Nicola Smith: Great. Thanks for your time. On the subject of masks, first of all, it’s a big debate at the moment in the UK, in the public and with the government, about the effectiveness of masks, whether it will help the UK to come out of the lockdown. I’d be really interested to hear your view on this from the perspective of Taiwan and what impact wearing masks has had on Taiwan’s strategy.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. As I explained to BBC, wearing a mask in Taiwan is a social signal. It signals two things. First, I’m protecting myself from my own hands because I wouldn’t be touching my mouth all the time.

Audrey Tang: Two, it signals that I’m washing my hands properly because we all know in Taiwan that wearing a mask is useless without washing your hands properly. If I wear a mask, it means that I’m washing my hands properly. Because it’s a social signal, it remind other people to take care of themselves in terms of hand sanitation, not touching your face. That’s it.

Nicola Smith: What would say about the actual medical effectiveness of masks? You talk about social signal…

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t matter whether this is made of fabric, like t-shirt, literally, or medical mask or surgical or even N95 – I imagine you wouldn’t be able to wear it all day – because it’s a signal.

Audrey Tang: The social signal is the part that has a effect on a larger crowd of people because just a few people wearing sends a signal that remind the other people, if they cannot keep a physical distance, to wear a mask, to protect themself from their own hands.

Nicola Smith: What impact do you think it made to order on Taiwan’s strategy though? Taiwan’s been very successful, obviously, in fighting COVID-19.

Audrey Tang: Based on water usage and other proxy metrics, we know that people across Taiwan, no urban or rural difference, are washing their hands much more vigorously than before.

Nicola Smith: Would you say that was the biggest contribution to keeping…

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nicola Smith: …Taiwan’s…

Audrey Tang: Soap is the most important technology.

Nicola Smith: OK. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The next one is alcohol hand sprays.

Nicola Smith: Keeping on the masks, to what extent does society have to wear masks for there to be a positive impact? At the moment, the rule in the UK is that you have to wear a mask on public transport, but you don’t see masks so much in cafes or shops or on the streets.

Audrey Tang: Or places where you really do need to drink, right? [laughs]

Nicola Smith: Yeah. [laughs] Exactly. What proportion of society needs to be wearing a mask for it to actually make a difference?

Audrey Tang: As I demonstrated, I keep a mask with me in my pocket all the time. Whenever I cannot keep physical distance, I wear a mask. It’s that simple.

Audrey Tang: In the cafes that you just mentioned, many of them installed this transparent plastic or glass shielding between the seats, in which case, of course, that serves as physical distance. You don’t have to wear a mask when you’re drinking because you’re shielded, literally.

Nicola Smith: And supermarkets? I see a lot of face visors here in supermarkets. How important is that in crowded shops?

Audrey Tang: The face…

Nicola Smith: Face visors, the plastic…

Audrey Tang: That’s another portable shield. [laughs] It serves two purposes. First, it’s also a social signal, although not as strong as mask because it says nothing about hand sanitation, but it says something about not touching your face. It’s maybe half of strong as a social signal.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that in places where seeing each other’s expressions is important, it’s of course superior to mask.

Nicola Smith: Why do you think Taiwanese public has been so good at just adopting masks? There doesn’t seem to have been a fuss about it. Even before the government started talking about it, people were wearing masks, whereas in the UK or certainly in the US, you see a lot of reluctance and resistance.

Nicola Smith: It’s seen as, sometimes, a macho thing not to wear masks. Why do you think there’s that different mentality?

Audrey Tang: It’s the incentive design that’s different. When I wear a mask in Taiwan, I protect me from myself. This is a very simple to explain idea. I can remind the people that I care to protect their own health. That’s a very natural human expression.

Nicola Smith: So it’s more about protecting others.

Audrey Tang: It’s about reminding others to protect themselves. If you say, “Wearing a mask is a sign of respect,” for example, that’s harder to spread.

