censorship, we’re seeing a firewall.

Audrey Tang: They’re actually less threatened by the trolls because the trolls just get, I don’t know, imprisoned or something, or put into the social credit system. That is exactly as you said. What some liberal democracies are now seriously considering is going to the more authoritarian model in order to somewhat create order when there’s this disinformation crisis.

Andrej Matisak: And to defend itself.

Audrey Tang: To defend itself against disinformation, to disarm or counter the disinformation crisis. This is totally true. In Taiwan, we have a legal definition to disinformation. We don’t use the F word that some other jurisdictions use.

Audrey Tang: We say disinformation. It is defined as intentional, harmful untruth, and harmful to the democratic public, not to the image of the minister, which is just good journalism.

Audrey Tang: Intentionally, public harmful untruth is now, in Taiwan, countered and we have evidence to back it up that we are as efficient as the Singaporean model. Do people know the Singaporean model?

Audrey Tang: In Singapore, they said, very simply, that any minister of the cabinet -- such as me -- can issue a general correction order to any social or institutional printed media that they must publicly show the very next news cycle. If I don’t like the way that you write, I can just write to your institution or social media and they have to publicly say, “We were wrong. This is the minister’s words. They were right.”

Audrey Tang: It extends, also, to other media not related to your report. They may be reporting something else entirely but I can also, in the Singaporean model, force them to correct you, even if they’re just Internet, online media.

Audrey Tang: This is not, strictly speaking, a take down. This is not, strictly speaking, censorship. This is, of course, creating a chilling effect…

Jolson Lim: …through censorship.

Audrey Tang: It is creating a chilling effect to order journalistic practitioners. In Taiwan, we are committed to never do that. We developed another model that is as efficient, sometimes as effective, always generates more trust compared to the Singaporean model.

Audrey Tang: The model, very simply put, has three prongs. The first one is, we call it memetic engineering.

Audrey Tang: Whenever there is a trending rumor that starts to spread, within one hour, each ministry in Taiwan is equipped with a team that can push out a counter narrative that doesn’t say that the old one is vicious or is harmful or is whatever because research shows that if you do that -- in Taiwan, we call slapping the face or 打臉 -- it would just reinforce whatever belief that the person spreading the disinformation already have in their mind.

Audrey Tang: Instead, we make jokes about it. We make really good jokes about it. The jokes must be less than 20 characters in title, less than 200 characters in body, and at least two images.

Audrey Tang: One example, there used to be a rumor that says if you perm your hair multiple times in a week, the country will fine one million NT dollars for you to perm your hair. It got pretty trendy.

Audrey Tang: Within one hour, this is what our Premier, our Prime Minister, had published in the social media. It says, “Popular rumor, perm your hair will be subject to one million fine. It’s not true.” That’s the title, less than 20 characters.

Audrey Tang: Now, what is the body? The body is the Prime Minister when he was young, a younger Prime Minister says, “I may be bald now but I will not punish people with hair,” and a fine print that says, “What we have introduced is a labeling requirement for hair products. It only takes effect on July 2021.” That’s the information payload.

Audrey Tang: The second image is the Premier as he looks now. He said, “However, if you perm your hair many times within a week, it will damage your hair and when serious, you will end up looking like me.”

Audrey Tang: [laughs] It’s really funny. It went viral and it reached more people, far more people than this information. We have evidence to show that anyone who saw this message as an inoculation, when they see later on this information, they will not spread. It means that the vaccine prevents the flu from spreading.

Audrey Tang: If you get the flu, you don’t cough anymore, because you have already seen this very funny vaccine.

Audrey Tang: That is our first line of defense, is just by being quick enough to trending rumors, to push out mimetic engineering products. That’s the first line of defense. The second line of defense is the social sector collaborative checking in the International Fact Checking Network and also crowdsourced community.

Audrey Tang: While this addresses the public social media like Facebook posts and Twitter, far more dangerous is end to end encrypted channels such as WhatsApp and LINE, which is the most popular here. Because both sites are encrypted, the state has no way to look into what’s trendy or not.

Audrey Tang: We took the same solution as we designed around the turn of the century, to combat spam. If you were using email around the turn of the century, most of your inbox will be people from royalty and far away land, that have two million dollars. If you want to just pay the transaction fee of $2,000…

Jolson Lim: Nigerian.

Audrey Tang: …they will wire it to your account and so on. At that time, we were absolutely swamped with those spams. Even Bill Gates said we have to start charging postal stamp to each email, otherwise, email is doomed. The CAN SPAM Act and all the regulatory interventions, begin to appear around jurisdictions. The solution is actually not that. The solution is empowering the social sector.

