Audrey Tang: We’ll make a transcript and all. It’s explained in the email.

Alexander Görlach: Yes. Thanks for having me. Thank you. All right. Can I make my own recording, too?

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Alexander Görlach: Then, we have two in case these tiny little bastards do not as we want them to. OK. All right. Let’s see how that goes. It is actually also recording.

Audrey Tang: Excellent.

Alexander Görlach: I put it here. Awesome.

Audrey Tang: Let’s get started.

Alexander Görlach: Yeah. I would like to kick that off with a general assessment, in your words, about what precisely has changed in the conduct of democracy, if you will, through what we described the digital.

Audrey Tang: Since...?

Alexander Görlach: Since we have... I don’t know. There’s no time that I would be saying. The discussion about representation and participation is ongoing, maybe 10, 15 years, before we then come to best practices in Taiwan and stuff. It’s just a general, smooth start into the conversation.

Audrey Tang: The digital basically meant two different things. One is that it makes it possible for people to listen to one another much more easily. The pre-Internet technologies, like radio or TV, usually makes it very easy for one person to speak to millions of people.

Audrey Tang: Arguably, that’s how World War II at least started, and to some extent World War I. Basically, it made it very hierarchical. Now with Internet, everybody has more or less symmetrical connections, that is to say, they have the equal bandwidth to receive as well as to send.

Audrey Tang: That makes it possible for the first time in human history to have listening at scale, as I prefer to call it, so that one person can listen to millions of people, but more importantly, millions of people can listen to one another. It is a fundamental change in configuration, that for the first time it makes horizontal organization actually easier than a hierarchical organization.

Alexander Görlach: Which the classical Parliament then would be, as in we have sent our representatives, and create a meter level. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: Right. Essentially, pre-Internet, where we’re talking about representative democracy is a solution, a compromise, if you will, with the fact that it’s impossible to listen to more than 20 people at a time. That’s why even the legislation have these subcommittees and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Now, it is actually possible to listen to 200 people, 400 people. We do that every day on Twitter, on social media, and so it is for the first time easier to coordinate with what we call weak links across the Internet as compared to people just having to step into a physical town hall. That’s the first thing, is a configuration change.

Audrey Tang: Representativeness gives way, to a degree, to representation. If we record this recording, if we make a transcript, people can very easily find it with search engine, and they can relive through the context of our exchange. That is the representation.

Audrey Tang: The document serves as the presentation, again, of our ideas, but the document itself is not a representative. The intermediary shifts from a human being into a mechanism. That’s the reconfiguration.

Audrey Tang: The second thing I would like also to mention is that the advent of machine learning in particular made it easier for people to automate away the choice. For example, previously, there was regulatory preannouncement in many countries, but every contact is through snail mail or through telephone at most.

Audrey Tang: Everybody just connects to the public service, maybe just one person, and they have to handle like tens of thousands of incoming messages if it’s a controversial regulation.

Audrey Tang: Everybody who writes for recourse doesn’t even know that there is 5,000 people before them, so the person becomes a bottleneck when it comes to consultations and so on because there’s just a limited language that they can go through.

Audrey Tang: I think in the President Obama’s White House, he hired lots of people like volunteers and also dedicated staff to just handle the influx of people writing to him. They have this kind of ratings scorecard mechanism.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a qualitative algorithm that selects maybe 10 mails every day to read aloud to the President Obama as a way to give both that diversity but also the direct voice.

Audrey Tang: That is maybe, I don’t know, 0.1 percent or less of the total mail. As I said, before Internet technologies, it’s impossible to crowdsource, and so it’s impossible for the people who write to help also moderate other people who wrote and for the consensus to emerge.

Audrey Tang: The advent of machine learning actually is not a substitution of collective intelligence, but rather in amplifying, enable the collective intelligence so that people can focus their time on moderating each other’s voice so that a real picture actually emerges, rather than being forced to this kind of step.

Alexander Görlach: That also largely contributes into the real representation. I like what you said about getting a more collective knowledge on a subject matter, but I wonder what that does to the decision-making process and to leadership in politics.

Alexander Görlach: We feel like in many democracies, we have implemented these sort of technologies, yet there seems to be a lack of leadership as in terms of that decision-making is elonged or just delayed to another moment in time for a variety of reasons. I was wondering about, what is the implication on decision-making, then?

