Audrey Tang: You already…

Nick Monaco: …on the topic disinformation…

Audrey Tang: I think you already learned everything there is to learn.

Amy Studdart: I highly doubt it. There’s a few reasons for our meeting with you today. First of all, we’d love to hear your thoughts on the disinformation operation here and how you thought it played out. Nick and I are writing a report that should hopefully come out within the next few months looking at the overall information operation and what happened.

Amy Studdart: The second thing is we also wanted to say thank you to your office for all of the incredible work that we’ve been doing together in the Philippines. I think we’ll be doing some stuff in India, and there’s a few other things as well.

Amy Studdart: Then the third piece is IRI, my portfolio specifically, and we’ve talked about this in the past, is much broader than just disinformation.

Amy Studdart: Now that we’ve moved past the election, one of the things that we’d love to be able to do is expand the cooperation with your office to talk about the positive ways in which technology can be used to support democracy and how we can be holding Taiwan and the work that you do particularly and g0v particularly up as an example for the rest of the world.

Amy Studdart: There’s an optimistic vision for the future of democracy, and you can see it at play in Taiwan. That’s our agenda. Am I missing anything?

Audrey Tang: Anything from you?

Chris Olson: My name’s Chris Olson. I am the program officer for China and IRI. While Amy and Nick are writing this report and they’re working on the subject matter expertise, I do more of the administrative and program/project management side.

Amy Studdart: Chris oversees our partnerships here in Taiwan as well.

Audrey Tang: That’s awesome.

Nick Monaco: I hope you’re not getting sick of seeing me. I know we talked…

Nick Monaco: …a few weeks ago more in-depth about disinformation…

Audrey Tang: Virtually and physically.

Nick Monaco: I’m excited to hear your view in the post-election period and get your thoughts on all this stuff. It’s good to meet with you.

Audrey Tang: Just one update. We’re planning a visit for me to DC and DC only on February 10 to 14.

Amy Studdart: Cool, a Valentine’s Day trip.

Audrey Tang: Yes. If there’s any action items that need more HQ coordination, we can touch upon it here. Then we can follow-up in DC. [laughs] It’s a CSIS invitation, so we think it probably will happen.

Nick Monaco: I’m going to be there, too.

Audrey Tang: You’re going to be there, too?

Nick Monaco: I think me and Puma are on the panel after you.

Audrey Tang: Puma is confirmed. Puma needs no clearance.

Audrey Tang: The first topic about the scope of the disinformation, you’ve visited Minister Lo, so you know the regulatory landscape. Have you interviewed with the FB war room folks?

Amy Studdart: Yes.

Audrey Tang: You have, so you know that they do the operation. The TFCC, of course, is instrumental this time not only in working with the private sector partners, but also to make sure that the social sector have plenty to do, for example, fact-checking, literally, every sentence that the president candidates said during their debate.

Amy Studdart: I didn’t know they did that. Wow.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s a really good effort. I wrote a recommendation kind of article for them in the news week, the business weekly here. This is called the Presidential Candidate Fact-Check project.

Amy Studdart: Cool.

Audrey Tang: This is very nice. Not only it provides certain quantitative measurements, [laughs] but also, literally, mobilized around a thousand people.

Amy Studdart: This is all volunteers?

Audrey Tang: Yes, this thousand people are all volunteers. These are the institutional and new media that collaborated. These are the distribution partners. This is how the public TV, which hosts both the platform forum for the presidential candidate as well as the debate, can publish a fact-check report in real-time.

Audrey Tang: It’s TFCC that gives this the bridge between the civil society and the institutional media, including social media because that fits into the algorithm. I think this shape of collaboration of essentially collaborative journalism is one of the highlights in that. TFCC and friends have played a role. Of course, Reader, Watchout, and everybody on this list have played a role.

Amy Studdart: That’s really incredible.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and that’s my understanding.

Audrey Tang: Any questions?

Amy Studdart: One of the mixed things that we’ve heard is that some people have said that there was less disinformation or less of an information operation than had been expected. Some have said it’s too early to tell. We don’t actually know what the information operation do.

Amy Studdart: Others have said, “Actually, it was quite severe.” I’d be interested to hear your perspectives.

Audrey Tang: There’s less. In cyber security terms, the attack surface is much narrower this time. Last time, because it coincides with the referenda, it’s literally a dozen attack surfaces, without even having to invent new ones.