Audrey Tang: We convinced other mail user agents to add just one flag called Flag As Spam, to their interface. If you see a spam, you can donate it to the public by donating it to the Spamhaus Charity, that look at all the signatures of these spams that people have voluntarily contributed, and then they analyze using machine learning at a time called bias and filtering through a signature.

Audrey Tang: Every other incoming email matching the signature will no longer land in your inbox. It will land in the junk mailbox, which is strictly speaking still there. If we have too much time, you can still read through it, but it doesn’t consume people’s attention anymore. Here, the government has no role at all.

Audrey Tang: It is individuals voluntarily contributing flagging. It is the Spamhaus, an international charity, doing the algorithm and the comparison. It is Gmail and Outlook and so on, agreeing to put a junk mail in their self regulatory measure. Here in Taiwan, we replicated this model to this information.

Audrey Tang: In the LINE, end to end messenger, everybody can long press any message and say, “We’re donating this as a sample of spam,” which is what this information really is. What this does is that it spams people with just information that’s simply harmful. When they donate, it goes to the crowd fact checker. They’re like Wikipedia. Everybody can add their commentary on.

Audrey Tang: We have antivirus companies such as Trend Micro, that has the bot. If you add the bot to your chat room, they will respond with clarification, anything about perming your hair or whatever, that has been clarified before.

Audrey Tang: We have a professional journalist and professor of journalism operating the Taiwan chapter of the international fact checking network, the Taiwan FactCheck Center, that does media literacy, due diligence fact checking publicly to the entire country. They can show very easily what trending rumors are false, and why they are false, what forensics or what fact checking they have gone through, just like any media does, but this time in public.

Audrey Tang: When they classify something as false, then Facebook, Google, PDT and LINE, all agree to move it to the junk mail folder, meaning that, for example, on Facebook, you have a news feed. If you have a friend spreading something that’s already fact checked as false, Facebook will just not show it on your timeline, unless you have only one friend. They have no choice.

Audrey Tang: If you have other friends, they will show other friends posts. If you go to their friend’s wall, you still see it there. They see a related link that when clicked goes to the Taiwan FactCheck Centers, clarification fact checking of that message, which is almost better than a complete inoculation vaccination program.

Audrey Tang: It makes people understand the critical thinking and learn, indeed, how to do forensics, how to tell if this information from an authentic report.

Audrey Tang: Just by the TFCC contributing such public curriculum -- which starting today, we are introducing in primary school, in the first grade, indeed, as media literacy classes -- they can now not trust the teachers, or not trust anyone blindly, but making their own fact checking processes. This is part of our national curriculum. That’s our second line of defense. Yes?

Jolson Lim: With respect, it sounds like these initiatives require a great degree of civic participation from regular people. Oftentimes, people have their own political opinions. That might make the practice or process imperfect.

Jolson Lim: As well, social media companies…In Canada, we look at Facebook in a greater negative lens, that their ability to combat disinformation, misinformation is ineffective. They just worry about the bottom line, if you know what I mean.

Jolson Lim: How do you get those two things to reach an optimal point, where civic society, or the population, as well as the disseminators of information -- social media companies like Twitter, Facebook -- how do you get them on board?

Audrey Tang: That’s two questions, right? [laughs] The first is, I think, if it’s about perming hairs, then there’s not much political operation. What about close to elections? What about the campaign disinformation or weaponization of disinformation during electoral periods? That’s the first one.

Audrey Tang: The second one is how the social media companies such as Facebook even agree in Taiwan to participate and encounter disinformation, self regulation, while they have staunchly refused to do so in other jurisdictions, or at least not as effective. That’s the two questions. You had questions?

Olga Katharina Scheer: Yeah. First part, what do you think about the case, Cambridge Analytica?

Audrey Tang: I know that question well.

Judith Hecht-Kontojannis: About what? I didn’t understand the question.

Olga Katharina Scheer: Cambridge Analytica.

Audrey Tang: The Cambridge Analytica.

Olga Katharina Scheer: What do you think about this?

Audrey Tang: That’s somewhat related to the second question. I’ll handle the first one first. When it’s not election season, actually, most people do agree of the harm of disinformation. We run many public consultations before.

Audrey Tang: When we put the facts, objective facts, the clarification messages, and ask what people feels about it, we always get this shape, meaning people who voluntarily contribute any feelings, any reflections about our facts.