Nicola Smith: Can you talk us through the system that you had to create for mask distribution?

Audrey Tang: Sure. There’s actually three systems. [laughs] There’s the Mask 1.0, which is everybody can purchase mask in pharmacies, 6,000 of them, using their national health insurance card which covers 99.99 percent of population including not just citizens but also residents of more than six months. That’s the first measure.

Audrey Tang: The good thing about this is that it requires just a little bit of patience, because there was queuing, but it’s guaranteed that people who do have the time will get the mask.

Audrey Tang: Then, the next wave is what we call eMask or Mask 2.0. Based on analysis, we see that Mask 1.0 reaches only 70 percent of population for good reason. Independent analysis from the civil society shows in those districts, with very long-working hours in large municipalities or science parks, people go to work before the pharmacies open.

Audrey Tang: They go off-work when the pharmacies already close, in which case they have no way to get a mask. For these people we introduced a e-preordering system online, where they can pre-order and collect after a week in their nearby convenience store which opens 24 hours at a time.

Audrey Tang: However, this mostly requires a phone that’s owned by yourself, instead of prepaid SIM card, because we need to validate that you are yourself, and so you don’t double spend, so to speak. After a month, after 2.0, we did 3.0.

Audrey Tang: That empowers, for example, migrant workers who often use prepaid SIM to go to their nearby convenience store and instead of using their phone or a computer, they just insert the NHI card to a kiosk at a convenience store, and then they collect at the same store a week after.

Audrey Tang: There are three systems all. After the three system gets introduced, now more than 21 million people have used one of the three venues which, considering we’re just 23 million people, is a huge success.

Nicola Smith: Absolutely. Can you talk me through also the idea of the app where you can see…

Audrey Tang: The map. That’s not my idea. [laughs] It’s a social innovation done by people in Tainan. Started with Howard Wu (吳展瑋) and later on Finjon Kiang (江明宗) and also the HTC DeepQ team which does the line bot for the CDC (疾管家).

Audrey Tang: These three together covers maybe 10 million users. Each of them, using their preferred method, can see where are their nearby pharmacies and how much medical mask do they have in stock, so they don’t have to queue in pharmacies that are out of stock.

Nicola Smith: How many people use that app or that map?

Audrey Tang: These three together I think have more than 10 million users, but actually there’s more than one hundred different application of voice assistance, you name it. I personally quoted a website, mask.pdis, that lists all the one hundred or so applications. All taken together, I don’t know, but a majority of population, that’s a very safe bet.

Nicola Smith: Are these systems adaptable to a country like the UK, where actually masks are still in short supply?

Audrey Tang: South Korea adopted our system. South Korean people were using the same mask map produced in Tainan, [laughs] even though Finjon Kiang did not know any Korean language, [laughs] but they both speak JavaScript and OpenAPI. [laughs] It was just a universal language. [laughs] They were able to convince the Korean government to publish in real time a API much as we do.

Audrey Tang: In other jurisdictions, usually you publish numbers after a public servant have looked at it, like freedom of information may be a week or so. Every day is considered very quick, but in our case it’s every 30 second when the system first launched. In the Korean case it’s real-time.

Audrey Tang: The importance here is that people can go to a pharmacy, swipe their NHI card, collect nine mask per two weeks, and if they’re adult a child and if they have a child, and see the stock level deplete by 9 or 10 after a couple of minutes. If they see rather that the stock level rises, they call 1822 right there. This is distributor ledger. This is participatory accountability.

Audrey Tang: This requires enormous trust from our government to people for not abusing the system. I don’t think there’s anything technologically preventing UK or other jurisdictions from adopting this system, but it does require a culture change.

Nicola Smith: One of the arguments that’s been used, not just in the UK, but in countries where masks has been in short supply is that they should be…

Audrey Tang: You mean medical masks?

Nicola Smith: Yeah. That they should be kept for medical workers and prioritized for medical workers.