Audrey Tang: If we open up the agenda-setting power to the crowd, we have this reflection to the people after they vote, agree or disagree but without rebutting on each other’s sentiments around each emerging issue. These issue have the same characteristics in the sense that there’s no clear ownership within the public service.

Audrey Tang: They’re emergent, like self-driving vehicles, and there’s no clear strategy for the governed because they literally just happened last year and before our budget cycle.

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In these kind of situations, it helps enormously for people to see a accurate reflection of everybody’s feelings around this matter because if you only look at mainstream media or indeed some social media, you will see only maybe five divisive issues being repeated again and again. That led to the illusion that we’re tribal people and against each other.

Audrey Tang: Through this kind of a machine learning revelation of collective intelligence, people can actually see that most people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the issues, most of the time. [laughs] This is very important for a polity to emerge.

Audrey Tang: Also, it’s critical that we see this is maybe populism because it allows everybody to escape their elites’ lie and then share their feelings, but it’s not tribalism because people can see, "We’re more or less on the same tribe, no matter how superficially we may be different."

Audrey Tang: That’s my answer to you. If it’s on the agenda-setting stage, not on the implementation stage, then this kind of agenda-setting power, I would argue, it only helps the decision-makers because then the horizon is expanded and people don’t have to rely on traditional associations or unions and things like that to get their voice across.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can speak just to themself and identify as a stakeholder but then see that despite different stakeholders’ positions, there are common values and we can just pass these through and then leave these for maybe sandbox, or experiments, and so on. It’s not only more effective, it’s actually more efficient.

Alexander Görlach: What’s this icon you’re looking, many of the countries’ discourse, it’s about they say they don’t feel represented in media. Media in fact has only the capacity, lets say, for five or six topics, whereas...I understand what you said between populism and tribalism.

Alexander Görlach: I feel this is quite a thing as in regard to that also, in many democracies, there is a lack of the common good or the definition of the common good, or what are we going to do, and you’d be showing, I guess this is the Taiwanese example?

Audrey Tang: This is actually from Paul and Green, but each consultation we run has this same shape.

Alexander Görlach: Would you say this sort of methods or display -- it’s not a method, it’s a display of what’s out there -- can help to bridge the gaps that have emerged in democracies?

Audrey Tang: Right. It’s not just a open space. It’s a reflective space, and a reflexive space let people become aware of the common good because if you quantify things like with money, with utility, and things like that as most policy planners tend to do, it is very abstract and doesn’t fit with each other’s intuitions.

Audrey Tang: Everybody can relate to a fellow citizen sharing their feelings, and so this creates, I think, the missing link between the data which is objective and always out there, versus the ideas which, as you said, that everybody can have different ideas, but only a few gets presented.

Audrey Tang: We create a kind of reflective stage between the facts and the ideas so that people can see each other’s feelings, and the best ideas then are the one that take care of most people’s feelings.

Alexander Görlach: Interesting. I was until this conversation, very adamant about...I think the crisis of democracy is because of a disentanglement of let’s say my civic rights and my social abilities. Is that related to that, what you just do here?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Alexander Görlach: Could you elaborate on how that is connected?

Audrey Tang: Very much so. As you have observed, in many cases, the social abilities feels that you have to join one tribe or the other, to organize and find a representative, and force the public service, which is always anonymous but to solve all the tension, to tug of war a little bit on your faith. That’s traditional social activism or mobilization.

Audrey Tang: This mechanism basically creates a reflection of the new fact that people don’t organize like this anymore, with #MeToo, or a #ClimateStrike.

Alexander Görlach: #FridaysForFuture, and all those.

Audrey Tang: And so on. It isn’t top-down at all. It’s basically just a meme if you will, and then people will identify with the meme, actually take control of the meme, and apply it however they want.

Alexander Görlach: With this also, the speculative parties, where actually these for you would apply your ideas. Also, this explains very much...in the German context, we have a new right-wing party that basically runs on the sentiment of people saying, "I’m not represented in the media."

Alexander Görlach: Economically, many of their voters are still on the good side, not all of them, but many. That would actually totally explain this phenomenon.

Audrey Tang: Basically, it creates hope, however terrible it is, for people who are suffering from the lack of representation. This hope is banked on the outrage against the old democratic system, which actually works really well. By using hashtags, people feel they’re part of each other’s self-consciousness even, in a real-time basis.