Audrey Tang: They can click agree or disagree without reply button on it. Every single time, we see maybe only five statements that corresponds to your politically charged worldview that are divisive, that when you propose those statements, half of the population think it’s true, and half think it’s conspiracy theory.

Audrey Tang: Actually, most of the time, most of the people agree on most of the things. Just showing this picture on each and every controversial topic to the population, as we are regularly doing now, is important, because it reinforces the feeling of a polity.

Audrey Tang: Whereas in social media especially -- but unfortunately, also sometime on institutional media -- people spend a lot of calories on just those five things, because they sell papers. It really helps to remind people that there are things that we all agree.

Audrey Tang: Why don’t we just ratify those and move forward, while continuing discussion on those five divisive things? Having this view of a common polity, this is very important. When election goes near, the window moves toward the right.

Audrey Tang: Everybody then talks about the divisive issues, rather than non election periods. We also have facts to show that, in the previous election, where it’s the first one that individual campaign donations are made public by the Corrective UN, there is far less money being spent on campaign donation, compared to precision targeting in social media.

Audrey Tang: That is Cambridge Analytica. [laughs] I’m not saying that CA is directly behind the profiling, but no doubt something like CA is working.

Audrey Tang: The sponsor to political advertisement at our time on any social media is no subject to the Political Donation Act. Even foreign people can spend sponsorship to precision target anything around the elections in political advertisements, even when foreign people cannot actually participate in political donations.

Audrey Tang: Because we have very strong antimoney laundering, regulation now, it’s actually very easy to get the beneficial ownership information if we go to the corrective UN route. Everybody goes to the social media targeted advertisement route.

Audrey Tang: There’s some write up about it on foreign policy and other places, where I will not repeat. What we have now done is that for the next election, with a bill in the parliament that’s about to pass that says, targeted political advertisement on social media is exactly the same as campaign donation. It must be disclosed in exactly the same way.

Audrey Tang: If the person paying it is just accepting money from elsewhere, they must fully disclose it, just like beneficial ownership. If finally, we trace it to a foreign source of sponsorship, then that is subject to maybe a $30 million anti dollar fine, and so on. Exactly the same as campaign donation.

Audrey Tang: Facebook has implemented the necessary technological component to enact this because they know that we will pass it in the Parliament. This closes off one loophole that you just mentioned, which is nearing the elections, foreign sponsored propaganda is unchecked. Now it’s checked, and it’s subject to a band, and a very large fine.

Audrey Tang: The domestic advertisements, while they can freely do so, must be treated as campaign donations, and disclose exactly in which region, for which criteria, for which population, which profiling are you targeting to. This then enables the independent media to analyze publicly what is really going on during the campaign session.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying that this is as effective as the previous two lines of defense because we haven’t encountered a real election yet. We are cautiously optimistic around the efficiency of this kind of way, which is, again, not concentrating the power to the administration, but concentrating the power to the courts and the independent media. I think that answers your second part. Yes.

Olga Katharina Scheer: If you put everything online, public, do you think you will still need journalists?

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course.

Olga Katharina Scheer: Why?

Audrey Tang: Both my parents are journalists. [laughs]

Olga Katharina Scheer: Taking their job.

Audrey Tang: Out of filial piety. Seriously speaking, I think journalism is about adding perspectives. It is not about discovering objective facts that other people cannot see. Journalism is not about having exclusive access of the current air pollution. It’s not what journalism is about.

Audrey Tang: Journalism is about building a narrative that can make people care about air pollution, whereas they previously didn’t, to make people care about collective social choices that can reduce pollution, that would require coordinated action, not enabled by any particular side of things.

Audrey Tang: Journalism is about providing accountability and indeed demanding accountability, out of all the sectors of the commitment that they have done, when they have done so publicly and reported by the journalists. I think that’s journalism’s true value. By making the entire transcript, and all the data, and everything public available, it doesn’t take away the job of journalists.

Audrey Tang: It does make every 14 year old, possibly a journalist. It’s just like the open access of archive. It doesn’t take away the job of researchers, maybe elsewhere, but not researchers. It makes every 14 years old contribute to science, and see ourselves as scientists. I think that is the democratization and not the eradication of the journalism profession.

