Audrey Tang: We’ll attribute “Audience Member” to all your questions. Is that OK with you?

Jonas Parello-Plesner: It’s completely fine with me, and happy in whatever form. Also for it to be live streamed, but I don’t know with…

Audrey Tang: We’ll have to check with everybody here for that.

Audience Member: That’s fine, but could we get it before 10 days, if we want to write something?

Audrey Tang: Of course, you get the transcript, and feel free to write about it. If you make, for example, journalistic output and so on, we can also embargo the release after you release, within a reasonable timeframe, of course.

Audience Member: That’s fine.

Audrey Tang: Cool. Let’s get started.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Yeah. Thanks for seeing us, Minister. We are here. My name is Jonas Parello-Plesner. I head something called the Alliance for Democracy Foundation in Copenhagen that was founded by the former NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish Prime Minister, which works to strengthen cooperation among democracies.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: We have a strong focus also on election interference following the 2016 election in the US. It’s been a lot on Russia but there are definitely other actors that are good at disinformation and election interference as well.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: One of my main reasons for coming to Taiwan is actually for the elections, bolster support for your democracy but then also to discuss what you see of disinformation and what has been the countermeasures also in strengthening resilience, which is something would be very interesting to hear your point of view on.

Jonas Parello-Plesner: Also, because it seems to be a big part of your mission of digital democracy of strengthening people’s participation in that way. That would be one thing, and then I’ll let the rest of the delegation also present themselves.

Flemming Rose: I’m a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC, where I work on free speech issues and right now on a project involving digital platforms and content moderation.

Flemming Rose: I’m a former journalist and newspaper editor and expert on Russia somewhat. I am also interested in regulation of social media platforms and if you have been looking into the European experience. Are you inspired? Are you concerned? What are your own intentions and your evaluation of your own infiltration law?

Audrey Tang: The law and regulation part of it?

Audience Member: Yes.

Audrey Tang: OK. Sure.

Jacob Mchangama: Hi. My name is Jacob Mchangama. I am the founder and director of a think tank, legal think tank, focusing on human rights and rule of law issues with a specific focus on free expression. Written a lot on the German initiative to target illegal online content.

Audrey Tang: On NetzDG?

Audience Member: We did a report, foreign policy last month where we look at all the countries that we could identify globally that have copied, more or less copied, the German initiative, which includes Russia, Singapore, and countries like that.

Audrey Tang: Learned from; inspired from.

Audience Member: 9 out of these 13 mentioned NetzDG explicitly. Then obviously they used them for different purposes, broader purposes. It’s always good to be able to point to Germany and say…

Audience Member: If they can do it.

Audience Member: …”if Merkel can do it, why can’t we.”

Audrey Tang: NetzDG-inspired?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: 9 jurisdictions out of 13. That’s a very interesting starting point. Thank you.

Camilla Sørensen: My name is Camilla Sørensen. I’m an associated professor at the Royal Danish Defense College, working, researching, and teaching on East Asian security with a focus on China, and also in the last five, six years, more and more on the Arctic where we in Denmark confront China more. That’s a great problem.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. Anything you would like us to talk about?

Audience Member: More or less some of the same topics.

Audrey Tang: More or less the same topics. OK.

Audience Member: Of course, my focus is more on the what we call traditional security, the geopolitics of it, but of course these things place into it as well, especially and when you talk cross-strait relations.

Audience Member: The specific project that I work on as part of so with this delegation is more on how the worsening relationship between the US, China are debated and playing into domestic politics in Taiwan, and of course specifically this election coming up, so how the whole US-China great power competition, rivalry is playing into that.

Audrey Tang: How that affects the middle power here?

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Middle-ish, I guess.

Lukas Lausen: Hello, my name’s Lukas Lausen. I currently work as a political advisor in the Danish industry. Before that, I worked in the European Parliament as a political advisor on foreign policy, amongst other things, to a member of the Parliament who’s now the foreign minister of Denmark.