Audrey Tang: With democracy, you only get to upload maybe three bits every four years, or every two years, and the three bits, two of which are discarded because of German Mandarin or whatever. It creates asymmetric hope, and that brings about outrage against the slow bandwidth democracy.

Audrey Tang: Democracy need to evolve into a real-time democracy, in turn, to basically give alternate means, like the Polis that I just mentioned, but also participatory budgeting, also e-petition, also all sorts of different ways, so people can feel that whatever the issue is, there is a actual place of fighting power that I can participate in real-time.

Alexander Görlach: Is that also the reason why we see a modest explosion of new parties? That’s like NPP is a breakthrough for the new subgroups, as we called them back in the day. Very interesting. How do we then transition into this real-time democracy?

Audrey Tang: There is a term recently coined by the UN’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation, called COGOV, or collaborative governance. It is actually a rebranding of multi-stakeholderism, which has been going on in Internet governance for decades. COGOV is easier to remember.

Audrey Tang: In any case, MSM, nobody really knows what MSM means, and also its main dialectic predecessor is multilateralism, which also is MSM. You can’t really tell each other apart. [laughs] They call it COGOV now. We’ll use the COGOV, whatever. COGOV means that we ask a different set of questions in democracy.

Audrey Tang: In this old model, we basically ask, who are the main organizer or representatives, how to arbitrate between their interests? That’s the two main questions any democracy asks. This one, we ask two different questions. We ask, given the stakeholders’ positions, are there nevertheless, some common values that we can discover through those feeling finding?

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that given the common values, can anyone deliver the innovations that are pareto improvements, that are good for everyone without sacrificing any other people? Basically, it’s an innovation-focused democracy. People who propose such innovations in a previous way, especially in continental system which we share with Germany, usually have to wait four years for it to happen.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re adopting the sandbox laws, which means basically, whether you want to deliver your innovations to any of the heavily regulated areas, you get one year. We promise not to fine you for breaking the law or regulations. You’re encouraged to break regulations, but you have to do two things.

Audrey Tang: First, you have to propose your own alternate regulation to run during the one-year trial. The second, the entire data and everything, must be open. It must be open innovation during the one year, for everybody to see.

Audrey Tang: After one year, maybe the society thinks it’s a bad idea. We thank you, and your investors for paying the tuition. If the people think it’s a good idea, actually, then we just adopt the entire regulation.

Alexander Görlach: Got you. It could be in any field, education, environmental.

Audrey Tang: It could be anything... Well I shouldn’t say that. The Ministry of Justice said, you cannot experiment on money laundering or funding terrorism, because we know what would happen. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, it’s all fair game.

Alexander Görlach: That also then rests on a fair assumption of representation. I’m not sure how much you are basing your model on deliberative democracy?

Alexander Görlach: That seems to be a very interesting model, as it shows in the end, that people are...what you said about pareto optimal. People are willing to give up some of their stands, when they feel like they are in a fair, balanced, discourse arena.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. I don’t usually say that we’re deliberative. The informed decision part, the informed part, is utopian. It assumes that people bring to the table, honestly, their interests. That’s often not the case, even in the really deliberative Swiss model of referendum.

Audrey Tang: That’s still not 100 percent true. We usually say collaborative, which means that we only identify some common values, and we’re satisfied with that. It’s not really consensus. It’s like consent, that I can live with it, not I can sign my name on it.

Alexander Görlach: That’s a very interesting semantic. This is utopian in the sense, that we all know you can infringe on that. That leads to the next point of our discussion, like the whole infringement on political democratic processes from the United States, to maybe also here in Taiwan due to China.

Alexander Görlach: I would like to discuss with you about that, as a second part of our conversation, as in how to deal with these threats, and how you identify those. You can also talk about the Taiwanese examples, for instance, and China. That’s maybe also for our readers then very interesting.

Alexander Görlach: I feel we know now a lot about Cambridge Analytica, but maybe it’s also interesting to look into the Taiwanese/Chinese case if there is one.

Audrey Tang: I have two slides that talks a little bit about the PRC model and the Taiwan model. What we have seen, of course, is in terms of freedom of assembly speech, and basically human rights, where according to CIVICUS Monitor, the only place in not just Asia, but all the way to North Africa that is totally open.

Audrey Tang: That means that we are founded on the idea that freedom of expression and assembly is not a instrumental right, is not a instrumental value. It is a core value, meaning that it’s part of Taiwanese identity.