Audrey Tang: Well, then you can use the same system to fabric masks rationing. I think Japan did that. They sent two fabric masks to each household. That’s another alternative. Or alternatively, you can work with Taiwanese manufacturer.

Audrey Tang: We now have an export that says if you send us a place in your country with electricity, water, and firefighter or whatever in a parts of land, we can help you to build this 24-hour factory that turns out two million medical masks per day.

Nicola Smith: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nicola Smith: Well, what would that require then? How would Taiwan be able to help set that up?

Audrey Tang: We have produced exactly that. We can help your machinery experts to transfer the blueprint and the knowledge. This is not something that’s a trade secret. We really want to help the world.

Audrey Tang: If there’s such a bilateral agreement, you can own that production line and even with residual PPE materials that you can use to make protective clothing or whatever. That’s something that our Minister of Foreign Affairs is now in active talks.

Nicola Smith: Are they in active talks with the UK?

Audrey Tang: I have no idea because I’m not part of MOFA.

Nicola Smith: Is this an idea that has already been exported elsewhere or is it still in the discussion stage?

Audrey Tang: First of all, because the machinery experts who did the Taiwan ramping up from 2 million a day to 20 million a day, they were not mask makers. They do much more higher-end [laughs] machinery. It’s like Tesla factory level people and now re-purposed doing the masks. They approach this with a very different…Not at all human laboring intensive point of view.

Audrey Tang: They are already in this line of business for smart machinery work. It’s just their product is probably not masks. They work with international counterparts. They’re just adding mask to one of their existing offerings.

Nicola Smith: Would those discussion be held government to government or is it more a commercial thing?

Audrey Tang: You can also just talk to the vendor.

Nicola Smith: How big is the operation in Taiwan? What kind of structure do you need or factory size or manpower? You said you don’t need so much human labor, but what facilities do you need?

Audrey Tang: You just need a place with sufficient room for the machinery. That’s it. Mostly, because it’s PPE material, there’s no very high-end machinery involved. I think the only high-end one is the supersonic vibrator.

Audrey Tang: I don’t really know [laughs] the precise word of that component. Other than that component, everything else is pretty much that you can locally source. I’m sure UK have those vendors. It’s just how to piece them together. That’s the main know-how.

Nicola Smith: Is it very costly?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know. In Taiwan’s case, because the country nationalized the production and the distribution, whether it’s costly is beside point. [laughs] We end up spending…if you purchase in the convenience store, then nine mask is partially subsidized by the convenience store because they want you visit a convenience store.

Audrey Tang: Their revenue actually grew during the pandemic. That’s very interesting. The remaining, it’s less than two Euros, overall, for 9 or 10 masks per two weeks. Even half of that or some of that is being subsidized by the distributor, the convenience store.

Audrey Tang: Aside from the ration the mask, if you have extra need, like you use it all the time so nine per 14 day is not enough, you can also order online. There’s also a free market for mask in addition to the nationalized economy.

Nicola Smith: One of the other things that the UK is about to launch is their own contact tracing app, which will use GPS.

Audrey Tang: It would use GPS? It’s not Bluetooth-only?

Nicola Smith: Sorry, yeah.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Nicola Smith: The contract tracing app is a big subject of debate at the minute.

Audrey Tang: Last I heard, it was Bluetooth-only.

Nicola Smith: Yeah, sorry. That’s my mistake. At the moment, many people are reluctant to download the app – it’s voluntary – because of concerns about state surveillance, about privacy. How does Taiwan…

Audrey Tang: Because that data collection was not there before the pandemic. That’s the real reason. It’s new data being collected.

Nicola Smith: Yes. How did Taiwan…

Audrey Tang: We don’t collect new data. It’s that simple.

Nicola Smith: You haven’t used an app.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, because we don’t collect new data.

Nicola Smith: The app is there, though, and you’d be prepared to use it. If there was community spread, my understanding was that the app would be used.

