Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Actually, there are main three questions. The first question is, I want to know how is going on about aging society in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is very quickly becoming an aging society. We’re roughly three or four years behind Japan, which is already an aging society. We’re catching up really fast, let’s just say that.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Do you face a challenge also in the fact-checking way? Is old people in Taiwan facing the fake news pretty much?

Audrey Tang: The elderly actually use Internet very actively in Taiwan, partly because we have very affordable broadband access, but also because the literacy rate is also very high.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, they’re very eager to use Internet. However, they don’t use social media that much. For the elderly, the users of LINE, which is an end-to-end encrypted messenger which is not really a social media, is much higher than the social media such as Facebook or Twitter.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, the elderly rely on LINE for their everyday communication. Whenever there is some disinformation or rumors, it’s very likely for the elderly people that they receive it from the LINE channel first before any media institutional or social.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Actually, my thesis is focusing actually in the LINE, too. We found that the fake news in Thailand, it’s spread through the LINE application. Is this happening also in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: No, what I’m saying is that disinformation is in all channels, but the elderly prefers to use LINE. The young people may have many different social media applications on their phones, such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. It’s very likely that the elderly people only have LINE in their phone.

Audrey Tang: This is not to say that all that elderly people read is LINE, but they spend more time on LINE proportionally compared to young people. That’s what I was saying.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: In Thailand, there are fake news that’s spread in the LINE application, through people sharing or forwarding news in LINE. Is there also the fake news in Taiwan that spread through the LINE as well?

Audrey Tang: In the collaboration that the LINE company through their corporate social responsibility, they publish a digital accountability dashboard to highlight the most viral rumors, misinformation, and also disinformation on their platform. They work with four fact-checking partners. One of them is actually in Thailand. They arrived with us.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Who are these…?

Audrey Tang: The Cofacts team.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Huan…?

Audrey Tang: Huan-Cheng. It’s Johnson Liang who came with us here, with the intern nicknamed Mr. ORZ. He was one of the founders of the chat bot called CoFacts. There’s also many other partners. There is one called MyGoPen. There’s one called Rumors & Truth, and also the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, which is a member of the International Fact-Checking Network.

Audrey Tang: All those four fact-checkers receive a collaboration from the LINE Corporation so that people can flag anything as rumor, as spam, or something, and then the LINE forwards it to all the four fact-checkers. Each of them can contribute back to the LINE system. The disinformation reported can be seen very clearly on the LINE dashboard.

Audrey Tang: I can send you the URL later. We are not talking about a general impression, but we’re talking about just like spam email. If you ask how many spam emails are there, of course, you’re going to ask Spamhaus which has the signatures of people who donate their email message that they think are spam through the “flag as spam” button on their mail reader.

Audrey Tang: Exactly the same way, people can report a piece of information as misinformation or disinformation by forwarding it to the CoFacts bot. Or, now in LINE itself, they can also just report it using the official LINE fact-checking bot.

Audrey Tang: I think if you want quantitative numbers, like whether it’s growing or whether it’s shrinking and so on, you can look at both the Cofacts database, as well as the overall LINE dashboard.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: That mean they fill misinformation through the Taiwan LINE application, right?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. The idea is that people can flag anything that they consider as misinformation or disinformation. When sufficient amount of people flag the same piece of message, then it gets a higher score on the digital accountability system. The fact-checkers can focus more of their energy on the one that’s just about to go viral.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: It also reach the private information, the information that I send you privately that…

Audrey Tang: If you send me an information, of course, that’s just between you and me. If you send me a piece of information which you will see elsewhere, you’re just spreading it, because you see a piece of information, makes you angry or something and you don’t actually check for the validity or the factfulness of that message and you just bluntly sent it to many people.

Audrey Tang: It’s not necessarily personal information. This is mostly just a virus that uses our trusting relationship as a way to propagate. Just like chain mail, this is not a new thing. Because of that, when we flag a piece of information as spam, we’re not saying that we’re sending the entire chat history to Cofact. This is not what happened.

Audrey Tang: It’s just a piece of information that’s forwarded to the Cofact. The Cofacts only learns about who flags the message, when was the message sent, the content of the message, a little bit of metadata around the date, and so on, but they don’t learn about our chat history. That’s not what happened.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: It’s not happened here in Thailand yet. There are maybe misinformation through the chat…

Audrey Tang: Last time I visited Thailand, I actually talked to many people about it. There’s a friend called Sunit running a social innovation collective. He visited Taiwan to serve as the judge of our Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award. During his trip, he visited Johnson and the Cofacts team to learn about, because it’s all open source, everybody can really run their own copy of Cofacts.