Audrey Tang: I think it will remain like that for decades because we still have people like me who remember the martial law and how it was like, and we really don’t want to go back there. It’s a identity thing.

Audrey Tang: Whereas with more or less the same technology, we’re making the state transparent to citizens by publishing all the budget data, procurement data, implementation data, planning data and then asking people to participate and comment openly as I mentioned, meanwhile, the PRC is making the citizens radically open to the state using social credit and many other designs.

Audrey Tang: Using social credit, accountability is zero in terms of state because while they implement it in the private sector, the private sector is de-facto owned and controlled by the state using nonmarket forces, as you very well know.

Alexander Görlach: Sure.

Audrey Tang: With that configuration, there really is no accountability. If somebody made a mistake or a deliberate "mistake" on somebody somebody’s social credit, there is no court. There is no...

Alexander Görlach: No appeal.

Audrey Tang: ...no appeal. There’s no due process. While it’s the same transparency technology, it is used in opposing directions.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, the sandbox is essentially having the society to judge the private sector’s ultimate regulations in order for the social innovations to lead the regulatory innovations.

Audrey Tang: In the CCP, which is the Chinese Communist Party, they insist on installing a party branch, by law, actually, into any large enterprises so that each enterprise must be led by the communist agenda, which is, again, exactly the opposite direction, but this time applied to the private sector rather than social sector.

Audrey Tang: I think it’s very interesting, like mirror image of philosophies, and using more or less the same technology.

Alexander Görlach: Before we continue with the whole alternative facts and fake news, that’s a very crucial question and always at the forefront. I’d say, progress in society always has happened through technological progress, if it’s good and bad, depending on place, whatever, but you can use these new technologies to go thence, always.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a amplifier, so whatever your...

Alexander Görlach: For good or bad.

Audrey Tang: ...dominant philosophy is, it’s bound to amplify that.

Alexander Görlach: Coming from a country that is highly exporting technology that can be used for good and for bad at the same time, how would you address this ethical dilemma, because we cannot stop to innovate, obviously?

Audrey Tang: There was a prior art, that is to say the restriction on exporting dual-use technologies, so, technologies that can be used for both civilian and military, like nuclear technology.

Audrey Tang: These are more or less considered that it will be abused and so not really provided to places where it could be abused.

Alexander Görlach: You could argue like London has lots of surveillance cameras and crime in, let’s say, Trafalgar Square goes down because of that...

Audrey Tang: But certainly not in people’s homes, like they do in...

Alexander Görlach: Exactly. That’s what I’m thinking now, and exactly, that’s what I wanted to say, and that’s the same technology. Would we then just stop to develop cameras that could be used for that, or just you say, "No, we don’t ever export it into the People’s Republic of China"?

Audrey Tang: One thing is that if there is a high chance of abuse, I would actually argue for export control, like antiproliferation is the best example, but it depends case by case of course. If there are things very easily to rediscover from first principles, then it’s a lost cause anyway, so you might as well export that.

Audrey Tang: If there are things that are heavily dependent on what we call a increasing return on research, then you can set your research agenda accordingly. Of course, it’s a science policy question, so we really need to discuss this case by case.

Alexander Görlach: Correct me if I’m wrong, I also feel like because technology is always at the forefront of advancement, that means that lawmaking and regulation is lagging behind. It’s always like that and then the poets come in and there’s screenplays and movies. It’s like basically technology runs in front and then like everybody is about to follow, so what do we do in that meantime?

Alexander Görlach: The Facebook example is a very good one.

Audrey Tang: It is. I think the recent fine on Facebook, it doesn’t so much hurts its bottom-line but rather sets what the norm is, and it’s very important in Internet governance. Or in COGOV, I’m still getting used to the new branding...

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Anyway, the core is that there is first a cyber norm, and based on a cyber norm, market policies, usually imposed through fines and incentives, and from the policies, then code. People will write code that are more conforming toward the incentive and policies, and finally, law.

Audrey Tang: Law, as I said, always lag behind, but for a very good reason, because if you start with the law, that means that lawmakers need to know more about innovations than innovators do. I wouldn’t claim that and I wouldn’t say any sane lawmaker would claim that. It’s like having a law that dictates the value of π, and we all know how that went.

Audrey Tang: If you start with law, and having the law immediately constraining the norm -- which is what laws always do, it opens up the possibility for the algorithm holders to lobby. If that happens, code will decide the law, that decide the norm, that decide the market. That’s the worst configuration ever because then the lawmakers become just rubberstamps to the code makers.