Audrey Tang: I really think that would be the last resort. We probably will use every single venue that does not collect new data. When those prove to be ineffective, even after hand sanitation, physical distancing, and mask use, then maybe if our R-value is still above one, we may consider app-level contract tracing.

Audrey Tang: But all the epidemiologists, I think the current consensus is that the measures that I just listed in Taiwan produce a R-value under one, which we have now empirical evidence because of the Dunmu fleet, the Panshi ship.

Audrey Tang: If our R-value in the community is above one, that surely would have caused a community spread. Because the R-value is under one with just these measures that I just mentioned, we have empirical evidence that we probably don’t need new, additional measure.

Nicola Smith: If it came to that, though, in the UK’s case, there’s already vast community spread.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Nicola Smith: An app is something that they are about to roll out. How do you address those privacy concerns of collecting new data? How do you put in safeguards to stop the abuse of that data?

Audrey Tang: If the data is only kept in your local storage, in something that you trust, like your firm, and it works in airplane mode with only Bluetooth on, then that is something that people can verify themselves. If it’s open-source, they can ask a friend with programming capability to verify that it does what it says on the tin.

Audrey Tang: However, even if it is just collected in your own firm, that is still new data being collected. It’s just like the health apps. Some people use the walking counter, whatever, [laughs] in earphone [laughs] to improve their own health, I’m sure, and it doesn’t transmit to the cloud.

Audrey Tang: Even for that, like the sports watches, there are still people with reservations, because they may not completely trust the hardware even if the software is open-source. These are legitimate concerns.

Audrey Tang: You will have to pair it with a incentive structure that acts in the individual’s best interest, just as I described with medical mask used in Taiwan, which is in the individual’s own best interest and not at all for a collectivist goal. Then, maybe that has a chance to spread.

Nicola Smith: How would you do that? If you were presenting that scope to the public, how would you suggest doing that?

Audrey Tang: I would say, “This is something that preserves your privacy, when a contact tracer, that is to say a medical officer, come and visit you, it can generate a one-time link for them to get the minimal information that they need to do their work.

Audrey Tang: “Without like in a traditional interview, where you would divulge private intimate details about your friends and families, even though the contact tracer, the medical officer, doesn’t strictly need those information. It’s a way to protect the privacy of your family.” That’s the best argument I can come up with.

Nicola Smith: These systems are ultimately open to abuse. If I copy…

Audrey Tang: You mean unintentionally?

Nicola Smith: Both unintentionally and intentionally.

Audrey Tang: First off, I’m not a cryptographer. [laughs] I know cryptography, but I’m not a professional cryptographer. I would defer to a professional cryptographer on that one. Far as I understand, professional cryptographers looked at the first version of the notification API produced by Google and Apple.

Audrey Tang: They found some unintended flaws in it so that they – I think just last week – changed their design to address the cryptographers critiques. I don’t think Apple and Google start being malicious. It’s just cryptographic design – especially for a new scenario it’s difficult.

Audrey Tang: Working with cryptographers on a accountable and open fashion will ultimately win trust from the cryptographic community, which would then help disseminate that scientific knowledge to the rest of population.

Audrey Tang: I would say for cryptographic content you really need interactive games, professional illustrators, or something that try to make those ideas simple, because otherwise, cryptography by itself is math, and we all know that math information have the R-value probably under one.

Nicola Smith: Totally for me. Politically, though, Taiwan is a democracy, the UK is a democracy, but not all countries might have the best intentions of these. Once you start introducing these apps for health reasons, then they might just overreach and use information for other purposes. Is that something that concerns you?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Ultimately it’s about data controllership if the people jointly control it ,meaning that people can see that it’s working with their best interest, and that they have full control over processing an application of that data.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a – I think UK has those – a credit union, where people decide to pull money together, but instead of trusting to a speculative banker or something, they use it just to serve the community’s need, a local credit coop or microfinancing.

