Interviewer: Like everything is good for the article, I like it that we can publish everything.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I don’t have a meeting after this, so we can just go on if you don’t have somewhere else (to be)…

Interviewer: Okay, perfect! Oh, I think that we have just one hour, so it’s good.

Audrey Tang: Because it took 20 minutes to do the photos.

Interviewer: You know, I asked Abigail maybe if she wants to go straight to the top of the tower to make a photo of what we think… because then you see all the Tel Aviv…

Audrey Tang: Maybe we do our interview first while they check the availability?

Interviewer: Yeah. So… I just put it here… Okay. It’s not bomb.

Audrey Tang: Yet… It’s not a bomb… yet. Wait until someone hacks into it.

Interviewer: I read about you that humor is the first thing that you use.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Humor over rumor.

Interviewer: And it’s good with the citizens that you can explain things by humor side.

Interviewer: I think it’s a good agenda because during the Corona time… If we can start, you see the question before, yes?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I did.

Interviewer: So if you want to answer one by one, like you got it.

Audrey Tang: I think we can do it normal flow.

Interviewer: Perfect.

Audrey Tang: I mean, there are questions that my staff says I should minimize my answers, like commenting to your PM or MPs.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Abby Lee: No comment on domestic politics.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we’re not interfering with domestic politics.

Abby Lee: We only share our experience in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Yes. We’ll just talk about… And in our experience in Taiwan, really, there’s nothing off limits, I will share everything. But I don’t yet understand your politics well enough to comment on your PM or MPs.

Interviewer: OK. One of the things I understood because it’s connected to what you say now, it’s about the fake news, the time that you do the response. It’s so quickly, like two hours maximum.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. And you are a journalist, so you get to use the F word, but we never use the F word. We never say fake news in Taiwan. We say FIMI or Foreign Information Manipulation Interference, F-I-M-I. It’s the same word that the European Union uses.

Interviewer: F-I-M-I. FIMI, it’s nice.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because especially in Mandarin in Taiwan, if we translate fake news, sometimes it translates to the news that the politicians don’t like. And that’s not a good posture with journalists.

Interviewer: It’s much gentler.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. And also, journalists, I think… journalism really is the perfect antidote against FIMI. Journalism to FIMI is like epidemiology to coronavirus. So, I hold journalists to very high esteem. Both of my parents are journalists.

Interviewer: Oh.

Audrey Tang: So, we use the word FIMI because a domestic journalist can never be FIMI, right, by definition. And if you say fake news, it confuses the two.

Interviewer: So, if you use the fake news, the two words, it’s going to be misunderstood sometimes.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Interviewer: Or you blame someone…

Audrey Tang: Yes. And we never blame the journalism, right? So, when we say FIMI, it means specifically foreign information manipulation and interference. And it may not be fake, right? It could just be they hacked into a signboard and post a message there. And the message may not be fake. It may be a real message, but it shouldn’t appear here.

Interviewer: So, it depends on which side you look at the scope. If we take the journalist, and I say something in the media, and then you read it and you say, wait a minute, it’s not like this. You will not say fake news?

Audrey Tang: No, I will never say that.

Interviewer: You will say FIMI…

Audrey Tang: No, no, no. I will not say anything like accusing the journalist.

Interviewer: Okay, so how do you…

Audrey Tang: We will just provide clarifications. And the clarification will come, as you said, within two hours, 200 words, two pictures. But it’s a clarification. It’s only when there’s a foreign cyber-attack, a foreign information manipulation, we would say that’s FIMI.

Interviewer: But in this period, in this reality, that every minute we can see this in government, in the United States, with the story with Trump, with Bibi, it’s a lot of examples I can give you. You have to take big department to take care about the…

Interviewer: Tell me, you write in your journal for 40 years. When you write 10 years before, we believe you. Now, we don’t know what is fake news and what is not. What to believe and what…

Interviewer: It’s something political.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think it’s the polarization that is the main difference compared to even 10 years ago, because on many online platforms, polarization sells more advertisement. Polarization delivers more clicks and people become addicted to polarization. And that’s the main problem.

Interviewer: So, we are like victims?

Audrey Tang: Or I would say “users”, right? There’s some other industry also has users. The industry that sells addiction, of course.

Interviewer: If I understood you well, if you look for the side of the clients that read the newspaper, the readers, you can say these words that I can read it like this. What you read, it’s good being in business, the titles, the stories, but not to use the words, “fake news”. Be careful. Don’t believe in everything, trust yourself to think if there is something not so correct or…

Audrey Tang: There is that. What you’re talking about is literacy or critical thinking. That’s what you’re talking about But in Taiwan, I was part of the basic education curriculum committee before joining the cabinet. Our new curriculum, new as of 2019, we took out all the words literacy. So, no media literacy, digital literacy, data literacy, no. We replaced that with competence. So, media competence, digital competence.