Lukas Lausen: I’m also the chairman of the Danish Foreign Policy Society, under 35. In terms of issues that I’d love to discuss, most of it has been mentioned. Generally, what interests me is the foreign interference, in general, that you’re expecting or have been working with during the election and experiencing over especially the last few years.

Audrey Tang: Let me just, in very broad brushes, give you some thoughts about my current role in the administration, wearing my digital minister hat. [laughs] Then I have some personal observations that is less related to my role. You visited the g0v movement, and they keep transcripts, as we do. I already read your exchange. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: There’s several points that I would like to make, knowing that you already understood the civil society, social innovator’s point of view. The first thing here is let’s start with this NetzDG. Indeed, NetzDG has shaped the policy discussion around the world, and Taiwan is no exception.

Audrey Tang: Back when I became digital minister, we specifically looked at the issue of online content moderation. At that time, it was early 2017, and then I brought this three point in the cabinet meeting back then that it needs our rapid response.

Audrey Tang: It need to be open, meaning that we must allow remixes and memetic engineering based on our content, so open in the sense of open communication, but also as in open license. We must be swift, as in responding within two hours whenever there is a piece of disinformation.

Audrey Tang: It need to be structured, structured meaning that we need to communicate in a very methodological fashion, targeting the media that are mostly live-streamed on the phone, media that is mostly visual on the tablet or a computer, media that is more traditional and that needs a full story and things like that.

Audrey Tang: That is to say, we need to be responding in a multimodal way so that wherever the disinformation took in its modality, we meet them there with the same modality. That was the principles.

Audrey Tang: Then NetzDG appeared, and then people started turning the conversation on, “How much should we place the governor, the new governor of the Internet, which is Facebook and friends, into a co-governing position?”

Audrey Tang: “How much accountability, how much transparency, how much duty of regulation can we put on their side?” which is, I think, the main idea of NetzDG, which many jurisdictions, although they cited NetzDG, they didn’t quite take that co-governor role.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t name names, but it seems like a certain jurisdiction took the role of traditional censorship, which is like a minister’s words can force a journalist change their title or something like that. Which is, again, not treating the new social media as co-governors, but rather is a more “cyber-sovereignty, vertical point of view.”

Audrey Tang: That is less interesting in Taiwan because everybody know it’s impossible. [laughs] Taiwan is, as a matter of fact, the only country in Asia and one of the only two in Asia-Pacific that’s rated by the CIVICUS Monitor as fully open, meaning that a journalist’s word is always as good as a minister’s.

Audrey Tang: There is no encroachment of freedom of speech, assembly, press, and so on. Because that’s defining characteristics of Taiwanese democracy, it’s inconceivable for us to choose the short-cut, so to speak, which is more censorship and more power in the administration.

Audience Member: Who makes this monitor again?

Audrey Tang: CIVICUS Monitor. It’s a continuous tracked…

Audience Member: You’re also free on Freedom House’s freedom of the press and freedom…

Audrey Tang: Exactly, so all these.

Audience Member: It’s an aggregate of all these?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Whenever any NGO reports any violations, like the latest updates here, the jurisdictions, in turn, will be down-ranked. It’s like the credit rating thing. As you can see, our closest fully-open jurisdiction is probably New Zealand, which is quite far away actually. All the way to Africa, there really is no other jurisdiction that is fully open.

Audrey Tang: This is a testimony to the character of Taiwanese democracy. Also, it shows that we can share the playbooks with the other countries that are committing to similar values. That’s very broad pictures, but it shows that our innovations, therefore, concentrated on the idea, as I said, of timely response.

Audrey Tang: This is the structure that I just mentioned. Within two hours, 200 characters or less, and at least two different modalities, like one picture and short film, one picture and one short text, or two pictures, and things like that. That is the kind of clarifications that we systemically roll out, basically making sure that the clarifications go viral before the disinformation packages.

Audience Member: Fun.

Audrey Tang: That’s a typical example. You’ll laugh about it… [laughs]

Audrey Tang: …and especially this part where our prime minister is showing his photo as he looks now, saying, “Perming your hair multiple time within a week will not damage your pocket, but it will damage your hair. We’re serious, you may look like me.”