Audrey Tang: There’s many innovations like this, where you can see for sure that this is working in the people’s interest in a coop spirit, instead of a capitalist spirit or even as their own enterprise spirit. Then people would trust that. The UK has a example of that, actually it’s the Scottish Highlands and Islands Development Agency.

Nicola Smith: You know more than me, and I’m Scottish.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, where the community collaboratively owns and controls the people of the community infrastructure. Digital infrastructure is a kind of infrastructure, so if it’s governed this way, then is has a chance. Otherwise, of course, legitimate concerns about state and capitalist surveillance would apply.

Nicola Smith: Basically, there has to be a lot of trust between the population and its government.

Audrey Tang: It need to be coded by the social sector itself in a open way.

Nicola Smith: The app would be voluntary in the UK. Is that going to work? Is that going to work…

Audrey Tang: I think it worked for Australia. It did not work for Singapore. I have no idea what the UK would do. [laughs] They chose a smaller island as a kind of a lab.

Nicola Smith: Yeah, the Isle of Wight.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have no idea, [laughs] because ultimately, it’s about incentive design. If you hit the right incentive, and people see that it protects their own interest and not at a service of some large entity of big sibling, then that would work. Otherwise, it would not work.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like wearing mask. If a majority of people wear it, of course it start to show some effect even just for social signaling. If the incentive design is not right, then you only always get a minority of people wearing it, at which case it doesn’t even work as a social signal. Maybe you would signal that I’m sick. [laughs] It would signal something else.

Nicola Smith: If you look at Taiwan, although you haven’t taken the more drastic step of using a mask…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there’s no lockdown.

Nicola Smith: Some of the measures have not been voluntary.

Audrey Tang: The quarantine?

Nicola Smith: Yeah, the 14-day quarantine, the ring-fencing of your phones to enforce that.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t like your phone being put into additional fence, you can go to a quarantine hotel which you’re physically barred from leaving. Your choice. [laughs]

Nicola Smith: What I’m trying to say is that there has to be some element of enforced control of these measures.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but we do that at the borders so that the domestic population suffers the least. That’s epidemiologically sound.

Nicola Smith: Is that something that you would recommend for the UK?

Audrey Tang: You can try the borders, certainly. The UK is not a continent.

Nicola Smith: We’ve been very late to introduce that, though, and there’s still a lot of loopholes so people can use public transport…They’re not necessarily controlling who’s…they not checking up on people’s details…

Audrey Tang: I acknowledge these as facts, but would you like me to say? [laughs]

Nicola Smith: I just like to know your opinion on this, whether it’s going to make any difference. If the 14-day quarantine is not watertight, is it going to make a difference?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when Europe and slightly later on the US had this unexpected spike, of course we had like three days of not catching up to the quarantine. Those three days causes a hundred or so cases, so it’s significant, but the contact tracers were very diligent, and successfully did a retroactive testing.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, they said that, “Even though it’s not required to do a RTPCR at the time of those few days, we would now retroactively ask everyone who returned from EU and the US in the past couple of weeks to back to the clinics to do a retesting.”

Audrey Tang: That’s how we found the few cases that went into the community and isolated them all. That did not cause a community spread, but had we not do the retroactive testing, we’re in big trouble.

Nicola Smith: Basically, unless we retroactively check who comes through the border, [laughs] then we’re in even bigger trouble, because we haven’t done it for months.

Audrey Tang: Medical mask use by itself, if it’s successfully socially signaled, has an intention of physical distance. There is some epidemiologists I believe it’s like a weak vaccine, in which case the R-value, maybe by that measure alone, will be controllable.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a consensus. Even the WHO just very recently, [laughs] showed a knowledge about that view. The WHO are now saying, “When you’re in community-transmission stage, everybody wear a fabric mask.”

Nicola Smith: In terms of artificial intelligence data, how Taiwan used data, what do you think was the most successful strategy in fighting the pandemic?