Audrey Tang: The norm-first approach is what we usually emphasize for not just sandboxes but also e-petitions, also Presidential Hackathon, and so on that we establish a co-gov way of establish the norms and decide incentive but not yet laws nor even policies.

Alexander Görlach: There also will be the need for the human factor, which is going to be our third objective, but our biggest is, we know about the biases in algorithms, about reinforcement of things that already bad, so that would actually also play into your argument, "Don’t do it."

Audrey Tang: Exactly. Basically, it establishes a norm allowing people to say it’s not encouraged. It’s not a good idea, but it’s not as punitive as a law that forecloses possibilities.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, we see a lot of cyber norm packages. These packages are widely agreed. For example, maybe a sovereign state shouldn’t really do cyber espionage for their private sector. Maybe it’s not a good idea.

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: If widely circulated and collaborated on such a norm, then even the most belligerent actors or state actors will actually concede a little bit to that norm if they understand that everybody really consider it a very bad taste. Again, it’s not law because on the international arena, there really is no law for that.

Alexander Görlach: Absolutely. Not yet, at least. To go back to infringement on this idealized...What’s the gov now? What’s the new term you...?

Audrey Tang: COGOV.

Alexander Görlach: Co-gov.

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Alexander Görlach: You had underwrite, you had the old stakeholders’ media with their five, six topics, and then you have the huge crowd of that assembles itself according to the topics of that.

Alexander Görlach: These infringements that come, let’s say, from bots or other governments’ interest, they try to impose the right end of the scale to this crowd, is that correct? Just to give them the illusion, even in the Internet, there’s only a few topics, so they try to amplify the right spectrum on your scale.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. In the ideal case, we would take this and deliver or encourage innovations that take care of everybody’s interest, but as you have witnessed, it’s not always like that. People would always want this to still shift a little bit...

Alexander Görlach: To their interests.

Audrey Tang: To their interests. I think the solution for that is to have alternate legitimacy structures.

Audrey Tang: As a conservative anarchist...

Audrey Tang: ...my mission...

Alexander Görlach: I like that.

Audrey Tang: ...is to foster social innovation, meaning that the social sector can take control of the technologies, emergent technologies that are for the benefit of the society.

Audrey Tang: Just last night, I went into a meetup for RadicalxChange. I’m also a director of the board now, which is itself an innovation because before October last year, it was impossible for public servants to also serve as a director of the board for an international non-profit organization, but anyway, we made it happen. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: In any case, what I’m trying to get to is the RadicalxChange vision. I’m joined by the likes of Danielle Allen and also Vitalik Buterin, who invented Ethereum and was there also last evening.

Audrey Tang: Our vision is basically use technologies like Ethereum, but for it to be owned by the social sector. Because Ethereum is open-source, anyone who want to fork, meaning that take it to a different vision, can do that. Actually, it’s done that many times. Ethereum itself is a fork of Bitcoin’s ideas too.

Audrey Tang: This kind of social innovation implements governance, but in a way that is remarkably free of the current legitimacy theory based on representative elections.

Audrey Tang: In this kind of balance, people can see when the social innovations actually works better. For example, if you want to transfer money over jurisdictions, it obviously works better than the SWIFT system.

Audrey Tang: It’s very rare that in Taiwan we adopt the idea of, whenever we see a large-scale social innovation like this, for example, people starting measuring their own air quality and threaten the legitimacy of the Environmental Protection Agency, we always say, we can’t beat them, so we join them.

Audrey Tang: That is actually flipping the legitimacy theory because previously, it’s the government making civic participation, but the government still owns the agenda-setting frame, even individual agenda. Now, it’s the people owning the frame, and the state joining as one of the participants who supports but doesn’t control at all this kind of citizen science.

Alexander Görlach: What about this like this vendor civic is agenda-setting is owned by the people, yet the people’s opinion is influenced by foreign forces?

Alexander Görlach: When I was in Mongolia last year, they were telling me the biggest problem they have is WhatsApp because it’s a fake news spreader along through WhatsApp group, which is basically, as you just pointed out, not to be controlled.

Alexander Görlach: You have to be believing that all the other participants and those who have agency in the process are at least, what did you say? Consensual, not consent...

Audrey Tang: Consent.

Alexander Görlach: Yeah, at least try to be halfway open.