Audrey Tang: The difference is that literacy is when you’re consuming the information. With critical thinking, maybe, but still a consumer. But competence is when you’re a producer of information, when you make information. So, the idea is that every junior high school student should be free to fact check the three presidential candidates as they’re having a platform debate. And if they find a mistake that a candidate said, maybe the student’s name appear on national television live stream. So, we need to-

Interviewer: If they found a mistake, they can-

Audrey Tang: They can report it to the collaborative fact checking community.

Interviewer: This is the platform V…(?)

Audrey Tang: No, this is called Cofacts. It’s also a g0v or GovZero initiative. But Cofacts is entirely in the social sector. It’s civil society. It’s not government run. It’s not government funded. But they are the Cofacts people, like Wikipedia, but instead of editing articles, they edit fact checks.

Audrey Tang: And we found it’s not the fact check reports that protects the mind against polarization. It’s a process of going through fact checking that inoculates a mind against polarization. So, if all the students can get the experience, like a journalist do, right? Checking the sources, checking the biases, making sure they’re two uncorrelated sources before saying something really happened and so on. If they go through this basic journalism one-on-one training, then they become immune or inoculated against polarization.

Interviewer: Wow. Very interesting. I read that you have… You made the v- How do you call this?

Audrey Tang: vTaiwan?

Interviewer: Yes.

Audrey Tang: In 2014. Yes.

Interviewer: Which year it was?

Audrey Tang: 2014… So, almost 10 years ago now.

Interviewer: And what is the major… main purpose behind this?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Yes. The idea of V-Taiwan is that for emerging technologies like Uber, the technology changes so fast that the normal democratic channels are very slow in comparison. A vote, for example, is once every four years in Taiwan. Of course, more in Israel.

Interviewer: Ask Bibi. He’s a champion.

Audrey Tang: Yes. So once every four years in Taiwan. And every time you vote, even after we have referendum, it’s once every two years, right? So, referendum, election, referendum, election. But even if it’s once a year, let’s be generous, still for every citizen, it’s until one year later can they deliver meaningful input. But within one year, Uber will have changed many times its business models and so on.

Audrey Tang: So, the idea is that the bandwidth of democracy, how much you can express, and the latency of democracy, how long to wait until you can next voice your opinion, need to improve as the emerging technologies. So, like in the Uber case, we ask all the taxi drivers, all the Uber drivers, their passengers and so on, to voice their opinion, but not just typing their statement. They also press like or unlike for other people’s statements. But there is no reply button. So, there’s no way for people to make personal attacks. Just their ideas, feelings and reflection.

Interviewer: It exists in other countries, I don’t think.

Audrey Tang: Yes, it’s been used in other countries as well. But I think Taiwan is the first one that uses it on a national scale.

Interviewer: National.

Audrey Tang: It’s used for town halls in Bowling Green in Kentucky. In many places, if you check Pol.is website, you will see. But mostly, they are for municipalities or districts and so on. And we take those small-scale technology and make it national, so that everybody can chime in.

Audrey Tang: And very quickly, we saw on the Uber conversation, that everybody actually agreed on most of the points. There’s just one that people don’t agree. Whether to call it sharing economy, or geek or extractive economy, that’s different ideologies. But actually, everybody agrees there should be insurance, there should be registration, they should undercut existing meters, but surge pricing is fine and so on.

Audrey Tang: So, when people learn that everyone across the party aisles actually do agree on these things…

Interviewer: This is democracy.

Audrey Tang: Yes, this is democracy. And we invite Uber and taxi union on the table and say, look, the people want you to work together like this, do you want to commit to it? And they say yes. So, Uber has been for years now a legal Taiwanese taxi fleet, because we changed our taxi law to allow for surge pricing.

Interviewer: So, according to the reality in Israel, probably you know the political issue, about the left and the right attitude of the people, every Saturday in this area it’s closed because there is a lot of people in the street that say no to what happened.

Interviewer: If we take this instrument to our democracy in Israel, do you think this is going to be much more polite for people to listen to each other, to respect each other when someone thinks like this, and others think like this, but not all the shouting and all the mess that we know for the last couple of months. Do you think this is going to be good in Israel?