Audrey Tang: Each referendum topic is essentially a divisive topic that could be used to sow discord, even for non-malicious actors. [laughs] That was the shape of the previous election. This time, because we separated the representational elections and the deliberative referenda into alternating years.

Audrey Tang: This time, first, it only took me five minutes to cast my paper vote, and the weather is good.

Nick Monaco: Sometimes, by hour.

Audrey Tang: Last time, many people stood in line, and there is no…Because they were technically outside of the voting place, so it’s still OK for them to check their social media. The attack surface is literally broader and also deeper.

Audrey Tang: Also, it could operate up until the second they walk in to vote. That exposure time, they had nothing to do, because they were in line and online, apparently. [laughs]

Nick Monaco: And in line.

Audrey Tang: Yes, online and in line. That length differs from place to place, but it could be an hour or two. This is a godsend if you are an information operator, because they had nowhere else to turn their attention.

Audrey Tang: All they think is about voting. Also, by law, there is no prohibition against campaigning for referenda on the voting day.

Amy Studdart: Oh, only candidates?

Audrey Tang: Only candidates.

Amy Studdart: Oh, interesting.

Audrey Tang: Also, some candidates are also initiator of referenda. So it’s… [laughs]

Amy Studdart: Complicated.

Audrey Tang: It’s complicated. The previous election, I think it’s not about the strength or resource poured into it. It’s just the attack surface so large. They automatically amplify each other. Whatever people have seen have been reverberating across all the different attack surfaces. This time, nothing like that. I think this is the crucial difference.

Amy Studdart: Is your perception that there was as much effort put into disinformation or undermining the information integrity?

Audrey Tang: The thing is that we only know the exposure and the effect they’ve had. Like right after the election, there is three TFFC fact checks immediately about the tallying process. Like there’s a video that confuses the legislative tallying with the presidential tallying.

Audrey Tang: The frame was that the person tallying it has been recording only one candidate’s numbers and not the others. Actually, what they have filmed and heard is actually two different tallying at play. There was also just a simple numeric error about the…

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry, with all due respect, I’m just quoting the disinformation. That quote, “The CIA have offered two special invisible ink so that the votes that counts into one presidential candidate, no matter who you vote, the other kind of invisible ink will show that you voted for the other presidential candidate. The reason we didn’t hear about it is the CIA is very secretive.” [laughs]

Amy Studdart: That’s wonderful. These things all need to be turned into movies.

Audrey Tang: I know.

Amy Studdart: That’d be great.

Audrey Tang: Right. What we have observed is that there was actually quite a few disinformation right after the election to attack the legitimacy of the election itself. Some versions of them have been tested already before the election to try out which narrative struck a chord.

Audrey Tang: The pre-election phase is less pronounced, and they only gain popularity after the election. That’s what I observe myself. I don’t know if Ning or Joel have anything to add.

Ning Yeh: Yeah, yesterday Minister Lo has mentioned all this disinformation is not so trustworthy. I mean just look at a story, just a story. [laughs] It not very serious impact to the public. Everybody knows that it’s fake.

Joel Chen: Yes, actually, just I mentioned to you yesterday. You were curious about it. You were wondering the Facebook is so playing so active role, especially in Taiwan. Actually, I call Max yesterday, because he was my colleague.

Joel Chen: I exchanged, I talked with Max about the why the Facebook is any different between…I’m also curious about wondering what it stands different role playing in Taiwan and in the United States. Max told me that, because that each different region, Facebook, they have got a different policy priority.

Joel Chen: I think that, because that disinformation, especially in Taiwan, Taiwan is a front line. Why the Facebook in Taiwan play so active role? I think that Max told me that one of the reasons wad that.

Audrey Tang: Line operates in several jurisdictions around Asia. So far, it’s the only dashboard that I have built. It’s not because other jurisdictions did not ask Line to build it. It’s just the Line CSR department in Taiwan feel very strongly about building it.

Audrey Tang: You can’t just build it as a technological tool. You really need a collaboration from your citizens that flags spam. You need those fact checking partners and so on. It’s really an ecosystem-building thing. I think only the Taiwan chapter of Line and its CSR department is confident that this ecosystem will play in a way that’s constructive to their mission.