Audrey Tang: It’s good humor. He makes fun of himself, not other people, and it really is funny. If you laughed about it, there is no way for the disinformation package to mobilize your anger into outrage because these are two mutually exclusive pathways in the mind.

Audience Member: You rename yourself sometimes as minister of memes?

Audrey Tang: Uh-huh.

Audrey Tang: Right, my motto is Optimizing for Fun.

Audrey Tang: I wasn’t planning to share this, but since you asked…

Audrey Tang: There’s only one political party that I associate myself with, and that political party is known as, literally, the 歡樂無法黨, or “Can’t Stop This Party.””

Audrey Tang: Literally, the unstoppable happy party. When they formed their party, I send them a basket of catnips, which is, I think, a very good floral message. The point here is that this really is the only way, after trying a myriad of ways, to effectively make sure that people are inoculating themselves against manufactured outrage.

Audrey Tang: That is like a cat after smelling catnip. After a while of having fun, they come down and start [laughs] being able to participate in the democratic process in a more rational fashion.

Audrey Tang: That is the core of my sharing in the 2017, but actual implementation wasn’t by me. It was by our two consecutive spokespersons, Hsu Kuo-yung and now Kolas Yotaka. Now on average, they can respond within an hour, which is quite a feat.

Audience Member: Does that mean you have plans to go down the NetzDG road is shelved, that’s not seen as a viable alternative? You see this as a better alternative, which is more efficient and more in line with your democratic and open values?

Audrey Tang: Basically, the idea is that we told multinational companies that this is our plan. This is our preferred approach but this assumes a few things. First, it assumes that they can help build a collaborative checking ecosystem.

Audrey Tang: Much as what they have done and I personally have done during the spam wars about 20 years ago, where people voluntarily donate their junk mails into a spam house and sharing the fingerprints of spammers into the mail provider’s, so that whenever the spammers try to send another email, it lands to your junk mailbox instead of your inbox.

Audrey Tang: That did not take a law. There is no law about spamming in Taiwan. It took a collaboration between five different stakeholder groups all agreeing to work together. Our core idea to the local social media companies is that this is by far what we prefer.

Audrey Tang: We highly prefer if you can work with the social sector with Cofacts, which you learned about with the International Fact-Checking Network, like the Taiwan FactCheck Center, and work with essentially empowering institutional media and the social sector.

Audience Member: Who runs the Fact Check Center? Is that also an NGO or is it government?

Audrey Tang: It’s an NGO. It’s a foundation and it only accepts small-scale donations, below NT$1 million, like crowdfunded. It doesn’t accept any political or party or administrative donations. They are equally attacked by blue and green supporters, which means they are pretty neutral.

Audrey Tang: The TFCC is a key piece of the ecosystem. We used to say that we may be forced to adopt something like NetzDG if an ecosystem cannot thrive, if somehow the global media companies, Facebook and friends, refuse to participate meaningfully in the multi-stakeholder social norm here.

Audrey Tang: This multi-stakeholder social norm is what Taiwan did for spam. It’s what we did for online teen and children exploitation and so on and so forth. Like almost every Internet governance issue relating to content, we choose the arm’s length multi-stakeholder model instead of the more top down model and so this is no difference.

Audrey Tang: One very quick example before the next round – we say that we have the norm, for example, that all political campaign donations and spendings are published in raw data form, analyzable by machines, by a separate branch of government called the Control Yuan.

Audrey Tang: This is the norm here, so that the investigative journalist can look at the previous election’s campaign donation results and find out which one’s donations did not actually go through campaign donation but rather they would go directly to social media advertisement, for example, and then on towards data.

Audrey Tang: We then say to the different social media companies, at least of five, that has signed on the norm package sign, “This is the norm here. You either treat the political advertisements as campaign donation, meaning you published a raw data and keep it for after date election for independent analysis, or you ban them altogether.”

Audrey Tang: There really is no law enforcing this but a risk of social sanction. Basically, make sure that all the global multimedia companies, social media companies, either declared that they are conforming to the Control Yuan standard, which is what Facebook did this time, or releasing its open data or they stop running political advertisements altogether during election now, which is what Google and Twitter did.