Audrey Tang: In our experience, if we talk about abstract things, like sharing economy, gig economy, then this tool does not work. This tool only works when you talk about the specific case, for example, somebody with a driver’s license but not professional driver’s license, picking up strangers, they meet on an app, on the way to work, charging them to it… like you need to have a specific story that people can relate to. And then ask people how do you feel about it.

Audrey Tang: We have since the vTaiwan project, brought vTaiwan into the cabinet, and run similar processes in the joint platform. The difference is vTaiwan is g0v, is civil society led, and Join is government led. And on the Join platform, we talk about even more things than emerging technologies. For example, we talk about the right for unmarried women, to the benefits for her child, and that was before we legalized marriage equality. So, it also carries to lesbian couples, for example.

Interviewer: So, this is interesting, the family of the couples, when it’s a marriage of gays or lesbians, they are not involved of the marriage, it’s separate.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so as I said, we chose specific examples within the marriage equality case. So, we didn’t talk about the definition of marriage, that would never work. But we talk about the welfare and the rights of the child that’s not yet born, right? So, we will all think about the child, and that makes it much easier for people to join together.

Interviewer: It’s relaxed.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s relaxed.

Interviewer: It’s not a mess.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. As I said…

Interviewer: So, when you come to a subject that’s complicated, how to…

Audrey Tang: …That can resonate with people. Because then when people hear about it, they have feelings that are more pro-social, because everybody wants to think better for the child, right? But if you argue what is marriage, they are very anti-social. Very polarized.

Interviewer: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yes. So that’s the idea. And when Taiwan legalized marriage equality, indeed, as you said, we chose a model where we recognized the bylaws, so they enjoy the same rights and duties as heterogeneous marriage… heterosexual marriage. But the difference is that the kinship, the in-laws, mother-in-law, father-in-law, and so on, were not part of the equation. So, the people who care about kinship, lineage, and those classical ideas, this is separate, but people do have the same rights.

Interviewer: That’s nice. We have to learn a lot from Taiwan. If we spoke a little bit about gays and lesbians, and all the process that you yourself have, it was 24 that you changed…?

Audrey Tang: 24?

Interviewer: Your age, 24.

Audrey Tang: Oh. When I was 24. I thought it was the year.

Interviewer: Not the year. Next year you’re going to be a change again. I will follow up with you. You have to make… he will cut the hair.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I’m going to flip-flop.

Interviewer: So, it was when your age was 24.

Audrey Tang: It was when I was 2005 that I become open about me being transgender or non-binary. I think the internet community that I was part of, the pro community, Haskell community, really took it very well. I faced no discrimination. So, I was very fortunate that I was part of this professional community that already has many of the most well-known, like Alan Turing of the community.

Interviewer: And your family, how they take care?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, they’re okay about me being open about it. They think that if it makes me happier, they’re happy. And I mean, I’ve always behaved in a non-binary fashion anyway. When I was 23, 24, I took a testosterone test.

Interviewer: Yes.

Audrey Tang: And the doctors tell me that I have a natural level of testosterone between normal female and normal male. So similar to, I remember he said, like an 80-year-old man or something like that.

Interviewer: Wow.

Audrey Tang: So, I’m really somewhere in between.

Interviewer: So, the test blood gives the evidence that what you feel is correct?

Audrey Tang: Yes. So, I don’t have in my mind this idea that half of population is similar to me and half is different. To me, everybody is of equal distance.

Interviewer: It’s very important what you said because most of the… now I made another article with a young, different story, with the young guys, 18, 17, that wants to be transgender…

Audrey Tang: Transgender?

Interviewer: Transgender, yes. And the big problem in school was the families, they left the house, the parents are not happy. And it’s not black and white. There is some kind of much nicer with the children, but the grandmother and the grandfather, they are very against this. And we can see this in Israel. There are much more cases that we can say, “thank God, they are okay, they are happy, the family is happy with the decision of the child, the girl, the son.”

Interviewer: But what you tell, if you are telling all the story and go to check it with doctors and open, open that it’s not an issue.

Audrey Tang: My grandma supported me throughout.

Interviewer: That’s perfect.

Audrey Tang: My dad’s parents, my paternal grandma and grandpa, are both Catholic. They are very devout Catholic people. And my grandparents helped raise me because my parents are journalists, very busy journalists. So, my grandparents raised me.

Interviewer: Both of the parents, also the mother?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, my mother is a very well-known journalist.

Interviewer: In Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: Maybe give us the name and we give her respect. What are the names of your parents?

Audrey Tang: So, my father is Tang Guanghua.

Interviewer: You give me the name, right? I will not make a mistake.

Audrey Tang: Well, it’s on my Wikipedia page, so just look it up.