Audrey Tang: Not in other, more authoritarian jurisdictions, where it may actually play in a way orthogonal or even oppositional to the core mission of the Line as a private sector company. I think that agrees with the Max assessment.

Nick Monaco: Is this a website from Line itself?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nick Monaco: Do they have a team of fact checkers at Line?

Audrey Tang: Yes, a team of people who forwards the flagged disinformation automatically to fact checkers and back, like an auto-clarification mechanism.

Amy Studdart: IRI works on disinformation, and particularly around elections all over the world. It has been really striking to me that Taiwan has been able to build up this ecosystem that includes civil society, government, and the technology companies working together in a way that seems to also be relatively trusting and open.

Amy Studdart: It’s something I would love to see replicated elsewhere, but I don’t know how we would do it. I’d be interested to hear from all of you about why it is you think this happened in Taiwan. I know that your office played a huge role in facilitating a lot of this.

Amy Studdart: G0v, the open source movement, and so on meant that there was already this culture there, but is there anything else that you think made Taiwan particularly capable of doing this, and is there anything that you think in particular is replicable in any content?

Audrey Tang: This is not about “thought leadership,” because this ecosystem model is already what Spamhaus have done for spam 20 years ago. Even in Taiwan, this is not new. For example, for child exploitation, that’s what IWIN has been doing for several years.

Audrey Tang: This shape of multistakeholder communication is, I wouldn’t say a tradition, because that sounds multigenerational, but it’s familiar to the Taiwan Internet community. We didn’t need to invent any new thought. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second is that the phrasing is really the most important. Back in early 2017, the main thing that we worked on is settling on the term misinformation and disinformation, to the exclusion of other terms in common use when talking about this.

Amy Studdart: To the exclusion of hate speech and…?

Audrey Tang: No, to the exclusion of “fake news.””

Audrey Tang: Which is especially a problematic word in Mandarin. As I observed many times, news – 新聞 – and journalism – 新聞工作 or 新聞業 – which means literally just news work.

Audrey Tang: There is no way to say 新聞 without affronting journalists. I’m especially sensitive to this, because my parents are journalists. Out of filial piety, I really cannot say the F-word.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, very early on, the administration settled on the words misinformation and disinformation, enlisted journalism as the main counter strategy. Like this is not discrediting journalists, but rather democratizing journalism, so that when everybody is potentially about a broadcaster…

Audrey Tang: Live streaming in Taiwan costs marginally nothing. [laughs] When everybody is a journalist by default, there’s a need for democratizing journalism competency, just like this thousand people fact checking. That’s a very good example.

Audrey Tang: By settling on this strategy very early on, we made sure that we do not alienate the journalism community. The TFFC is blessed, and indeed still maintained in a foundation form, by some of the most renowned journalism professors, theorists, and researchers.

Audrey Tang: If we alienate the journalism community, we won’t get anywhere for this particular issue.

Amy Studdart: That’s really fascinating. I think the nature of the disinformation/misinformation problem in Taiwan is also different to what we see in other environments as well, where you have, like in a Sri Lanka, for instance, where do you actually have a lot of hate speech.

Amy Studdart: There’s already divisions there in which people are being awful to each other in the real world. Then they take that online, and so it can be exploited more, which is really tragic. Do you have more questions on disinfo?

Nick Monaco: Yeah, I’ve been toying with a comparison that I don’t know if is fair or not. It’d be interesting to get your opinion on it. I’m curious if you think Taiwan is comparable to Finland in the sense that Finland has been dealing with Russian disinformation for a long time and seems to be largely resilient to it.

Nick Monaco: There have certainly been isolated cases of strong disinformation and harassment. Jessikka Aro, of course, being the main one. By and large, the government has responded pretty well and remained pretty resilient to disinformation.

Nick Monaco: Do you think Taiwan benefits from, it seems to me this is something Taiwan’s been thinking about for a long time, even though it’s only cropped up in the online sphere recently? Do you think that’s a fair comparison to make, or do you think the context is extremely different here?

Audrey Tang: When I was working before this role in the K to 12 curriculum committee, Finland indeed is our main source of inspiration to design the K to 12 curriculum. The curriculum places media and technology competency as one of the nine core competencies to have.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan, I think, is influenced both by the more East Asian standardized test, individualistic competition, that’s maybe more US. Anyway, [laughs] we’re influenced by many different strains of thought.