Audrey Tang: The important thing here is that Cofacts is not just a standalone tool. It’s also a database for other people to use. For example in Taiwan, we have an antivirus company called Trend Micro, which is pretty famous. The Trend Micro also makes a bot. You can invite the Trend Micro bot into your family chat room.

Audrey Tang: For example, in the LINE, you maybe have a group with 10 people in it. You can invite Trend Micro in. If you invite Trend Micro for each message everybody send, Trend Micro compare it to the Cofacts database, but it doesn’t send anything. It’s not locking anything. It just scans each incoming message, just like an antivirus program.

Audrey Tang: If they detect some misinformation that’s already clarified by the Cofacts, the bot just push out a message saying, “Oh, you sent this, but this is already clarified and this is what Cofacts has to say about it.” Cofacts is not just about individual people reporting, but also about a collective clarification, just like editing a Wiki.

Audrey Tang: This then becomes a shared database that Trend Micro can then use. If you invite Trend Micro into your family chat room, maybe 10 people, the other 9 people don’t have to learn anything about Cofacts or about digital accountability. They just understand that if they send out or share a message that’s misinformation, the bot will correct them very quickly.

Audrey Tang: It also saves you from confronting your family members because it’s an antivirus bot. It’s not their children [laughs] or their sibling correcting them.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: It’s interesting. Let’s move through to the aging content. How do you think that we can…You don’t have aging problems with the fact-checking, right?

Audrey Tang: I think the idea is to, what we call, train the trainers. Meaning that there are aging people who understand how to talk to other elderly people in their language and in their culture. The idea is that, in Taiwan, we have many community colleges, where the aging people are still lifelong learners, can enroll into the community colleges.

Audrey Tang: In the long-term healthcare centers, there are also people playing board games and so on, and basically do lifelong learning in the elderly care places. Because of that, the Ministry of Education works very closely with the coaches and trainers.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like people who work with the elderly to, for example, for them to play some softball together or to do some simple gym together and so on so that they keep a healthy life. We also have the same coaches learning about the counter disinformation ideas, so that the elderly can also exercise their mind in fact-checking.

Audrey Tang: They feel very proud because then they serve as the trainers that can then bring this skill to their elderly friends. Everybody can participate in this fact-checking work because, for many elderly people, it doesn’t matter who tells them what. What matters is that whether they can make a meaningful intervention.

Audrey Tang: For example, if somebody tells them microwaving, I don’t know, fruits causes cancer or something like that, it doesn’t matter where did they learn that knowledge. It matters that they send it to their grandchildren so that they feel that they are caring about their grandchildren. The important part here is the trainers are equipped with the same attractive information.

Audrey Tang: We work with LINE. The LINE TODAY platform have this clarified information that are standalone, that are beautifully drawn or painted, and that are also good if the elderly want to care about their grandchildren. It’s also viral, but it’s true. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The idea is that we equip them with such true information so that the elderly can look at LINE TODAY, see the latest clarifications, and also care about their grandchildren by sharing those clarification messages to their grandchildren. If we don’t design that into LINE TODAY, they’re going to share anything that they look at that may improve their health in their minds.

Audrey Tang: If they have LINE TODAY, message from the Ministry of Health and Welfare, from a large hospital, or from esteemed scholar that are themselves fact-checked, they are very happy sharing that, too.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: I think it’s going to be my recommendation, too, in the thesis also that what you said. The last thing is, especially in Thailand, how we can improve the elderly? Do we have to do the same like in Taiwan? What is your…

Audrey Tang: Yes. I think a key part of it is what we call intergenerational solidarity. The elderly feels that they are still relevant in the society. Indeed, they know more. They’re wiser about many aspects of the society. They know more about the traditions, about the society, the culture, the environment.

Audrey Tang: The main problem that they’re facing is that the young people, after setting the new direction of where the society is moving, for example toward sustainability, toward climate change mitigation, toward marriage equality in Taiwan, and so on, the young people seem to leave the elderly people away and just work on their strategies without consulting their elderly.

Audrey Tang: That make them feel neglected and also misunderstood. If the young people keep a healthy relationship, for example all my four grandparents are still around. The eldest, my grandpa, is already 102 years old, very old. The youngest, my grandma on the father side, is maybe almost 80 years old. There’s one generation difference. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Between 100-something and 80-something, there’s also different world views as well. I keep visiting them once a month and call them every week or two. My grandparents are very eager to hear from me about the new directions that we are helping to make for the country. I always consult their opinion on how to make those new directions understandable by their friends, by people in their generation.