Interviewer: I will make a mistake if I look it up. You are spelling it out, also the mother. I have to tell the truth, I am the daughter of a very, very special and famous journalist.

Audrey Tang: I see.

Interviewer: In Israel and also in Europe. Noah Klieger is his name. He’s not with us anymore. He died four years ago; he was 93. He’s very, very nice. I spoke with Anna about the story about the Holocaust and that’s one of the questions that I want to ask on this article that we made with you.

Interviewer: Holocaust for Jewish, for Israel, it’s one of the most important historic sites. It’s one of our, you know, during our life, we together made stories with the survivors every year on Holocaust Day. It’s going to be, you know, it’s finished. They are old, they are going to disappear. And the witnesses, the witnesses that went through the Holocaust, they are going to, how can I say it, they have died almost.

Audrey Tang: They are walking out.

Interviewer: And books of history and Iran for the other side that ignored that there was, they were not Holocaust. I spoke a little bit with Anna about Taiwan attitude and I was so happy to hear that in school, there is in history lessons, in books, there is a part that spoke about Holocaust, about the murder of six million Jewish…

Audrey Tang: Definitely.

Interviewer: That’s so important and now it’s connected to your job. Because when there is a story against Holocaust, against Jewish, antisemitic issues, when the media, the Instagram, the Facebook, the Twitter, all what we need, what we have now… I will not use the words in the article fake news because you are not using it.

Audrey Tang: You are a journalist, so you get to use it.

Interviewer: For me, I can use it.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: It takes a journalist to say something is fake news.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Interviewer: But then you fix me and it has nothing to do with me. I’m a good student. I learned a new thing.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but we are the government officials. Once we start saying this news is fake or not fake, it becomes interference from the public sector against journalism. This is something we never do in Taiwan because it’s a slippery slope.

Audrey Tang: The next thing would be the ministers wanting to force journalists to change headlines and we don’t want to go there.

Photographer: It’s very important. They are asking us to hear this because in Israel, it’s the opposite, the other way around. They are blaming and they are chatting journalists and blaming journalists with fake news.

Photographer: And, it’s exactly what you say because in the beginning it’s fake news and then they want to shut down the…

Interviewer: To take out the titles… Our job… I feel that every day I’m going to prison because when I say something, maybe immediately they will say it’s fake news, we don’t check, I don’t check and I don’t do research. But it depends how forces, like what she said, will take it to the opposite and to say it’s not real, when it’s real.

Interviewer: So, what I mean in this reality in the world, what we have in Ukraine, in Russia, in America, in Israel, how do I know at the end of the day that your people in Taiwan got the real message, the real reality, that when they see in the TV…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. We don’t have an anti-vax political faction. Everybody got vaccinated.

Interviewer: But when you have in the media, texting like this or photo imaging, and… pictures… in Gaza. A child in Gaza that the army killed him when he was 2 or 3 years. And this is the article, but this is not the real story.

Interviewer: The real story for this example is that this child was around the bomb, a very big bomb, that the terrorists used this child against Israel to send this bomb. So, when you see this fake… It’s not fake news. This is the reality. But when we got it from the media around the world…

Audrey Tang: It’s a different frame.

Interviewer: It’s a different frame. They make the Israelis, the army kill children. This is not right. The army, the name is Tzahal. It’s the army to protect. To protect, not to fight. This is the word when you translate. We are not attack. We are protect. And if we don’t be focused for your job, when you say immediately, 2 hours maximum, when there is something like this…

Audrey Tang: Yeah. 200 words, 2 pictures to clarify, to add back context.

Interviewer: Exactly. So that’s what you do in your agenda? Because that’s what I feel when I read a lot of things and text with you. That’s my impression. It’s amazing.

Audrey Tang: Yes. That was established, I think, around 2018-2019. When I was at the time minister without portfolio. And we worked together with the spokesperson at the time and another minister without portfolio on this principle and implementing it.

Audrey Tang: Now, of course, I’m a cabinet minister now with my portfolio at the ministry. But all the ministries, including ours, still follow the same protocol that we established in 2018-2019.

Interviewer: Thank you. Interesting. Can you explain? It’s very good. When she asks, this is the readers. If she doesn’t understand something, it’s very good that she asks.

Interviewer: Your job, for all the head, the head that you control, it’s to avoid this example… Or maybe you explain what is your…

Audrey Tang: My current job.

Interviewer: All the corners.

Audrey Tang: So, I will first go back to 2019, when we were having the discussion in the cabinet. There are people…

Interviewer: Before the corona.