Jolson Lim: Taiwan is having presidential elections in January.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Jolson Lim: There’s elections in a number of our countries, including mine next month, where these issues of information, and what is true and what is not, are big issues. In Taiwan, what have you seen, in terms of the trends regarding fake news and misinformation? Are they the same trends that are applicable to other countries in the West?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan news and journalism translate to the same Mandarin word, [non English speech] , so [non English speech], but also [non English speech]. News and journalism is the same translation, which is why I never use the F word that you just used, which also in Mandarin sounds like a front to journalists. Out of filial piety, I cannot use that word. Feel free to continue using that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what we’re now seeing, in terms of information on manipulation, is indeed very applicable to other countries as well. This slide, actually, I shared first, in Bangkok, in Thailand. In Thailand, the PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, and indeed, their entire public sector, is now forced to choose between going to the Singaporean model or the Taiwan model.

Audrey Tang: Lots of our nearby jurisdictions are making the same choice. Even in the traditional Western liberal democracies, sometimes they are now also forced to make such a choice, such as the NetzDG in Germany. Although it’s only around hate speech, they nevertheless move towards a little bit about concentration of power of what’s hate speech and what’s not hate speech, and so on.

Audrey Tang: It is something that is faced by everybody, which is why I think the Taiwanese model, which shows evidence also for it as an epidemic rather than a battle, I think is a better analogy. If you frame it as a battle, there would be sites that are adversarial. I’m not denying that there are adversarial sites, but they are actually opportunistic approaches.

Audrey Tang: No information operation adversary actually manufacture mimetic weapons from scratch. They look at the LINE, WhatsApp, into an encrypted channels. They see the discord, the social distrust that’s already there. They run a lot of AB testing to make sure that they can really divide people.

Audrey Tang: There’s entire reports about the Russian manipulation on the US parties, so I don’t have to repeat that research. Finally, when you see this information packaged, that’s already the last stop in their work. They have already identified the precision target criteria needed to maximize this trust for these particular people.

Audrey Tang: If we see it as a vaccine in the previous stages, where people can see that we are a polity, and this is the world between us, it’s a publicly funded TV series that just went on air in HBO Asia in Japan.

Audrey Tang: Everybody who have seen this TV series which has 95 percent approval on IMDb, which we’re very proud of, see the media and how it works, how institutional media works, how social media works, how people frame things, what does the various effects of fires help us as manufactured, how the framing effect works and things like that.

Audrey Tang: It is really a public education series, but it is also very compelling drama about the death penalty. This really went viral in everywhere, in Taiwan. Everybody who have seen this TV series is then equipped with more intellectual capacity to see any incoming message and asking who frame it, why do they frame it this way, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Media literacy is not just about literacy, it is also in this TV series about numeracy, about the ability to see numbers, to use data, to see and collect evidences, to show that what information operations stage any and each of us is participating or helping to spread. Something like that I think is much more important in the long run.

Audrey Tang: Of course, having weekly access to minister doesn’t hurt either. [laughs] If the public sector is accountable in a real time way, there’s far less also for the disinformation to grab.

Jolson Lim: Do you think Western governments would be able to look at the Taiwan model, and what Taiwan has, and apply it to their own government in their own country?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Jolson Lim: What about the Taiwan model do you think so far perhaps needs improvement, or what has to come next in this country to really build on what has happened?

Audrey Tang: As I said, we have not actually run a election using this new model. We have been kind of cooking this model since 2017, but we cannot roll it out in the previous election because then it will be seen as an election manipulation effort. Then we announce it right after the previous election. This takes affect in the next one, and so we will of course make adjustments based on the actual data collected.

Audrey Tang: Before, the social media companies doesn’t even publish the data, so there is nothing to analyze, but now the situation is changing.

Audrey Tang: For example, Twitter just published a couple of weeks ago, a dataset about information manipulation campaigns against Hong Kong social movement. They discovered that even though they’re harmless looking account, they’re spreading photos of, I don’t know, Korean artists or whatever, at some point they all took a different stunts and start spreading misinformation.

Audrey Tang: While they’re probably intentional disinformation about the Hong Kong protest in a coordinated fashion. Their source Internet protocol address are not only from the PRC territories, but also from a section previously not noticed that doesn’t need to go through a VPN to access Twitter. This is a state protected IP address designed to influence Twitter, because they’re not part of the Great Firewall. If it’s not state sponsored, at least it’s state encouraged information manipulation.

Audrey Tang: Twitter, for the first time, for a PRC operation, published everything before taking them down. Now we have much more quantitative evidence, the numeracy part not just the literacy part to look at information manipulation. We’ll see how it takes us in the next election.

Olga Katharina Scheer: What do you think about the protests in Hong Kong?

Audrey Tang: Your concern…?

Teresa Aburto Uceda: I was going to trust to you stand up a bit more in Hong Kong, what was your opinion, and how do you think that can affect to next election?