Audrey Tang: The idea is just like design thinking. The young people can scan a larger horizon to find more brainstorm ideas. If the young people settle on a collective value for the society, we must always include the elderly in so that the elderly people can help implementing. Meaning that making those idea a reality in a much more reliable, robust, and efficient fashion that the young people may miss.

Audrey Tang: The old people feel that they’re helpful in making things reliable, but the young people also feel helpful because they set the direction. These two must not be confused, like setting a direction and then just go away. [laughs] The elderly must not think that they still see the new world’s direction because the young people, frankly speaking, has a much better access to the international trends.

Audrey Tang: Those two people, if they’re connected by common values, then the elderly people will feel that they’re still part of the society. Indeed, in our participation platform online, the most active age groups are 15 years old and 65 years old, because they have more time on their hands, [laughs] and also they care more about the next generation instead of anything private.

Audrey Tang: We often have petitions where a 15-years-old set the direction, like banning plastic straws. Elderly people help think of new ways to realize that, like still making straws but from the recycled sugarcane waste or recycled coffee bean waste and so on, because they’re very good at agricultural innovation, but the young people set the direction.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Make that gap more small, right? The main things. If I talk about media, how can we improve the aging or the elderly via the media? What kind of media we can make? For example, clips or videos. How is this media should be for elderly?

Audrey Tang: I think the most powerful media is high-bandwidth video conference. In Taiwan, because we have broadband as a human right, we can, at any given place, just start using a phone and start a high-definition video, 1080p or sometimes even 4K, between any two points in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Even on the top of mountain of Yu Shan, which is almost 4,000 meters, or the south most Pacific islands of Dongsha in Taiping, all of them have 10 megabits per second, which is required for high-definition video.

Audrey Tang: I tour around Taiwan every couple week or so to go to the most elderly places, like the indigenous nations with the tribal elders, like the rural areas where the only very young and very old people are still there, because the people in the working age have moved to municipalities. I’m sure you also have that…

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …here in Thailand. I will tour around and meet them where they are. Maybe in a town hall, maybe in a large café, a garden, or whatever that they are used to gather around anyway.

Audrey Tang: I make sure that when I travel, I connect through high-speed telepresence to have a wall projector, project the image of the Taiping municipality, and connect them to all the ministries in Taiwan, usually section chiefs. Maybe 12 different ministries.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that, because if they’re only constrained in their social context, it’s very easy for them to think about something without checking whether it’s true.

Audrey Tang: If, regularly, they connect through high-bandwidth video conference to people in municipalities that can answer their questions about whether something is true, or they can also make suggestions like the policy that we design in Taipei doesn’t work in their rural area. Instead of waiting for four years to elect a new MP, which is very long time, [laughs] they can just say whatever they want.

Audrey Tang: I make sure that the ministries hear their story by looking at them eye-to-eye. In Taiwan, we have the same. Meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent of trust. Through high-definition video conference, we can build already 20 percent of trust.

Audrey Tang: The idea here is that if the elderly people can always see that they are being cared about, that they have a good relationship with not only policymakers but also doctors, psychologists, and so on in different municipalities, but they can just turn on the screen and see them face-to-face with some regularity, then they feel they are very connected to the society.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t have that connection, they would instead just rely on the small bits of text on the LINE system. The problem is that, if you look at a picture online, a very low-definition video, or just a few words but you don’t know the person sending this message that well, then you can do a psychological projection, that is to say second-guessing what they really mean.

Audrey Tang: Across generational differences, across different cultures, and different lands, the psychological projection is always wrong. That reinforces their stereotypes and makes this information much easier to grow if you’re filled with stereotypes about people.

Audrey Tang: If you regularly just meet people in a high-bandwidth fashion either face-to-face or through real-time telepresence, then it’s actually very difficult to pretend that the people out there are aliens, they’re outcasts, or different culture and so on. We will very quickly realize we’re still in the same society, the same polity.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: I’ve got everything and interesting things from you.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Thank you very much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: I will see you tomorrow, too.

Audrey Tang: Yes. We will see each other at the university. Cheers.

Zach Huang: Sunit, you just mentioned, he is talking tomorrow. If you want to…

Audrey Tang: If you want to work with someone to help LINE here in Thailand do the same as we do in Taiwan, Sunit is a person to talk with.

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Thank you.

Zach Huang: You want me to take a picture?

Suthimanat Chinakarapong: Yeah, please.