Audrey Tang: Before the corona, yes. And there were, at the time, people, academic people, politicians, that advocate for a notice and take down but we did not choose that option. We chose instead notice and public notice. So, we never take down journalist work but we always add context. So, for example, for you, it’s maybe WhatsApp, right? Or Signal. For us, it’s usually Line. But it’s the same thing. It’s the instant messenger.

Audrey Tang: Many people, as you said, because their phone has a very small screen, so they just look at one picture and two lines of text. The frame is done. So, even though those two lines of text are not untrue, they’re misleading.

Interviewer: This has a lot of influence.

Audrey Tang: Right. So, the work of the g0v, the Cofacts people basically said, you can invite a robot to your chat channel. And the robot comes from maybe the leading antivirus company, maybe the leading antivirus game.

Interviewer: Like bots.

Audrey Tang: And the bot will look at the message and seek for clarification or context. So, if there’s already clarification, the minute you share this, the bot will say, by the way, here is the full story. And Twitter also took that.

Photographer: But who are you serving? The people? The government? Both?

Audrey Tang: Yes. So, it’s an ecosystem. The LINE company agreed to provide a flag button. So just like your email, you will have a button that says flag as spam. If you flag that email as spam, it sends a signal to spam house and warn every other Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, that the next time this person sends something that looks the same, put it into junk mail. Don’t put it into the inbox.

Audrey Tang: So, the same system here. LINE lets any user flag something as probably scam or spam. And once you flag it as possibly scam or spam, LINE provides a dashboard. So, you can see which things are going viral based on voluntary report of the people. And so, you can see, for example, some story that is misleading has a basic reproduction number very high, like Omicron. And you can see something that is self-limiting.

Audrey Tang: And so, the fact checkers and the community can focus their energy on the things that are going viral, but not focus their energy on things that are not going viral anyway. And so, for those going viral stories, it’s like contact tracing. They trace the sources, they make sure there’s a context, and so on. And then the community provides.

Audrey Tang: And as of this year, the community also uses GPT-4. So GPT-4 will first do a critical reading of the analysis. And so, with AI and the community, there’s evidences for clarification. And the professional journalists on the Taiwan Fact Checking Center, part of the International Fact Checking Network, look at the crowd evidences.

Interviewer: It’s not just on the digital texting, it’s also on the print?

Audrey Tang: Yes. So, the journalists working at the Taiwan Fact Checking Center, again, independent, not government-run, then issue their full clarification report, and say the story was misleading or false and things like that. And then Facebook and other messaging ecosystem take the fact-checked reports in and display this notice. So, you can still share the story, but you cannot take away the notice. This is like the Twitter community notes.

Interviewer: Yes.

Audrey Tang: So, the idea is that if we take things down, it actually fuels conspiracy theories. But if we don’t take it down, but add clarification, it’s like mRNA, right, who is a vaccine. So people get the virus, but they also get the antidote. And then they become fellow fact-checkers that can contribute to the community.

Interviewer: So, this is the secret behind the success of Corona taking care of a new country.

Audrey Tang: Yes, this is how we fought the infodemic.

Interviewer: Probably this is the secret, like you explained now. It’s amazing…

Audrey Tang: Yes, I think the infodemic, according to WHO…

Interviewer: It’s friendly It’s much more friendly than to get the vaccination without asking nothing and without checking the facts. You know, you speak, and my mind says, but Israel, we know that our country is famous with the technology, the high tech, the cyber.

Audrey Tang: Yes, with the best startups.

Interviewer: So, is it right that Taiwan, with the connection that we have with the country, is a good connection because of you?

Audrey Tang: Because of our perfect ambassador. I said that on record.

Interviewer: We need also a picture with Anna, by the way, I forgot to tell you… We have also, it’s okay, we have a picture.

Audrey Tang: Suddenly it’s about you. Would you like to be part of it?

Interviewer: She is the host, but it’s hospitality here, so we have to keep her.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, she is the host.

Interviewer: So, what I mean, when you have the connection with the Israelis, the relationship between the countries, you give a lot of fame, information now that we’re adopting Israel, I think, because we’re the biggest newspaper in Israel. So, when I publish this, it’s going to be, wow, huge.

Audrey Tang: Big news.

Interviewer: Big news, and it’s going to be like a rally, because when I publish this, and you say this, and you’re important people for us, that you come and give us this statement, one year from now I will sign you, that we will see this, that we adopt some of the things, the tools that you use in your country.

Interviewer: But what I want to ask you, if there are tools from Israel you already adopt, or when you come here to visit, if there is kind of a vision of this.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: So, it’s a win-win…

Audrey Tang: Yes, we just before this interview visited a great Israeli startup.