Audrey Tang: I actually tweeted about it, and that was very early on, I think. That’s before the Presidential Hackathon around Oslo Freedom Forum. Right. That was, I think, the first large parade, the June 16 parade.

Audrey Tang: This is what I said, and I also stand by these words now. I said that, “this is the chance for the PRC to listen to the people and advance open government which is the 16th Sustainable Development Goal that they have agreed on back in 2015.” Taiwan can help Hong Kong promote the global goals.

Audrey Tang: That is not only my personal stance, but now I think our President and indeed our Premier yesterday, said we have all the laws and regulation in place that when people seeking protection want to consider Taiwan as part of their destinations, we have that in effect. The civil society in Taiwan, the social sector of course has moved very quickly.

Audrey Tang: If you look at Taiwan Reporter, which is the social sector media, recently famous for covering the Xinjiang concentration sites, I think that’s a neutral word, it’s very hard to choose a neutral word now, concentration sites of “reeducation,” they also have a lot of civil society interviews, and support, and indeed the gas masks and everything you can see regularly being sourced from Taiwan as part of the Hong Kong movement to fight authoritarianism.

Audrey Tang: In the public sector, because I wear two hats, you see, in the public sector we make sure that regulation and the institutional support for people who seek asylum, or support, or a state to present their views are thoroughly protected in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Wearing my other hat I’m very glad to see that the leaderless technologies that we have developed during the Sunflower Movement five years ago, and applied directly by Taiwanese people visiting Hong Kong at the end of that year in the Umbrella Revolution has now evolved into a truly leaderless way.

Audrey Tang: At that time we’re only prototyping the leaderless coordination efforts, and at some time it still falls back to the old command/control ways, but after five years of practice, I’m really, really grateful for Hong Kong people to show us that truly leaderless movement is not only possible, but actually effective, as a conservative anarchist, that is the philosophy that I have always advocated, and now there’s a real demonstration not in only the protest sense, but demo sense to the world.

Audrey Tang: That’s my personal reflection. How does it affect the election? Well, I don’t belong to any political parties, so I care about fairness of election and not the outcome of the election. I think no candidate now say one country two system anymore.

Audrey Tang: That is something that is fallen off entirely from the Taiwanese political rhetoric. Mayor Han Kuo yu said that to implement “One Country, Two System,” we’ll have to step through over his dead body, meaning that he is dead against it.

Audrey Tang: Same applies to virtually everybody who are considering a presidential bid for people right now. That may increase or decrease over the coming weeks. I think that is the immediate reaction. Sometimes before the Hong Kong protest, people still tolerate in political debates the possibility of “One Country, Two Systems.”

Audrey Tang: Of course the one country is always said as the ROC not the PRC, but sometimes it’s still being bandied about. After Hong Kong nobody use that terms anymore. You really refrained the political conversations around the upcoming political presidential election. That is my observation as a non partisan.

Brendon Hong: Does the Taiwanese government have any indication that Beijing, or Beijing sponsored actors might try to somehow influence the elections?

Audrey Tang: Everybody is influencing our elections. Beijing operated or not, Taiwanese elections, we’re literally at the forefront of democratic innovations. People who don’t like the Taiwanese model and prefer authoritarianism, or indeed fascism, would of course work to kind of disprove the Taiwan model, because they have some other governance model to export.

Audrey Tang: Taiwanese elections is always something that the fascist jurisdictions would like to show as ineffective or dividing, or whatever, but this is not pertaining only to Taiwan, any liberal democracy. If you have watched the next Netflix terms about a certain referendum is vulnerable to such operations by authoritarian actors, or authoritarian and excluding part of population, populist actors. This one is no exception, but we’re used to it now, ever since 1996.

Brendon Hong: Who is in this camp from your view, you said authoritarian, fascist, who do you consider like this? Which jurisdiction, namely?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s two things. Within Taiwan, there are people who not only remember the martial law, but remember fondly of the martial law. These are primarily the people that I’m referring to. They reminisce a time where there is not so much people going to the street, or there’s not so much loudness of voices, the cacophony of voices around any particular social issue.

Audrey Tang: They reminisce about the efficiency of a top down approach, of the leaders saying something and it gets done tomorrow, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This being a democratic society, they have their voices. Indeed, they have their own parties, and so on. I’m not saying that their views are wrong, I’m just saying that whenever a democratic election comes, these are the people in Taiwan who would like to convince everyone that democratic election may not actually be the best system, that maybe it is a better system for authoritarianism to resume somehow in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That is the primarily the population that I’m referring to. In nearby jurisdictions, there are also people who reminisce these times. If they want to export their authoritarian ways of not making the state transparent to the citizen as we just showed, but make the citizens transparent to the state. Sometimes they’re not controller of a jurisdiction, sometime they’re private sector companies.