Audrey Tang: It’s more about public communication than anything else. The daily CECC press conference, the use of assistive intelligence, namely chat box, to make sure that people in quarantine are taken care of, they feel not lonely, which is important, and also that people who have any questions they can ask a Google Assistant or similar voice assistants, any scientific question and get answers.

Audrey Tang: If they cannot receive the answers, it escalates to our scientist team, which devises answers and translate it to the public spokes stock card which is very popular. This direct line of communication, the daily CECC press conferences, and a call center, the 1922, altogether provided a collective intelligence system.

Nicola Smith: How has Taiwan managed to keep the issue non-political? We’ve seen some countries that have tying themselves in knots, because it’s become a very political issue.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I know.

Nicola Smith: How has Taiwan managed to avoid that?

Audrey Tang: When our top epidemiologist at the time, literally the person who wrote the textbook on epidemiology, need to talk to the President, he only has to walk, I think, 30 seconds because he was our Vice-President. [laughs] That’s that.

Nicola Smith: Would you say the public have been looking more to scientists than politicians for…

Audrey Tang: Dr. Chen Chien-jen is also a political authority. It’s very interesting because when the Vice President need to consult the top epidemiologist, he only has to look into a mirror. [laughs]

Nicola Smith: True. Taiwan’s very lucky in that sense.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. [laughs]

Nicola Smith: Can I ask you briefly on disinformation? Taiwan has been on the front line of disinformation from China and presumably others, but definitely from China, for years now.

Audrey Tang: We make fun of it.

Nicola Smith: Is that the best weapon to counter it? What would be your lessons for other parts of the world that are starting to see more disinformation?

Audrey Tang: Make fun of it.

Nicola Smith: How does that work out in a…

Audrey Tang: …practical sense.

Nicola Smith: How do you do that? Can you give some examples?

Audrey Tang: You read about the tissue paper and the premier’s buttocks.

Nicola Smith: Premier’s buttocks? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The premier’s buttocks, yes. The maker of that meme now are administration’s spokesperson, [non-English speech] , basically said, when he was a child, he used to look at this book, I think by Mai Kong, that says we only have one earth, which is a very famous environmental slogan. He just changed that to say that we only have a pair of buttocks each.

Audrey Tang: Our premier wiggling his buttocks a little bit, making that point, [laughs] says that the rumor that says the medical masks ramping up will hurt the tissue paper production is not true because tissue paper are made out of South American material and medical masks, domestic material. This is hilarious because the packaging itself is of a tissue paper box.

Nicola Smith: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: [laughs]

Nicola Smith: I didn’t notice that at first.

Audrey Tang: It says in Mandarin, “ [Mandarin] ,” which means no matter how much you stockpile, we only have one pair of buttocks each. In Mandarin, stop stockpile is this homonym for buttocks. [laughs] It’s a pun on many levels.

Nicola Smith: That’s very funny. The premier didn’t mind being used?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. This has a R-value of maybe three. [laughs] When everybody see it, they just share it two, three people.

Nicola Smith: Where was that initially unleashed then? Was it online? Was it on Facebook?

Audrey Tang: All the social media, every single social media you can think of, Telegram, Line, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it.

Nicola Smith: The creator just started putting it out on social media?

Audrey Tang: If you respond within a couple hours, when the conspiracy theory, panic buying trends, then you ensure that…it’s a race in time. If this has a higher R-value, it will reach more people quicker. People, once they laugh about it, they cannot get outraged when they see this conspiracy theory and disinformation.

Audrey Tang: This serves as a memetic vaccine, while this then will have a R-value of under one, in which case it will stop to spread. Indeed, the panic buying stops within a couple days.

Nicola Smith: After that meme?

Audrey Tang: After this meme.

Nicola Smith: Wow.

Audrey Tang: We discover that the people who spread that in the first place was the tissue paper reseller. Go figure.

Nicola Smith: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Nicola Smith: Funny.

Nicola Smith: How did you discover that?