Interviewer: Perfect! Can I write it?

Audrey Tang: It’s just upstairs.

Interviewer: Is it the same building?

Audrey Tang: Yes, they’re neighbors.

Interviewer: Okay.

Audrey Tang: They’re called Chain Reaction.

Interviewer: That’s nice.

Audrey Tang: It’s something, I think, really a very good invention, that says, currently, as you know, if we want some big companies to train machine learning models, like ChatGPT, they absorb all the data, they control how to train it, and then they only share it with their subscribers, or people who agree to their term of service.

Audrey Tang: But if I have some private information, and I want to get it into ChatGPT 4, currently I have to share this private information with somebody with the computers that can do the training. But this is private, so I don’t want to share it, but this means that I cannot enjoy language models, or latest AI for the private data.

Interviewer: It’s going to be also in the medicine, probably, or biometric ID.

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly. So, for me, personally, I use a very expensive MacBook with 96 gigabytes of RAM to train the model on my MacBook, so it doesn’t leave my MacBook.

Interviewer: So, according to this method, are you believing that it’s important, like we saw in the corona in Israel, for example, the government use the follow me about our telephone, if we were not being insulated at home, if we go to work or to the supermarket, they can catch us that we did something wrong.

Interviewer: Do you believe that when you… with your people in your country, it’s needed to use these tools to follow people, because it’s against the privacy? So, from one side, you keep the private information, but on the other side, you can use it for following, so what is the limit?

Audrey Tang: So, during the pandemic, that is a life and death question for the Taiwanese people, because on one hand, we want to receive exposure notification, if we enter a venue that has infected people. On the other hand, nobody wants the government, or even the venue owner to know my telephone number. So, this is the dilemma everybody was struggling with. And again, the GovZero community, g0v, created this zero-knowledge way of contact tracing.

Audrey Tang: The idea I can explain very simply in one minute. You go to a venue, you see a QR code, and the QR code is a random number. You scan the QR code or you type the random number, and you text an SMS, just regular message. My grandma can use it to 1922, which is your telecom. So, the telecom, yes, it’s just it.

Interviewer: So easy and simple?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. So, you just scan, hit send, and it’s done. And the venue owner never learns about your telephone number. If the venue owner is very careful, they will insist that you show that you have sent a message, but because your screen has nothing about you, just a random number they already know anyway, so they learn nothing about you, zero knowledge.

Audrey Tang: And your telecom already has your phone number anyway, right? So, they don’t learn anything new, and they don’t know which venue it is because it’s a random number.

Interviewer: It’s not against the privacy.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: Okay, nice.

Audrey Tang: So only when there is an infection, do the…

Interviewer: What could be instead of baby? I think you’re explaining very nicely.

Audrey Tang: Yes, yes. So, you receive notification but you don’t sacrifice your privacy. So often it takes startups, innovators, to think of ideas like this, but I’m sure Taiwan is not the only place where the startup people came up with their solution.

Audrey Tang: We read it in online forums in many jurisdictions, but only in Taiwan do we, after three days of somebody proposing this, do we just implement it nationwide with millions of venues, all voluntary. And if they want to still use pen and paper, they can still use it. So, it’s all voluntary, but we did that in three days.

Audrey Tang: So, my point is that privacy and public good need not fight against each other. We just need to find the people with the innovation and let them participate, let them direct the policy, let them have the good ideas and amplify it.

Interviewer: I have to ask you, which age do you remember that you start with this agenda, that it’s coming to me, that what you’re speaking with me all the time, to keep equal, all the time equal between people, to respect people, to think about this kind and this kind in equal way, not from this way.

Audrey Tang: Not top down.

Interviewer: Not top down. Because everything that you say, it’s giving me this impression that it should be from very small age, not from the last couple years. Is that right?

Audrey Tang: Yes, I was this way since I have memory. I was always this kind of kid. Because as I mentioned, I was raised by my grandparents, but also by my aunt, uncle, and so on. So, it’s a big band.

Interviewer: Interviewer: And brothers?

Audrey Tang: Yes, a younger brother, one. So, it’s a big band that raises me. And because of that, my ideas of what is equal takes care of all the perspectives. So, my saying is that I take all the sides. So, if there is a side in the big family that I don’t understand, I just try to understand it, instead of forcing them to accept my view. And I carry that to my politics as well.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there are 20 national languages, 16 of which are Pacific Island languages.

Interviewer: How many languages?!

Audrey Tang: 20.