Audience Member: You found that social sanctions…

Audrey Tang: Social sanctions, yes.

Audience Member: …like the people would react to…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, to it in an adverse fashion.

Audience Member: Do you experience that people do that?

Audrey Tang: Of course. If people accept that this is the norm that…because our political campaign expense filing, although it’s released by the Control Yuan, the Control Yuan currently cannot fine people or put people in prison if they underreport or overreport.

Audrey Tang: Comparing across the board, you can easily see what looks like an underreport or overreport or whatever by individual campaign supporters. That is actually part of the basis of social sanction. This is, for example, if you look at g0v-launched vote.ly.g0v.tw website, that is what they show very quickly and here I choose some random – well not so random – legislator candidates. Then…

Audience Member: That’s Freddy Lim?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Then you can see what their campaign expense, according to the Facebook transparency effort, is and which target they’re targeting and what effect it’s having. If it’s trying to do hyper-precision targeting to discourage people from voting or whatever, this will show up immediately and there will be social sanction if anyone do that.

Audience Member: Does it say Freddy Lim is a good musician or not?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

Audience Member: Isn’t he also a playing…He’s also a band player, isn’t he?

Audrey Tang: Yes. I don’t see anything political ad saying that, though…

Audience Member: It’s a joke.

Audrey Tang: OK. The CEC, the Central Election Committee, also shared in this time the campaign platform is multimedia. At least, it’s graphic. You see QR code, you see layout, and so on. Again, this is released as public information for like the g0v project to show.

Audience Member: Just here to make sure a complete understanding, who does what in this, the g0v…

Audrey Tang: This g0v project, 選前大補帖.

Audience Member: G0v, they compile it…

Audrey Tang: They compile it.

Audience Member: …but Facebook as delivered the how many…

Audrey Tang: The raw data, as structured open data.

Audience Member: That’s very new, right? The ad library is only half a year old or something.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and that’s the norm here from the Control Yuan. We’re like, “You have to either build a ad library or conforming to the Control Yuan standard.” The rest of it, like the previous campaign finance and so on, like these bar charts, are from the Control Yuan.

Audrey Tang: What we’re saying is that they have to release the raw data, structured data, to at least the same grain detail as the Control Yuan so that the investigative journalists and civic tech people can make sense of the ad library and incorporate them into these kind of websites.

Audience Member: How new is that? Did Facebook do this for 2018, for the local election?

Audrey Tang: They just started doing this for the presidential election.

Audience Member: This is the first election?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Control Yuan started doing this in raw data form for the previous, for the mayoral election. These two, taken together, at least mean that the multi-stakeholder groups don’t have to apply for a license from Facebook or whatever to get access to this data.

Audrey Tang: But instead, can look at the data together to make sure that whenever people detect that there may be a hyper-targeted discourage to vote, like black operation, there will be subsequent social sanctions in no time.

Audience Member: What do you mean by social sanctions?

Audrey Tang: People calling that out, and people refusing to support either the companies involved, like the advertisement companies involved, or the candidate themself even.

Audience Member: Don’t you think that would be possible to do with disinformation as well, to put emphasis on social sanctions and not on law and legal sanctions, speaking about NetzDG?

Audrey Tang: That’s what I meant. I mean that if there is a good norm that, across the sectors, people largely understand and agree, such as the definition of disinformation, that’s the first key piece of getting the norm out. This is the widely agree definition.

Audrey Tang: Then we don’t need to have a special anti-disinformation act. Rather, people recognize existing acts as related to disinformation, and the people who are working on those counter-disinformation issues know what they’re countering.

Audrey Tang: These are the bedrock of building a multi-stakeholder system that obviates most of the need to have a NetzDG. We also say, if this fail to build, then we have no other options but pass something like an NetzDG.