Alexander Görlach: What do you make of, is there an influence of the mainland on, let’s say, the next year’s election, or is there infringement on these processes in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. A few things.

Audrey Tang: I think the new phrase, as coined by our president last week, is now the "Chinese continent."

Audrey Tang: I like how she referred to Taiwan as "an island off the Chinese continent."

Audrey Tang: In any case, there are certainly Chinese continental forces. This is a slide that I gave in Thailand, in Bangkok and actually also in HQ of Agoda for the search of collective solutions in a world of disinformation. The main insight I would share from Taiwan is that it’s basically three defenses, but also three proactive actions.

Audrey Tang: The three defenses, very quickly, is that we found scientifically that if there is a trending rumor, if the ministries go out and clarify within one hour, then actually more people hear the clarification first.

Audrey Tang: This is a real example. There was a rumor that says the administration is going to fine anyone who dye or perm their hairs multiple times in a week, a large fine, [laughs] like one million NT dollars. It’s obviously untrue.

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Within one hour, we have the Premier, Su Tseng-chang, posting this very viral picture. It went viral on multiple social media that says, "There’s a popular rumor that says perming your hair will subject to one million fine. It’s not true. I may be bald now," -- this is a picture of the Premier when he was young...

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: "But I would not punish people like that." -- Premier Su

Audrey Tang: What we are actually doing is requiring the products of hair products to be labeled in its ingredients and takes effect only 2021.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the now bald Premier says, "However if you keep perming your hair multiple times in a week, you will damage your hair..."

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: "You may end up looking like me." -- Premier Su

Alexander Görlach: That’s a funny way of reacting.

Audrey Tang: We saw that more people saw this clarification before they see the rumor. They serve as inoculated agents. This is the first defense.

Audrey Tang: The second defense, of course, is collaborative checking. In Taiwan, we have members of the International Fact-Checking Network as well as the collaborative fact-checking community that allows anyone to just press on their Line, which is like WhatsApp, which again the Google doesn’t see.

Audrey Tang: Just like email, email is supposed to be anyway secret communication. But anyone can flag something as spam. If you flag something as spam, you’re basically saying, "This is not personal communication. This is a infringement to my personal domain by people who don’t really care about me."

Audrey Tang: Even they may say they care about me a lot and they’re are a royalty some foreign country that have a lot of money...

Audrey Tang: "...if you pay the transaction fee." [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Flagging something as spam is a gesture to donate something that doesn’t belong to the personal space anyway into the public discourse. There are international organizations, like Spamhaus, that basically gather those signals. That is how the spam wars are won.

Audrey Tang: Those signals go into machine learning. They publish the signature of people who match those emails. All the email providers after receiving the matching emails, it doesn’t go away. So it’s not really censorship. It goes to your junk mail folder, which you only check if you have too much time.

Alexander Görlach: No hobbies. No pet.

Audrey Tang: Exactly. It doesn’t waste people’s time.

Audrey Tang: The same for the IFCN. The IFCN basically gathers the signals of people flagging something as disinformation. They publish fact-checking reports in a investigative-journalism way.

Audrey Tang: Once the Thai Fact-checking Center rates something as false, for example, it goes back to the Facebook algorithm so that people will stop seeing that on their news feed. It would become not preferred to share. It’s not entirely censorship. If you go to that friend’s page, you’ll still see the post. It’s just it was a related link that links to this debunkment of the disinformation.

Audrey Tang: All in all, it reduce the virality to maybe one-fifths or less while it increase the virality of the clarification. That’s exactly the pattern, how we foil spam. This is the same project that having the social sector to become the fact-checkers.

Audrey Tang: Finally, during elections -- which is the highest payable, it’s exponential -- we introduce, just like anti-money laundering, a way for people to having to declare their political advertisements. This stems from our campaign donation law, which is one of the most transparent in the world. Anyone now can just get structured data, like Excel files, of individual records of donation.

Audrey Tang: They must be from the citizens. They must not exist at the top and so on. What we observe in the previous election, because we just passed that law, everybody who have redundant money or from foreign sources just put their money on precision-targeted and political advertisements. Those are not accounted for.

Audrey Tang: Now we’re changing the law so that they must be accounted for in the same transparency as the campaign donation. That is to say, anyone who place advertisement must disclose where their payments came from and the previous one have also them declare where their payments come from, like anti-money laundering.