Interviewer: 20?

Audrey Tang: National languages.

Interviewer: Wow!

Audrey Tang: It’s not just Mandarin, you know.

Interviewer: I thought in France there were 10 different… It’s French, but it’s a different accent.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, my grandma spoke Daiyu to me when I was a child.

Interviewer: Wow. How many do you know?

Audrey Tang: Well, nowadays, maybe just JavaScript.

Audrey Tang: I think in English now.

Interviewer: You think, you dream in English also.

Audrey Tang: I dream in JavaScript.

Audrey Tang: But my point is that if I see a petition from a Pacific Island community, or a couple of months ago, from the immigrant workers in offshore fishing boats, they also want Wi-Fi, of course, and come to ask me about satellite and so on. So, any time I feel I cannot understand what they’re saying, I always think it’s my problem, it’s not their problem.

Interviewer: It’s a different attitude.

Audrey Tang: Go there, stay with them.

Interviewer: It is your problem now. You take the responsibility.

Audrey Tang: So, I go there and stay with them and mingle with them until I can see the world from their perspective. So, that’s what taking oversights means.

Interviewer: I don’t know if it was in the question, because I don’t know if you know a little bit about…

Audrey Tang: We ignore that anyway. Just ask whatever.

Interviewer: There is in the government now, because this is the right in the government, there are people there… There are a lot of religious ministers in our government, and one of the big problems is that the religious are very fanatic. The religious are against the lesbian and gay, and all the world… It’s terrible.

Interviewer: But what I want to ask you, on this attitude that you say that you listen to all the people, the different minds, and thinking, this is good to adapt, first of all, even if they are so catholic.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, my grandma is catholic. We talked for hours.

Interviewer: It’s a passion. What is the tip that you can give us that the people will be much friendly to each other, and even if they think in the Bible it’s written, this is against the Bible, against what God wants. This is their belief. We cannot judge them, but they are not respecting our…

Audrey Tang: Yes. My grandma is almost 90 years old now. But I still visit her, or at least video conference her, every week. And back in 2018, she would tell me…

Interviewer: She lived far away from you?

Audrey Tang: Not very far. Maybe about an hour’s drive. But I video conference when I’m on the airplane, or in Tel Aviv.

Interviewer: Show her the nice guys in the beach.

Audrey Tang: I will actually video conference my parents, and also my grandma, on my flight back to Taiwan. So, we’ll see how the satellite connection works.

Interviewer: That’s good.

Audrey Tang: So, during the video calls or visits, she would tell me, my grandma would tell me that, back in 2018, referendum about marriage equality, she would say that her church friends tell her this and that. But she understands I have my perspective.

Interviewer: To respect your…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so we went back and forth many times. And I think they eventually understood that both the people who were fighting for the rights, and the church friends of her, they both care deeply about family, about a stable relationship. So, actually they have more in common than the other people who don’t care about family.

Audrey Tang: So, they are actually neighbors, in the ideas place. So, I think the point is that we need to keep building bridges, keep communicating. And this is what Be Taiwan and POTUS is about. It’s about giving a voice to the bridge builders. This is like the contact tracing, right?

Interviewer: Not too afraid to make the voice…

Audrey Tang: To make the voice of the bridge builders heard. Because during the contact tracing, there are many people very loud about privacy. Many people very loud about public health, but we need to give extra voice to the bridge builders that says, oh, we can have both.

Interviewer: Fantastic. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Interviewer: So interesting. I think about what happened now with the treatment that we have from Iran. Not just Israel, all the world, I think. What is your attitude when we have the cyber-attacks, also the digital, the banks… not just in newspaper, the banks, the security office, the academic, the institute of hospitals? What are the tools that you think in the digital…

Audrey Tang: Yes. If we collect too much personal data in the same place, imagine if instead of the SMS contact tracing, imagine if all the venues are required to report to the same state database, every visit, every phone number. Then that becomes very attractive to cyber criminals. You just hack into that computer and you know everybody everywhere at once.

Interviewer: It’s like in a movies…

Audrey Tang: But because we choose the way to decentralize, to give the privacy in the contact tracing, there’s no such hotspots for the hackers, the militia hackers to enter. Now the same applies to all the information collection points, if you overly aggregate private data, there’s always a risk of cyber-attack.

Audrey Tang: And startups like Chain Reaction, their main contribution is to make sure that they only aggregate encrypted data. Even if the hacker, the bad hacker, gets into the data center of a hospital, for example, all they get is encrypted data and they cannot do anything with it. It’s like a random number that I just said. So, we need to apply those privacy-enhancing technologies to make sure that when the criminals break into a system, there’s very limited or zero damage that they can harm. This is my main agenda.