Audrey Tang: They did a attribution. We always do a notice and public notice if we can trace to the original poster.

Nicola Smith: That was a local tissue…or international?

Audrey Tang: I think it’s called direct sales. I don’t want to use the term pyramid, but it’s this kind of direct sales network.

Nicola Smith: Is there not some kind of penalty for that.

Audrey Tang: There is a penalty for that. It says here that the criminal code 251 that, at the most, there’s a NT$300,000 fine and something like that. It’s punishable up to three years in prison.

Nicola Smith: Were the tissue paper vendors…

Audrey Tang: I don’t comment about the judicial branch. I’m sure they’re still in the judicial branch.

Nicola Smith: It’s being investigated?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Nicola Smith: That’s interesting. It’s an excellent example. Are there any other examples that you can…

Audrey Tang: That involves the PRC? [laughs]

Nicola Smith: Yeah, that come to mind. It’s becoming a bigger issue around the world.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Nicola Smith: Especially as…

Audrey Tang: Last November, there was this trending meme that says…on the tin.

Nicola Smith: “Hong Kong thugs compensation exposed. Kill a police and earn up to 20 million.” Can I take a picture of it?

Audrey Tang: Sure, it’s online anyway. It’s not true, by the way.

Nicola Smith: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwan Fact-Check Center, part of the International Fact-Checking Network, did the attribution work, did a notice and public notice. Initially, there’s this photo from somebody we know, which is the “Reuters,” which is a journalistic organization. It says on the caption that there were teenage protestors, and that’s it. That’s literally the only thing that Reuters say.

Audrey Tang: This is a new caption to a real photo that’s taken by Reuters. It’s not just disinformation, it’s a info op. It’s a operation. We traced – and by we, the IFCN member, the Taiwan Fact-Check Center, not run by the state – the independent journalists traced that into the Weibo account of the Chang’an Sword, or the Zhongyang Zhengfawei, the CCP’s central political and law unit in the PRC.

Audrey Tang: They’re a state organ. Their original Weibo post says this.

Nicola Smith: It was the Chinese state that did the…

Audrey Tang: State propaganda.

Nicola Smith: Would you say that the Chinese state has people doing this full time, pumping out disinformation…

Audrey Tang: They do it overtly. It’s not a covert operation.

Nicola Smith: It’s part of the government structure?

Audrey Tang: They say this publicly on their Weibo in appropriating the Reuters photo. You can see it’s the same photo. There might be copyright violations, by the way, which they agreed not to do. In any case…

Nicola Smith: Typical, isn’t it?

Audrey Tang: I know. The point is that when there’s public attribution, when people see on social media this photo with the false caption but with a note that says, “This is from the Chang’an Sword,” the frame changes. They still share it. It may still have an R-value of over one, but they share it as a cautionary tale, like the CCP is trying actively to interfere our view on the anti-ELAB protests.

Audrey Tang: It’s not quite making fun of it, but still it’s making a new narrative out of it.

Nicola Smith: To counter the flood of disinformation that’s coming out or active operations, as you said, you need some full-time…

Audrey Tang: People.

Nicola Smith: …experts who are dedicated to that.

Audrey Tang: Of course, and there’s now multiple organizations in Taiwan doing that. I think MyGoPen is also certified now as a International Fact-Check Network member.

Nicola Smith: Are other countries, Western countries, doing enough to counter this kind of disinformation?

Audrey Tang: The public awareness is most important than anything. When people laughed about this operations for a while, they learn proper mind sanitation rules…

Audrey Tang: …and would keep a social distance [laughs] from the social media posts before clicking share. They would have a inoculation in their mind about this kind of messages because they have seen sufficient attribution work before and maybe even participated in some of the fact-checking work themself, which is the best way.

Audrey Tang: It’s just like learning to be amateur epidemiologist. It’s like being a amateur journalist. It shields you from this kind of narratives. When a majority of population have this exposure, this inoculation, this builds nerd immunity.