Audrey Tang: If the ultimate payer is not a Taiwanese citizen, then it’s subject to $50 million NT dollars fine, something like that, for everybody who are in this chain. Basically, we want to limit political advertisement to only by citizens and disclose in the same way as the campaign donations.

Alexander Görlach: That is really like, from the America point of view, let’s say in the business model Facebook, that would be a huge infringement as in terms of saying, "As long as I book an ad and I pay for it, I can display my ad."

Audrey Tang: Facebook, just like Line, have signed on what they call they call the counter-disinformation best practice. They did agree on that.

Alexander Görlach: Very cool. That’s the learning out of Cambridge Analytica I suppose.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, because they are at a all-time low in terms of social trust. People are considering Facebook worse than tobacco and liquor companies.

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The first time in history. [laughs] That is actually interesting because they have similarities. They sell addiction. They create externalities on the society. They are going to be regulated the same way. Facebook is saying, "We are socially responsible for the mess that we caused. We sign on to those best practices." That’s a different view of the agenda.

Audrey Tang: Once we have those published, just like the campaign donation record, it doesn’t matter what Facebook agenda is because they’re now required or at least self-regulated so that they publish all this data, including, crucially, the targets selected by precision targeting. Like the profiles, how each advertisement is directed each part of population.

Audrey Tang: We rely on independent media who operates their analysis in the open on GItHub to analyze the campaign donators roster and, next election for sure, the political advertisement donors’ sponsors roster. This is again a reflective space for people to see what’s actually happening.

Audrey Tang: Another thing I would like to say is the three proactive actions.

Audrey Tang: First is that we have a team in each ministry responsible not only for clarification but invite people who hold different positions into collaborative meetings. That is the e-petition of participatory budget’s platform which counts many 5 million people among 23 million in Taiwan. It’s a large, a quarter of population already on this online media.

Audrey Tang: This is basically there’s no reply button. [laughs] Anyone can do e-petition. We found that the most active participants are the age group around 15 years old and then 65 years old. These are the two large groups. The similarity is that they care the most about what’s public, less about private. They have more time in their hands.

Audrey Tang: In the 15-years-old, because they cannot vote, not even on referendums, but they actually care the most. They’re on the business end of climate change. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: We see, for example, just this month, Taiwan banned the indoor use in restaurants of plastic straws. Everybody’s now using recyclable straws or glass straws. That was a year and half year ago brought up by the e-petition that went viral. 5,000 people just joined suddenly. The EPA thought you must be a senior activist leader. It turns out she’s just 15 years old.

Alexander Görlach: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s her civics class assignment. [laughs] She just need to apply something to raise the e-petition. But it’s really well arguing this argument.

Audrey Tang: The EPA actually consented. It creates a social norm. Then now we’re gradually banning plastics of all sorts. That means that people don’t have to go to streets on Fridays [laughs] but can actually work collaboratively with the EPA.

Audrey Tang: This is I think the empowerment that will make disinformation less likely to spread. Then people see that your agenda is not refuted by the government. Rather, the government’s on your side. It’s real time. It’s not every four years.

Audrey Tang: Our office hour we’re having now is also part of this. Any conversation is not a private conversation. Rather, anyone can Google and they will see my position and status quo on this matter.

Audrey Tang: Finally, the flagging and clarification is actually amplified by the private sector. Like Line and now Mashu Television both see that the trend in clarifications, just like the Premier’s clarification, it’s by itself a funny fact. It by itself is a good social object to have a conversation.

Audrey Tang: Line agreed to feature it on LINE TODAY. Mashu makes special television reports, TV series, or even the entire trending on HBO Asia "The World Between Us" TV series just focusing on new challenges and public awareness. It becomes a good business.

Audrey Tang: Making a business case out of this is also very important. Then people can participate in the norm-setting. It’s not the private sector against the public sector anymore. Private sector also sees that’s it’s cool to spread this messages, like sustainable circular economy and things like that.

Alexander Görlach: Leads right away into the last big topic that we have today about ethics, the human in ethics and also the human factor back in the world of technology. That’s dear to your heart if I may say.

Alexander Görlach: When I remember this one slide you showed me, your Prime Minister making fun of himself about being bald now, that’s actually quite a good example for having the human factor within the digital if you will. Why do you care so much about that? How did this come about? What is your take on it to implement that?

Audrey Tang: I think that the human factor stems directly from the representation ability that is done by technologies. That is to say, if we are forced to communicate using low bandwidth, then, of course, there’s a limited number of letters in the printed press.