Interviewer: It’s also, if I take the tourist department, if I see pictures about places in Taiwan and hostels and restaurants, what is going to be not fake news when I arrive to the hotel and I find, “oh, it’s ugly, it’s dirty, it’s not like in the picture.” How you can take this example that it’s also in your cover image, that when we got the information here in Israel, and one of my departments is to publish tourism, to encourage tourism to go from here to Taiwan, I do it also. So, it’s very important to me to understand when I’m collecting the database, to find with booking, with all the links that I got, if I can trust it, or there is a lot of problems.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. And you’re talking about aggregated information, that’s statistics, evidence for your reporting. But you probably do not need the registration detail of each guest to a hotel, right?

Audrey Tang: So, the point here is to make very clear the delineation between personal data, private data on one side, and non-personal data on the other side. In many digital systems, these two mixes together, so you would say that, “oh, we’ve de-identified, we’ve removed sensitive information,” but it turns out from the periphery of those data, you can reassemble who there is.

Audrey Tang: And if you do that too much and re-identify, then, you know, like a journalist who accidentally reveals her sources, then if you do that for a while, you cannot practice as a journalist anymore because no source will trust you.

Interviewer: Yeah, nobody trusts me anymore.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. So, you need to keep the trust. This is the value of your work, right?

Interviewer: Exactly. So, the same for the… Especially this year, you know, because we have so many details and so many forces to take, to collect. But if you make a mistake in this and you base it on something that cheats you, and it’s again fake news or fake details that they give to the readers, so nobody wants to read anymore.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Interviewer: They don’t trust me anymore.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. So, the same for our statistics department and audit departments. Our main idea here is to make sure that we publish data that can be analyzed independently, but with no sacrifice to the privacy of the sources.

Interviewer: Yeah, exactly. We are almost finished.

Audrey Tang: That’s okay. I can do this for days.

Interviewer: I think the time is much more than you give me. You’re so interesting.

Interviewer: It’s a hard one. I need you for… You are now age 20?

Audrey Tang: 42.

Interviewer: What? No way! What are you eating? 42?

Audrey Tang: I sleep for 8 hours every day.

Interviewer: Okay, that’s good. Without pills?

Interviewer: Without pills, no pills. Without weed.

Audrey Tang: No.

Interviewer: So, what are you going to tell me 5 years from now? Where are you going to be? In the same job? You’re going to be the prime minister of Taiwan? What are your dreams?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I will keep building bridges. 7 years ago, when I first became a cabinet minister without portfolio, there was an HR forum. And on the gender field, I feel in ‘Wu’, or not applicable, like none. And in the party field, also, none. So, I’m non-affiliated or non-binary when it comes to gender, or party, or ethnic group, or whatever. So, basically non-binary in everything.

Audrey Tang: And I think 5 years from now, this politics of building bridges, of what I call plurality, building collaboration across diversity, I think will become much more mainstream. It will become an acceptable, or even preferred, political attitude, not just in Taiwan, but in all the liberal democracies.

Interviewer: But, in this process, could you imagine that because of the bot got inside our life, so much less people will have work, because the computers, the bot, take care of everything inside. So, what are we going to be? We don’t have a job, the mind of us will be with the robot. How is it going to be? Because it’s already happened.

Audrey Tang: Well, automation, to me, I call it assistive intelligence. It’s just assisting us, right? It’s like this assistive technology I’m wearing, it’s my eyeglass. My eyeglass is, to me, a perfect example of assistive technology, because it’s very transparent.

Interviewer: Very nice one.

Audrey Tang: It just helps me to see you better. It’s not pushing advertisement to my retina. It would not be an eyeglass if it just…

Interviewer: It doesn’t have a political…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it doesn’t have a political agenda.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and if it has bias, meaning that if it’s skewered or somehow broken, I can repair it with super glue, I actually did. [laughter]

Interviewer: Or send it to a fixer.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ll send it to a fixer down the road, and they don’t have to sign an NDA, they don’t have to pay fines for reverse engineering.

Interviewer: This is a very good example, to use it like a tool for what it needs to be. Very simple.

Audrey Tang: Yes. So, all AI need to be assistive intelligence, and we should reject the kind of AI that’s authoritarian, instead of assistive.

Interviewer: Nice. Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Interviewer: Really, it’s a pleasure to be here with you. If there is… To be on the safe side, because I didn’t write everything because I just like the conversation.

Audrey Tang: I can send you the transcript.

Interviewer: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.