Audrey Tang: For example, I don’t know, companies making social credit system. They have a business to make, which is to convince nearby jurisdictions that building a social credit system is a good idea to your governance system. While I would argue that they don’t see themselves as defending any particular ideological or constitutional duty, it is their business to sell such a civic surveillance system.

Audrey Tang: They also, or at least the people who did information operation in our previous election, as seen by the foreign policy report, or report themselves as employees of a certain Tencent corporation.

Audrey Tang: Now, they may or may not be real employees of the Tencent corporation, but it is true that if your business is selling such 1984 devices, you would be motivated to influence the Taiwanese election, so that people would consider that chaotic and would consider buying your solutions.

Teresa Aburto Uceda: Two last questions from my part. I would like to know if you think that we will see independence referendum in Taiwan in the near future.

Teresa Aburto Uceda: My second question, do you have any advice for the European Union, such a big organism, the biggest parliament in the world, to get more transparent and to better engage the people, so you can fight all these far rights with parties?

Audrey Tang: First of all, I am all for inclusive populism. The work I’m doing can be seen as a form of inclusive populism, because it takes what’s monopolized by the elites away and democratizes whatever the elite can do.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying that I am not a populist. I am just saying I’m an inclusive populist. That I’m not saying that part of our society is not our society and should be, I don’t know, driven away or something. Even for people who reminisces about authoritarianism, they are part of our polity. I’m being inclusive here. I have nothing against inclusive populism.

Audrey Tang: With that said, I think what we are now seeing, by changing the referendum to take every other year, instead of with the elections, is a great development. In our previous mayoral election, which is also the day of referendum, we have seen two adverse stereo effects.

Audrey Tang: The first one is that referendum requires a long deliberation of options, so that when the referendum finally passed, not half of the society feel that they lost. Rather, they have participated in meaningful deliberation, so that everybody can live with it.

Audrey Tang: Switzerland, of course, is one of the best places that have pioneered this model. Whatever deliberations have we done, even for an entire year, when it comes to the representative democracy election, people just put that into brackets and start thinking in binary terms.

Audrey Tang: That is what party politic is. Having the referendum in the same day as the party politics makes it that people feel lost if they lose the election, and by extension, the referendum. That is actually not good to develop a truly deliberative conversation for the referendum.

Audrey Tang: Which is why we have now changed to have a mayoral election and a national referendum, presidential election, national referendum, mayoral election, and so on, so it falls on every other year. We have entire year for deliberation without getting captured by binary party politics.

Audrey Tang: That’s the first observation. The second is that, in our current referendum act, it doesn’t handle constitutional changes. To declare du jour independence from what, from the ROC, maybe? [laughs] That would require a constitutional level change.

Audrey Tang: It would either require amending the constitution or making a new constitution, as in Iceland. Not very successfully, but as in Iceland. That is not covered by the Referendum Act, which strictly speaking, is one implementation of the direct democracy creation right, as guaranteed by the constitution.

Audrey Tang: By a radical revolutionary named Sun Yat sen, who put direct democracy into the constitution, which was very cutting edge 100 years ago. What we are now doing in the referendum is not challenging the constitution, just implementing Sun Yat sen’s idea of direct people participation.

Audrey Tang: We cannot use that Referendum Act to overturn the constitution. That will take another effort. Just answering your question, we cannot use the referenda system as we have now to amend or change the constitution. I think that answers the question.

Audrey Tang: What was the second question? Sorry.

Teresa Aburto Uceda: I was asking about, do you have any advice for the European Union?

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, the EU. The EU is very diverse, [laughs] so how do we even start? Sometimes, I would say that, in many EU states, they actually pioneered the work that we are doing now. For example, the private data as relationship view is directly from the GDPR.

Audrey Tang: Our privacy law is a copy of the EU privacy directive before the GDPR. We’re now very close to get GDPR adequacy. For these data portability, explainability, relational rights, we learned from the EU. We’re not saying that we can advise the EU in any way.

Audrey Tang: Our ways of producing the data collaboratives, the transparency from the civil society, like the Presidential Hackathon, is also learned from Germany. I have a good friend, Julia Kloiber, who worked with the German cabinet to introduce the Prototype Fund, which is a new way of government award, of rewarding people who write any data based innovations that maybe has five percent of success rate.