Audrey Tang: When we’re doing the K to 12 curriculum design, the Finnish idea of this just autonomous, interactive common good, like in a very old sense of common good – like Henry George sense of common good sense – is particularly resonating with the education community in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: There’s many cultural reasons, but I think people see this kind of multistakeholderism as representative not only about the necessity practically, but also culturally, because Taiwan, at least in the new curriculum is transcultural.

Audrey Tang: The new curriculum is paired with the National Language Act, so that we have 20 national languages now, and that people can choose to approach any knowledge and any discipline through the lens of any other culture.

Audrey Tang: People are raised now to view the culture that each individual is born with in the light of another culture that nevertheless share the democratic process. This freedom to travel between cultures, which includes religious freedom, but not limited to, is, I think, a core part of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: In this identification of democratic process, it is inspired by Finland and also inspired by Switzerland, where this democratic process identity, and not football team identity is even more pronounced.

Nick Monaco: I’m curious to know if you’re thinking a lot about online harassment as well. I talked to J. Michael Cole a few months ago, and he mentioned that a lot of people who were talking about anti-Han commentary online were getting viciously attacked en masse in a way that wasn’t the case a few years ago in Taiwan.

Nick Monaco: I’m curious if you’ve seen the same thing or if the government’s thinking about that at all as a problem. I’m just curious to get your thoughts.

Audrey Tang: It works both ways. The 出征, how do I translate that?

Nick Monaco: Ehe expedition.

Audrey Tang: Expedition, yes. [laughs] The expeditious harassments…

Audrey Tang: Now, I’m trying to use the term as they use it. [laughs] The expeditious harassments are reflecting the mass insecurity of the belief system. You see that happening when any of the supporting idea or candidate is on the height, but declining in popularity.

Audrey Tang: This slope is where the expeditions are most likely to happen, because they need to turn an individual event that upsets people in normal times into outrage to regroup and remobilize in the hope that they can regain the popularity.

Audrey Tang: This is, as everybody who have studied online social media know, counterproductive, because this dispels people’s myth that this is some idea that’s worth following. It may reinforce existing followers, but it turns everybody else off.

Audrey Tang: Just in a practical term, although many different waves like this have come and gone, the individual practitioners quickly learn that this is counterproductive to their mission. There are, for the non-digital natives who this expedition may be their first exposure to Internet culture, it takes slightly longer to wean off this habit. This is nothing new. We saw it in Usenet days.

Nick Monaco: Interesting. Also, I’ve been curious about, we talked a little bit about traditional media few weeks ago, specifically more on, I think, the print media side.

Nick Monaco: The past week, listening to some people talk at the post-election conference at TFD, I’ve been thinking about the influence of radio in Taiwan or whether or not disinformation, acquisition by Beijing, or anything like that would be an influencing factor in radio, maybe particularly in the South, but not exclusively.

Nick Monaco: Is that something that the government’s thinking about at large or that you’ve thought about?

Audrey Tang: The radio broadcasting station, I think, is technically that dish of the broadcasting facility is classified as cybersecurity-wise top-level critical infrastructure, so we’ve been thinking about it. Practically, I think historically, even during the martial law days, there is limited but vibrant use of radio.

Audrey Tang: The so-called underground extra-party videos, radio stations, and that is an important part of the culture. Of course, to me, nowadays, we will say there is no democratic debate between the underground radios and the official propaganda.

Audrey Tang: Both tell one side of the story, and there was no room for meaningful debate, of course, because of martial law. Still, that is one of the identities of people who identify with the radio broadcasters and the radio stations, is a most accessible form of civil disobedience.

Audrey Tang: That’s a historical fact, and that culture, of course, continues for people who are, I think, nowadays in their at least 60s. That’s still important to them. I would say radio is less important for people 30 years old or younger, because iPod is invented in their lifetime. They have podcasts to listen to.

Nick Monaco: Do you think that, I guess, mainland actors or cross-strait propaganda infiltrators would have the capacity to message and more localized messaging campaigns? I guess that’s at the heart of what I’m thinking about when I think about radio, or social media, it might be the case as well.

Amy Studdart: A follow-on to that, did you see much of disinformation narratives jumping from one platform to another, so jumping from Facebook to television to radio?