Audrey Tang: People have to consolidate their points to a degree where it become almost devoid of any human touch because there was simply no bandwidth in the newspapers to deliver a two-way interaction.

Audrey Tang: Unless you’re reading "Harry Potter" newspapers, in which case, there’s plenty of social interactions.

Audrey Tang: In any case, what we are now looking at is basically a not transactional but relational configuration of policy-making. When people participate in the e-petitions, they’re not just there to support the 15-years-old. You are also reaffirming their identification into creating a better Earth for the next generation. It’s a identity-building or even polity-building action.

Audrey Tang: Once we have that as a organizing principle, its norm-setting power is actually much higher than any hierarchical organization can do. A hierarchic organization, while very efficient at issuing command, is actually very bad at providing the appropriate context to such a command.

Audrey Tang: But if it’s a horizontal, then everybody can extend the metaphor, the memes and so on, so that it makes the most sense. Like a small-world network theory, the bridge-makers makes the most sense and do a cultural translation of that norm into what their community can embrace and understand.

Audrey Tang: I think this is essential for the goals of the sustainable development, the global goals, which is about making sure that anybody see any social issue with the lens of a what we call triple bottom line.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, anyone working on any of the SDG topics are empowered through the cultural translators to make their case business and make their case social and make their case environmental, so that people can see that after all, we agree on most of the things. That is I think essential also because of the planning horizon.

Alexander Görlach: That also requires a capacity of empathy, which is a very human thing to be able to. The question would be how you can implement this even if you would say this positive bias or whatever you want to call it within the technological framework? Because we seem to be lacking this.

Alexander Görlach: Even though you have now assembled, like make sure you can display that societies have similar issues they care about, still we are in a age where divisiveness is rating high and lack of empathy, if you see the European debates on refugees, it’s tremendous. How do you see this factor? How can we bring empathy into technology?

Audrey Tang: A few things. One thing is that I think the divisiveness and the lack of empathy is a direct result of lack of imagination so that it feels like zero sum. It doesn’t have to be zero sum. If people’s planning horizon are at most... Actually, German is exempt from that because your Chancellor can go on forever.

Audrey Tang: In many other democracies, including Taiwan, the planning horizon is usually four to eight years. However, most "wicked problems" requires structural solutions that takes a decade or two.

Audrey Tang: The difference in the planning horizon linked to a kind of incentive to frame these in the short term -- if you’re private sector, sometimes they frame things quarterly. If you’re on that horizon, then these values sometimes just isn’t compatible. It would appear zero sum. If your planning horizon is 20 years or more, then actually this naturally agree with each other.

Audrey Tang: First thing what we do in our collaborative meeting is that we try to have the central piece of stakeholder going to the stakeholders that haven’t been born yet. That actually extends everybody’s horizon.

Audrey Tang: We had a real case where people who are very much for marriage equality and people who are very much, I don’t know, conservative Catholics going to our collaboration meeting to talk about the issue of whether we want to extend the artificial insemination rights for people who are not in a marriage, so single mothers wanting to have the same reproductive rights as wed couples. It’s not yet legal in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: The point that we can make this discussion fruitful instead of violent or divided is that we set the how-might-we question, the centerpiece in the double-diamond design thinking method, as how do we ensure a exclusive and accepting society for children born into such a family?

Audrey Tang: That rephrasing is basically saying, "What are we going to make as a society for people who haven’t been born yet? They will be socially included maybe 10 years, 20 years later." If you use that planning horizon for conversation, actually people who seem like fighting against each other can work very collaboratively.

Alexander Görlach: Is that your prerogative for the ethic of the digital, to just go on such a methodological stage and say, "Look, that’s how we propose it"? You look in a 20-year future?

Audrey Tang: Yes. Basically, we extend the horizon whenever possible. If it’s next quarter, there really is no room for even consent. If it’s for 20 years in the future, both consensus is very easy to build.

Audrey Tang: That’s I think one of the main example of humanity is that humanity by default cares about the next generation. AI or machine learning cares about the past because that’s where the data comes from. The human capacity of imagination, even a poetic capability of ensuring these alternate future, I think that is the key principle of making the digital co-create.

Alexander Görlach: Thank you very much. That was very insightful. I’m excited.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Alexander Görlach: Awesome. Can we take a photo?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Alexander Görlach: That would be super lovely.