Gesbeen Mohammad: …what I say.

Audrey Tang: Sure. We usually make a transcript of our conversation.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Oh, you do.

Audrey Tang: If you are not comfortable with any part of it being published, just remove them. Then I will publish the kosher part to the Internet, if that’s OK with you.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Of course. That’s absolutely fine. This is more like a background interviewer. It’s just more to get a sense of whether we might be able to do some filming with you.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Basically, as I explained in my email, we’re making a 90-minute film. That’s the reason why we came to Taiwan, actually.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Yeah, exactly. He read those screenshots of this WeChat chat group and then that way informed the World Health Organization. Also, Taiwan started screening incoming flights.

Gesbeen Mohammad: I just wondered if we look at it from that timeline, whether there was anything from your part that you were doing that was shaping things or information you were receiving at the time that might have shaped things either in Taiwan or whether you had information that informed you of the situation.

Audrey Tang: At the time, as you understand, it’s also leading to our presidential election. Most of my work at the time, although I did tell, I think, foreign journalists in Denmark who visited to watch the election that we’re having something like SARS 2.0…I think I said that on January 9th or something.

Audrey Tang: I’m vaguely aware of something going on, but I was not part of the response team nor part of the CECC because my focus at this time was on countering not the pandemic but the infodemic, [laughs] the disinformation leading to the election.

Audrey Tang: I only really got involved around end of January, when the civic technologist begin to code up the mask availability map. Then we very quickly enlisted the help of the National Health Insurance Administration and start rationing all the mask. That’s like the 6th of February.

Audrey Tang: After that, of course, I’m participating in the weekly meeting around the mask distribution and so on. I become more involved then because of the technological measures that can help automate away a lot of the work from the pharmacists, from the local hospital managers, and so on.

Audrey Tang: My story, I think it doesn’t quite contribute to the timeline that you describe. The part of the timeline that was last December and early January, I was more like a adviser to the general communication strategy, humor over rumor and so on, but not specifically on the pandemic.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Was there a lot of rumors or misinformation…

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Gesbeen Mohammad: …seeping into Taiwan about the coronavirus through China? Is that something you’ve had to combat at all?

Audrey Tang: If you check the Taiwan FactCheck Center, there’s quite a few disinformation of that kind. Of course, I would encourage you to maybe interview people in the Taiwan FactCheck Center, or the Doublethink Lab and so on, who have been working with International Fact-Checking Network, specifically the disinformation playbook and so on.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, I’m more like a facilitating ambassadorial role to make sure that the social sector and the business sector talk on the same terms. Once they achieve mutual trust, I try to stay out of the specific cases. They will have far more understanding of the specific cases or the specific rumors than I do.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Of course. There’s been a lot of reasons why Taiwan has been successful in its response to the coronavirus. From your area you work around, the digital area, what are visually the most…If we were to film something to say this is why Taiwan was successful, what would you recommend in terms of your campaigns?

Audrey Tang: Of course, the humor over rumor is very successful. The not really person, the dog to interview would be Zongchai, the spokesdog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. [laughs] We of course work with all the different ministries, but the participation officer, the officer that is in charge of engaging with the general public over the Internet on hashtags and so on, lives with that dog. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Whenever there’s a CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center, press conference, that introduce, for example, physical distancing and so on, they can just walk back to their home, which is quite close to the ministry, take new photos of the dog putting their hands to the mouth or something and then share that as a very trendy, viral meme.

Audrey Tang: Maybe the participation officer of the MOHW and the dog would be a good interview subject. Also, of course, there’s always the mask availability map, which is very visual. The people who did this, Finjon Kiang and Howard Wu, are in the Tainan City.

Audrey Tang: A single trip to the Tainan City would enable you to interview pretty much all the civic technologists that did this technology and who worked quite closely without actually having met once face to face or even video conferencing. We just type it online.

Audrey Tang: They don’t have to make a trip to Taipei to convince people because I’m kind of the bridge that connects them to the premiere. Howard Wu and his space of also the Google developer group that collectively did the first version of the map is actually quite visual and is a great story to tell.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Sorry, just going back. You’ve talked quite a lot about authoritarian systems and democracy.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Gesbeen Mohammad: How are the ways that Taiwan’s response was very open from the get-go? How has that, in your view, impacted how things have played out here?

Audrey Tang: We fought the pandemic with no lockdown and the infodemic with no takedown. The reason why is that, of course, we remember how bad it was in SARS in 2003, where we had to lock down the entire hospital. The constitutional court find it barely constitutional and charge the legislature to improve it so that we don’t have to go to lockdown again.

Audrey Tang: Similarly, people who are over 40 years old remember the martial law and the administrative takedowns of censorship and so on. Nobody want to go back there, even if faced with the disinformation crisis.

Audrey Tang: I think a lot of it is about seeing past this false dilemma of human right and democracy on one side and public health or public safety on the other. Too many liberal democracies are now faced with this false choice, like you have to sacrifice one or the other.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we firmly believe that we can learn from the lessons from the martial and also from the SARS epidemic, that we can devise a set of measures that radically trust the citizens so that citizens understand the science behind it and can innovate, through social innovation, social scripts that people, for example, wear a mask to protect oneself from one’s own unwashed hands.

Audrey Tang: That connects the mask use to the soap use and so on. That together, in a non-disruptive way, reduced R value to under one, in which case, the virus will not spread or the rumor will not spread. I think it is really a societal mobilization. It is hinging the idea of the government trusting the citizens.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Versus that, then there’s dictatorships. Authoritarian systems are generally bad for public health because of the secrecy, like we saw in Wuhan with the initial human-to-human transmission.

Audrey Tang: If there is freedom of journalism and freedom of the press, then Dr. Li Wenliang would save more people. He literally saved Taiwanese, but he could have saved more people.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Of course. Exactly. That’s great. I know you’re very busy. I don’t want to take up more of your time. I’ll get back to you if we want to film anything in that arena. That’s great. Thank you so much for making the time to speak.

Audrey Tang: We’ll make a transcript. I will not publish this video.

Gesbeen Mohammad: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Please feel free to edit it. We can also embargo until you are more comfortable releasing it. Just let me know.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Great. I’ll let you know. Thank you so much for your time.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Gesbeen Mohammad: Take care.

Audrey Tang: Bye.