Audrey Tang: Both excellent questions. The technical capability, of course, is there. Speaking the Taiwanese Hoklo, vis-à-vis Hokkian, Minnan, it only take maybe a few weeks training for a speaker of that language to speak fluently in this language.

Audrey Tang: This is like learning to write simplified Chinese. Once you know traditional Chinese, this is not particularly hard. Technically, it’s possible. I really don’t think that this is the most effective route to go, even if you are targeting people who are above 60 years old.

Audrey Tang: Broadband as a human right, people now belong to one or more Line groups, and we know that as a fact, that the elderly people, even though they know nothing about other Internet services, they are on Line groups.

Audrey Tang: Just recording something visual through the Line groups is much more convincing than something that is purely auditory in either podcast or radio, which is why, in the TFFC post-election, the fact checking, mostly you see they are fact checking video now, because these seem more convincing. That’s the answer to your question.

Audrey Tang: Your question, yeah, the Taiwan institutional media culture is unfortunately influenced by the need for so-called real time news. The real time news…

Amy Studdart: We saw this. We were in the Counting Information Center, and we had all of the television…

Audrey Tang: Oh, it’s very futuristic, isn’t it?

Amy Studdart: It was amazing. You had all of these televisions with television stations showing completely different results from the election. Vicky was kind enough to explain that it’s complete nonsense. It’s just completely fictional, because the Taiwanese culture is, you need the real time, some information about nonsense.

Audrey Tang: They represent alternate timelines.

Audrey Tang: Right, and the quantum superposition collapse on one of the futures.

Audrey Tang: Very sci-fi. [laughs] Yes, exactly. The CEC maintains the official tallying. The fact that the institutional media, based on the real time reports from the live streaming or observing of the tallying, which is a Taiwan specialty, differ, obviously, based on which group they are working with.

Audrey Tang: They, of course, have their own bias in which tallying stations they dispatch people to. I wouldn’t say it’s even misinformation, because these numbers are based somewhat on observations. There is systemic bias in those observations is what I’m saying.

Audrey Tang: Then that’s, as you mentioned, what they think that the viewers want or the readers expect. That is the interesting configuration in the Taiwanese institutional media landscape.

Audrey Tang: That is also one of the reason why there is a lot of pressure on the editorial process to be shortened when there is only a source from the social media or when there is only a source from even end-to-end encrypted channels.

Audrey Tang: All you have is a few screen grabs, but then there is enormous pressure to make a real time news on the Internet first. Then maybe you correct that later. Then after a few corrections, that appears on the television. At that point, it can be scrutinized by the NCC now.

Ning Yeh: Not before publication.

Audrey Tang: Right.

Ning Yeh: Only after.

Audrey Tang: Only after. Sometimes, the NCC commissioners, councilmembers discover that there is only seconds between this step and this step.

Audrey Tang: They would say, then, that when this station originally apply for a license for the public broadcasting spectrum or some cable that is running on public land or whatever, they say that they will have this and this fact checking process or editorial process between this stage and this stage, but they literally did it in 30 seconds.

Audrey Tang: If there is a way to do in 30 seconds what other institutional media usually takes an hour to do, I want to learn about that technology.

Audrey Tang: The most obvious explanation is that they skipped parts of the process that they committed that they will do. NCC issue letters to them. Recently, in the past few months, also fine to them.

Amy Studdart: Are they meaningful fines, or are they symbolic?

Audrey Tang: Does Ning want to answer the question?

Ning Yeh: That’s fine, yes.

Audrey Tang: OK. It’s a fine fine.

Amy Studdart: It’s a fine fine. That’s fantastic. Do you have more disinfo questions?

Nick Monaco: I don’t know, just I would be curious. Have there been any instances that you’ve seen of messaging, and disinformation messaging in particular?

Audrey Tang: In videos, definitely. In writing, difficult, because written Tâi-gí is either using Taiwan romanization or Tâi-lô. It’s a previous version.

Audrey Tang: Very few people, other than people who work in religious missions who invented Pe̍h-ōe-jī in the first place, or people who are computational linguistics, like me, that can even type correctly the characters needed for the Tagalog romanization.

Audrey Tang: Mostly, you see it’s using hànzì, writing a soundalike of Tâi-gí, which is not very convincing, because it seems like parody speech, just by nature. If you say, for example, one of the most-heard phrases during the election during is “tòng-suán”.