Nicola Smith: I like that. That’s what we need. Would you say that Taiwan is leading the way then, globally, on countering disinformation?

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s the Taiwan model. Our model, just like when we fight coronavirus with no lockdown, we fight the infodemic with no take-down.

Nicola Smith: How many dedicated experts do you have, do you think, looking at this and actively countering?

Audrey Tang: Everybody contributes in their spare time, everyone who flag such a disinformation in the end-to-end encrypted channel like Line, forwarding it to Cofacts or to Dr. Message. That’s from Trend Micro, a leading antivirus company. I don’t know, but hundreds of people, at least.

Audrey Tang: What’s more important is the millions of people who volunteer maybe a couple minutes of their time to flag something they think as suspicious.

Nicola Smith: They would flag it to one of these…

Audrey Tang: To one of these fact-checkers, of course.

Nicola Smith: Like AFP, the news agency, has a fact-checker?

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nicola Smith: Have you noticed an uptick in disinformation coming from the PRC recently?

Audrey Tang: It’s always very high, so…

Nicola Smith: Yeah.

Nicola Smith: In the time of the pandemic, it appears that China has…

Audrey Tang: A narrative to push.

Nicola Smith: Yeah, and more motivation to distract.

Audrey Tang: A narrative to push, yes.

Nicola Smith: Have you noticed that?

Audrey Tang: There’s two things going on here. First is, as I said, it’s overt. It’s not covert. They make YouTube videos, clips, that try to push their narrative. I think that that narrative sometimes backfires like in the Viva Taiwan incident.

Nicola Smith: In Brazil.

Audrey Tang: In Brazil but they’re still going on about it. That’s the first thing. That’s been going on for ages. The second, which is, as you said, more recent is on specific topics such as the origin of the virus and things like that. For these, the Taiwan stance has always been that the academic community, scientific access, of which we have limited access to in the WHO, is welcomed but not sufficient.

Audrey Tang: We really want meaningful ministerial access because unless the other countries’ top academician is also their vice president, having scientific access is not the same as the ministerial access. We will continue to share the Taiwan model like through taiwancanhelp.us, fightcovid.edu.tw with international counterparts. We have our own model.

Audrey Tang: I’m not saying that the total lockdown, very top-down, almost no journalistic freedom model that the PRC tries to push doesn’t decrease our out value.

Audrey Tang: It, obviously, also decreased our out value. It’s just like if you shut down the Internet, of course, there’s no disinformation on social media but what we’re trying to say is that Taiwan strengthened liberal democracy during the pandemic and during the infodemic. We would like to share that to liberal democracies.

Audrey Tang: We don’t directly say that you have to use our model but if you choose to remain a liberal democracy, that would make us really happy.

Nicola Smith: Is the best way to fight disinformation reactive or more proactive? You said…

Audrey Tang: Proactive. Of course, media competence, right? Starting from age seven in the primary school, instead of teaching literacy, which is treating students as viewers and readers, teach competence, which is they are YouTubers. They are producers of media.

Audrey Tang: They need to be responsible about checking their sources, about balancing their narratives, aware of the framing, all the training that journalists need to go through, all the media makers need to go through.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, broadband is human right. That’s everybody, so we really need to put it into the basic education curriculum, which we did, starting last year.

Nicola Smith: Is that going on?

Audrey Tang: Of course. If you check the mlearn.moe.gov.tw, it has material from first grade all the way to lifelong education.

Nicola Smith: Sticking with disinformation, it’s not just the PRC that’s putting out disinformation. What if you have a global leader with a very large following on social media who is putting out disinformation, how do you counter that?

Audrey Tang: Humor over rumor is still the best way unless you do take-down but we don’t do take-down, so humor over rumor remains the best way. I have to go to a cabinet meeting now.

Nicola Smith: Sorry.

Audrey Tang: It was great, thank you.

Nicola Smith: Thank you so much.