Audrey Tang: The state never gets anything back, really, but all they ask is that the source code, the data, the innovation process must be open. If you fail, you fail spectacularly. Other people can then learn from it and build from the failures. The prototype fund, I think, is a really good idea that we just adapted into the Taiwanese Presidential Hackathon.

Audrey Tang: The Presidential Hackathon is an annual event that runs for three months, much like the Prototype Fund, that we ask anybody from the society. For example, these are the pipe repairs people from the Taiwan Water Corporation.

Audrey Tang: Every day, they wake up, they listen to the pipes for leaks, and most of the time, they listen nothing. If the pipes start leaking, many of them plastic pipes, they have to be creative and solve those water leaks. The problem being, because it’s very time consuming, during the leak and the time that it gets discovered.

Audrey Tang: For example, in Keelung, that would take two months, which is too long. Through the Presidential Hackathon, we coach them to be tri sectoral, meaning they’re the public servant, but they also get paired with the private sector, the innovation and technology experts, but also with the social sector expertise around community building and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Each team, through those three sectors, creates a solution. Their final solution is a chat bot that the repairs people wakes up and see their machine apprentice telling them that which three points near them is most likely to leak with 70 percent accuracy.

Audrey Tang: Now, in Keelung, it only takes a couple days for a water leak to be detected through this co-creation of technology. Something like that is what we learn from the Prototype Fund. Prototype Fund suffers from a challenge, in that if you fail spectacularly, then it’s working as designed.

Audrey Tang: For five percent of the teams, you really deliver a solution, such as this one, there is no obligation for any state or any county, even, to adapt its regulation, to adopt the solution. Sometime, the solution just went nowhere.

Audrey Tang: We know it solves the problem, but it doesn’t get any political will to implement. To fix that -- and that’s my main suggestion to the European Union -- is that not only building tri sectoral teams is important, but the trophy of…

Audrey Tang: Well, this looks like a trophy. Why don’t we just make it a trophy? A trophy that you give from your president is very important. Because they have public sector people in it, we cannot give them money. We give them a trophy that is a projector.

Audrey Tang: If you turn on the projector here, it projects an image of the president herself handing the trophy to you. It presents the award ceremony, and if your director general, if your mayor doesn’t think your idea visible, have budget, or regulatory adjustment for your idea to implement, all they have to do is turn on the projector.

Audrey Tang: That is the presidential promise. All the five teams every year that won the Presidential Hackathon gets the presidential promise that we will do whatever it takes within the next year to make your idea public policy, written into the national public policy.

Audrey Tang: That is the binding mechanism for the civil society’s idea to be realizable in the public sector. That then attracts many, like more than 100 teams, this year. We use a new voting method, called quadratic voting, that is under some circumstances, the best voting method.

Audrey Tang: Every citizen in the e participation platform gets 99 points. They see around 100 cases. Now, in many other online voting, you will see everybody just voting 99 points to one single subject and be done with it.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t work in the QV, because if they really like this one, and they want to spend 1 point to buy one vote, that works. If they want to buy two votes, then they have to spend 4 points. If they want to give them three votes, they have to spend 9 points.

Audrey Tang: 99 points only gets you 9 votes, and you still have 18 left. You have to find something else to give them four votes, and you still have two left. You will look at two other projects to give them one vote, by which time you realize this one is actually better than the one you just gave nine votes to.

Audrey Tang: You retract some points and spread it to this fair and balanced voting. Using QV, we have a really good spread of the diversity of public benefit. Not just by who can advocate and lobby the most number of voters to the publishing platform.

Audrey Tang: Each and every topic is corresponding to one Sustainable Development Goals. For example, the one that we just showed is 6.4, increasing water use efficiency. After they solve the problem for Keelung, they get invited by Wellington, and indeed, co-created a similar solution in New Zealand to tackle their water shortage issue.

Audrey Tang: Which they didn’t used to have, but because of climate change, they are now starting to have, and so on. This is the idea of what we mean by Taiwan can help. It means that, when we’re solving our own problems, we do it in a tri sectoral way.

Audrey Tang: We index those efforts, using the SDG target numbers, so it can get discovered by every other society. We always have something concrete to show, because the president has herself promised to implement in the society.

Audrey Tang: Foreign visitors can just check for themselves how it’s working in Keelung and other jurisdictions in Taiwan, other municipalities, before co-creating with that team the solutions for that particular country. I think, within EU, maybe the member states can have a very similar fellowship programs.