Nick Monaco: I just learned that one yesterday.

Audrey Tang: Oh, you did?

Nick Monaco: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: OK, you learned some Tâi-gí? That’s excellent.

Audrey Tang: Like if you write tòng-suán in hànzì, of course, it is just the same as the Mandarin hànzì. You wouldn’t think that it’s Tâi-gí when it’s written like that. If you want to write and have it sound like Tâi-gí in your reader’s mind, you have to write “frozen garlic,” like 凍蒜.

Audrey Tang: Then frozen garlic is comedic by nature. [laughs] It loses potency as an outrage-provoking device, because once you laugh about it, you cannot feel outrage.

Audrey Tang: That’s very difficult. Of course, I must say that the public television systems, the public television station, is now teaching the recommended characters and the correct orthography for Tâi-gí.

Nick Monaco: When you say correct, you mean the Ministry of Education?

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Education, yes. That is a worthy goal that I also personally helped. We all know that it will take another 5 or 10 years before that become the main orthography, though.

Nick Monaco: That’s really cool. The reason I ask is, from the Twitter archives, we know that messaging in Hong Kong was quite localized. It was in Cantonese, but I guess the context is a little different.

Nick Monaco: I hadn’t thought about the fact that Taiwanese isn’t really standardized in the writing system yet, or maybe it’s standardized to an extent, but there are three standards, or something like that.

Audrey Tang: In romanization? Yes.

Nick Monaco: Right.

Audrey Tang: What you said is totally true, although the MoE now standardize on Tâi-lô. Again, it takes five years or so for everybody to get comfortable using it.

Nick Monaco: Just as a linguist, I’m excited you guys are doing that, so thank you. It’s been a fun adventure to learn a language in a state that isn’t standardized. It’s a new experience for me. As a threat actor, that would be a challenge to appear legitimate, but figure out which system to use.

Audrey Tang: They don’t even try. [laughs]

Nick Monaco: Cool, awesome.

Amy Studdart: Slight subject flip, but obviously, disinformation has been a huge priority for the last couple of years since 2018, I guess. It’s going to continue to be a challenge, but I’d be interested to hear what your priorities are for this administration, now that you’re back in government, and you can hopefully do some positive things, rather than just fighting the bad guys.

Audrey Tang: I think I did positive things also when countering disinformation. For one, we really enhanced the clarification method. The memetic engineers trained and hired by the various ministries, they’re not going to be losing their jobs.

Audrey Tang: They’re going to continue to roll out very funny cat pictures.

Audrey Tang: More cat pictures.

Amy Studdart: That is a positive contribution to the world. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is a positive contribution. That’s literally why Internet exists, [laughs] to distribute cat pictures. Anyway, I think, actually, for our office, the main priorities have never been on disinformation.

Audrey Tang: We only focus very intensively in two time periods. One is in early 2017, when we translated the term misinformation and fact checking, another very important term, to Mandarin, and raised the idea of an open, rapid, structured response in the cabinet meeting.

Audrey Tang: That was March 2017. We worked intensively on that for about a month or two back then. Then the next was when Gulas joined the cabinet. Gulas and I work with Minister Luo on the legal framework to define disinformation and to update existing laws that talk only about radio and newspapers to also work on digital.

Audrey Tang: You talked to Luo, so you already know about that part of the work. My role is just to check that it’s not against physical law, [laughs] or really, the cyber norms, to implement. These lasted for maybe a month or two.

Audrey Tang: My priority have never been on disinformation. It’s just coincidentally, the core work that we do, which is open government, and the National Action Plan, of which will be rolled out this May. That will last four years.

Audrey Tang: If you announce something late May, and it lasts four years, that means that it’s exactly the term of the presidential term, because the inauguration is on May 20th.

Audrey Tang: We want to, in the NAP, talk with the multistakeholder, the forum in the civil society, but also in various ministries, to make sure that whatever people care about transparency, participation, accountability, and inclusion is included in the NAP for the four years.

Audrey Tang: That will serve as our shared road map for the government and civil society both going forward to make Taiwan’s democratic institutions even more open and also making sure that we can share it with other jurisdictions in a more systemic, instead of point-by-point, fashion.

Audrey Tang: That’s one priority. I don’t know if Yeh Ning have other priorities, because in our office, everybody have a different priority.

Ning Yeh: Exactly.

Ning Yeh: We’re within that open government values. In countering disinformation, the basic idea of the open government is to rebuild the trust between government and people, or among more peoples.

Audrey Tang: Among social groups, yes.

Ning Yeh: Because for people receiving disinformation, they lose trust between government and people or among people. Maybe the open government or open society is the ultimate solution about disinformation.

Amy Studdart: Absolutely, of course.

Ning Yeh: Yeah, Audrey, you mentioned that, if the government and the other people or other citizens or at least your friends, you will check back with them frequently, they don’t believe the disinformation. Open government, maybe we try to establish a good, sound, and rapid mechanism to let people check the information with each other quickly and correctly.

Audrey Tang: Right, so disinformation in this sense is just a symptom.

Amy Studdart: Yeah. I think one of the challenges with initiatives like this is making sure that they continue after people have left government.

Audrey Tang: That’s Yeh Ning’s job, to write everything as institutionalized regulations.

Amy Studdart: Ah, regulation. One way to do it is to make it law, that you have to publish transcripts and make all of this stuff public. Another way to do it is to build culture and to have a culture of government…

Audrey Tang: They reinforce each other. It’s double hermeneutic.

Amy Studdart: Exactly. Then the other piece is to build expectations among citizens so that, when it’s not happening, they say, “Oh, this is terrible. Why have you messed everything up?” Are you going to be focused on passing regulations that require open government to take place?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and there’s two levels. There’s laws and there’s regulations. Under regulations, there’s best practices. What Yeh Ning have been consistently doing is to look at various of our practices. Some failed very quickly. Some worked OK. Some worked slightly more promising than others. Then we call them better practices.

Audrey Tang: Then we write about it as case studies, as curriculum for internal training for the civil service. We also publish that. The civil society can take that and use that in their high school classes. Actually, a few of our most potent petitions are from people who are 15 or 16 years old.

Audrey Tang: One of them say that’s her civics class assignment. That shows something is working, because the civics class teachers cites our work. That’s written in a high school textbook, actually.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that’s a little bit, we’re feeling honored, but also feeling a lot of responsibility of we’re just figuring those things out. Now, it’s already textbook. [laughs] Then it shows that this culture building is truly cross-sectoral and that the social expectation of something like this – not any particular forms of meetings, but rather a culture of trusting the citizens – is a norm.

Audrey Tang: You can also see this in the presidential debate and campaign. One of the few things that presidential candidates agree is that there need to be more open government, and the threshold for citizen petitions need to be lower or more accessible.

Audrey Tang: That’s even true in the DPP primary. That shows that there is a common expectation that open government is not relying on any particular person, but really need to become part of the culture that defines this transcultural citizens’ republic.

Amy Studdart: You mentioned petitions. Do you mean actual petitions?

Audrey Tang: E-petitions, but yes.

Amy Studdart: I’m sorry, this is a really ignorant question. In Taiwan, do the e-petitions have any legal rights?

Audrey Tang: Regulatory framework, yes.

Amy Studdart: What is it?

Audrey Tang: Anyone who has 5,000 or more e-signatures can demand within 60 days a point-by-point response from the ministry involved. If it is cross-ministerial and/or complex, for whatever definition…

Ning Yeh: There is a                                                       principle                                                   for that. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Right, and/or complex, then it’s complicated. Then there’s already 60 or so cases where PDIS, our office, have stepped in and worked with the participation officers embedded in each ministry.

Audrey Tang: There is participation officer teams in each ministry to work in a cross-ministerial fashion to play the different roles required to hold a proper multistakeholder deliberation. The deliberative nature is empowered by first the POs, or participation officers, in each ministry can work as facilitators, even for cases unrelated to their ministry.

Audrey Tang: Sometime, they perform best in that role, because they speak both the language of ordinary people, because they’re just an ordinary stakeholder in that case. Also, they know public service and how it works.

Audrey Tang: They can work as facilitating bridge. That’s the first thing that we’ve institutionalized. The second is a transparent and accessible platform, join.gov.tw, with 10 million visitors out of 23 million people in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: That gives it a broad legitimacy, that we’re not only privileging a certain selection of people, but rather, the entirety of the population, which you cannot get unless you have broadband as human right. Otherwise, it would taking away civil rights from people.