Audrey Tang: The most important is for one mayor or one president to give the same political promise as the presidential promise in our hackathon.

Andrej Matisak: I had just one quick one. We have been talking about this information a lot. For example, from your point of view, how to deal… Also, maybe it could be a device also for the journalist. How to deal with somebody like US President Donald Trump?

Andrej Matisak: He is a huge source of disinformation. From my perspective, he is basically one of the biggest trolls we have, because he has an office which is one of the most important office, if not the most important one in this world.

Andrej Matisak: How to deal with this kind of spreading of disinformation, basically from the guy who was elected in the fair and democratic elections? By the way, your foreign minister just said that you have probably the best relations with the US ever.

Andrej Matisak: I understand the statement, because of political things. Trump is there. He doesn’t like liberty, democracy, those things, so how to deal with somebody like Donald Trump?

Audrey Tang: Our relationship with the US is not partisan. When I was in DC, I met literally with most of the international think tanks from the Republican side and also the Democratic side. Indeed, NDI and IRI work together to spread the Taiwan model in nearby jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s not a partisan relationship. It’s not like we’re pretty good relationship with the Republic, but not the Democratics. It’s not like that. The support for Taiwan is truly bipartisan. That’s part of your implied question. I have to answer that first.

Audrey Tang: How to work with a president that has mastered Twitter, and indeed, can make poetic pronouncements using 140 words -- well, characters, now 280 characters -- but still 140 Chinese characters. [laughs] Each one is twice as wide as a Latin alphabet. We understand that.

Audrey Tang: In any case, how to work with such a politician. This is a great question. I think that really, nobody monopolizes the Twitter platform. Everybody can learn the art and poetry of communicating their side of the world in a way that goes viral.

Audrey Tang: This is not a privilege of the president. Indeed, President Obama also used very similar…Of course, he is more spreading hope, but same idea. [laughs] He is using very similar use of social media also to just bypass journalism to communicate directly with the population.

Audrey Tang: I think for journalists, getting people’s 15 seconds of attention is not just a good to have anymore. One has to work with the political machine’s acuity to also get people’s 15 seconds of attention before they can then understand your entire exposition or your entire investigative narrative.

Audrey Tang: This is maybe unfortunate, and this is also why I use this Nokia 8110 phone, from the movie “Matrix,” which was 20 years ago. Exactly because the addiction industry that is Twitter and Facebook doesn’t hurt me if I’m using this phone.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a touch screen. It doesn’t give me haptic dopamine shot if I swipe on it. It doesn’t swipe. It doesn’t give me the addiction, the fear of missing out, because the screen is too small to fit anything in. I cannot just randomly spew my emotion for people to radicalize themselves, and then later, I would regret, because I type really slowly using this keyboard.

Audrey Tang: All this is deliberate. This means that I would like to deliberate, instead of just spreading radicalized information. I would also encourage -- and this is what I share with all the citizens -- if you have a political environment where people just spread divisive messages, one can empower oneself using simple extensions such as News Feed Eradicator.

Audrey Tang: Maybe you have used an advertisement blocker before that blocks advertisement, especially popup advertisement for your browser. The same technology can also be used to take away the Facebook feed and replace it with an inspirational quote, this one from Adler.

Audrey Tang: You can also customize the quotes. What it does is that it takes the passive part of Facebook away. There’s no way for their parasitical AI to manufacture addiction anymore, because that’s the only unpredictable part of Facebook.

Audrey Tang: Every other part, I still use Facebook to search for hashtags, to watch live streams from Hong Kong, to engage in messaging, and things like that, but I don’t let my mind be absorbed in the place of addiction by those technologies.

Audrey Tang: Then, no matter how radical or how disinformational the politician’s message is, I am not affected anymore when I configure my phone and my desktop computer this way. This is the psychological, the mental hygiene that we’re introducing to our even primary schoolers now as part of their media literacy and critical thinking in our new curriculum.

Audrey Tang: I think, at the end, that may be the only way out, because otherwise, it is an arms race. Nowadays, for journalists, for you to understand that there is even such a possibility, you have to make ironically a 15 second advertisement that attracts people to this kind of inoculations. That is just the world that we’re living in now. C’est la vie.

Andrej Matisak: I have to deal with Trump, no matter how.

Audrey Tang: Well, I just shahred a few common practices we’re observing here. I think we are at time. Thank you for your great questions.

Judith Hecht-Kontojannis: Thank you very much for your time. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.