Audrey Tang: Join is very popular for 15-years-olds, because there’s really no other institutionalized way for them to participate in democracy. That’s the shape of the system that we helped each ministry build and Yeh Ning helped institutionalizing.

Amy Studdart: This inclusion thing, you’ve mentioned the broadband as a civil right thing in a few other meetings that we’ve had. I think it’s so essential. IRI works in a lot of developing democracies, where Internet penetration is really low.

Amy Studdart: One of the ethical conundrums that we come up against is that e-government in general is obviously a good way for governments to leapfrog expensive bureaucratic processes and have more inclusion. When there’s only a small proportion of the population online, it’s also completely non-inclusive.

Audrey Tang: Precisely.

Amy Studdart: It has to be a base level. Following on from that, you mentioned that you also want to be taking this out to other places and doing the ambassadorial role that you’ve done so well talking about this.

Amy Studdart: I think, for the mission of my program, is really focused on this positive story about the future of democracy. Yes, we have to fight disinformation. Yes, we have to protect against cyber attacks against democracies, but democracy is not going to win if we say the 1980s, 1990s version of democracy is what we’ve got.

Amy Studdart: China’s presenting this high-tech version of authoritarianism that looks like it can…

Audrey Tang: We need a high-tech version of democracy.

Amy Studdart: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: Democracy is a technology.

Amy Studdart: Exactly. We need to be more transparent, and we need to be using these tools to facilitate inclusion, deliberation, and so on, and so forth. I’d love to hear more about your plans about how you’re going to do that. Do we need to wrap up?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We’ve already worked out a workshop structure that we’ve very successfully transferred to the foreign service in the sense that our foreign service consulates and embassies are, first, they’re all aware of the work we’re doing, because Minister Joseph Wu made sure that they learned about what we’re doing.

Amy Studdart: He seems like a great ally for you.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, very much so. He’s the first foreign minister that opens a Twitter account.

Amy Studdart: His Twitter is spicy. It’s great.

Audrey Tang: For a while, whenever he tweets a print press somewhere in the US features his tweet on the papers. That’s like presidential level Twitter visibility. The point here is that Joseph already made sure that the consulates and embassies learns about the work that we do.

Audrey Tang: Of course, in the frame of SDG 16, which is open government. Then we’ve worked with, for example, in Thailand Chulalongkorn University, the Communication and Media Department to bring Cofacts, to bring the Open Data Alliance, to bring the company that built the open data platform for public transportation exchange.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the participation officers from two ministries, and the list goes on, to Chulalongkorn University to work with their multistakeholder communities to talk about our very holistic view of building trust.

Audrey Tang: That worked really well. Because it’s within the framework of SDG 16, and that we’re open to any students from any jurisdictions, there’s no diplomatic pushback from other jurisdictions. That’s the Chulalongkorn model.

Audrey Tang: In Japan, we worked with Haruseki-san of the Code for Japan community, which is part of Code for All. The Taiwan delegation is from g0v, which is, again, part of Code for All. In the Code for All exchange program, we’re just piggybacking on the civil society workshops.

Amy Studdart: Is this separate from the Facing the Ocean?

Audrey Tang: This is before Facing the Ocean. The connection was built there, and then it continued to the Okinawa, and then continued to Tainan. Our Japan ambassador, Frank Hsieh, to Japan knows about this thing and approves of this model.

Audrey Tang: This is really good, because they, in the Japanese cabinet office, there is also people who are working on digital transformation. They also have dual role. They have a day job as an officer, but in their copious spare time they also participate in Code for Japan.

Audrey Tang: For me to meet them there is very natural and not bilateral at all. Then we also work with Toronto, with the New York City, with actually many jurisdictions on very similar models. Each time, partnering both with our embassy or consulate, but purely as just blessing this to happen, and not at all having a MoFA seal on the event.

Audrey Tang: Then a local partner that’s either a media, a university, or a civic tech community. Then we always build this as an open to everyone workshop to learn about the art of building trust and facilitating trust. We’ve been working with at least 10 or so embassies and consulates about this already. We look to expand this more.

Amy Studdart: This is fantastic. I think one of the things that I struggle with when I design programs is I always want to build Taiwan into it, but I feel like we’re also starting to overburden your team a little bit.