Audience Member: Don’t you think that another governments have reacted too quickly? That I agree with your line of reasoning that you have to establish norms, and we are only in the beginning of establishing norms here.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Audience Member: People to seem to panic, and they want to enforce new laws very quickly without acknowledging that it takes time to establish new norms. They do it the other way around, where there are a lot of unintended consequences.

Audience Member: The other thing is scale. Do you really think it’s possible, with an NetzDG, to moderate content on scale without exercising real censorship, because you will have to take down by AI so much without considering the context?

Audrey Tang: You mean in the German jurisdiction or in Taiwan?

Audience Member: In Germany.

Audrey Tang: Well that’s two questions. The first one is that, whenever people frame it as something zero-sum, then people easily panic, because one day, without a new act, is one day gained by the disinformation peddlers or whatever.

Audrey Tang: This is not just around disinformation. This is literally in every emerging technology. You have people thinking that we need a law to protect the economic interest, while people will say, “Oh, we need to protect the environment interest before the economic interest.”

Audrey Tang: Also, about technological innovation versus social justice, and so on. Whenever people fall into that line of thinking, of course, there is a lot of what I call manufactured panic, meaning that, because they worry that if they don’t get their side of the act passed, the opposing value will pass something.

Audrey Tang: Then there will be no chance for them to win their part of the value. Our way of policymaking is always based on the idea that there need to be a norm first, which is what I refer to co-gov or collaborative governance.

Audrey Tang: This is my real office, by the way. This is the Social Innovation Lab. If we have a norm, and then from the norm, interact with the market, then that obviates the need for a law to take priority or precedence.

Audrey Tang: Instead, the law can work with the architecture, or I’ll just write code. This is, of course, the Lessig diamond. Basically, whenever we see this shape, then that means that we can tell people that the law is following the emerging norm by exactly, for example, one year or two year.

Audrey Tang: This is not like the law playing catch-up, where in a…Since we’re talking about a German superhighway, where there is no speed limit, and the leading car, which is the emerging social norm, may take any speed, but the car called law is just following from a safe distance, but exactly the same speed.

Audrey Tang: People understand that, with due time, when the norm and market interaction form a coherent package, we will be able to then take the code and legalize the relevant part of it.

Audrey Tang: People won’t then, when we say that, “I will just need a sandbox experiment,” or if we say, “This need a multi-stakeholder consultation process,” or so on, people will know that there will be a law pertaining to it exactly a year after or something like that.

Audience Member: Do you already do that?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I already do that, yes.

Audience Member: What are your experiences with that? Does that work?

Audrey Tang: Yes, it works quite well, reliably.

Audience Member: That’s because you give a signal to the market that, if the market doesn’t react on a norm that you want to form, then a law will take the place of the norm?

Audrey Tang: Correct. That’s the signal we gave to Uber, for example.

Audience Member: You’re threatening them into behaving…

Audrey Tang: Not really threatening them, just sharing the observation that the social sector has higher legitimacy than public sector and private sector combined. If they don’t conform to the social sector’s norm, the public sector cannot help them, but they will have to face social sanction.

Audience Member: How did Uber adapt their model here?

Audrey Tang: Right, back in 2015, there was an AI-moderated conversation using the Polis system, asking people to share what they feel about a specific case, like someone driving to work without professional driver’s license, but stopping to pick up a stranger from the street that they met from the app, take them on a detour, charging them for it, and continuing to go to work.

Audrey Tang: That is like we’re not deliberating about platform economy or sharing economy. We’re talking about this specific behavior and ask what people feel. It turns out that people’s friend and family feel different ways, because they didn’t talk about that over dinner, I’m sure.

Audrey Tang: They are still friends and families, and they basically respond to the same factual information and a set of five consensus was made. One of it is the passenger liability insurance. The point here is that you see your avatar.

Audrey Tang: You can agree or disagree on your fellow citizens’ sentiment, and once you do, you move toward the people who feel like you. The next statement appears, and then you vote another time. After a while, you’ll be prompted, saying, “Are there anything that you feel you would like to share with other people?”

Audrey Tang: Then you raise it for the other people to share. We always see this picture after three weeks of running a conversation, which is the ideological points. People agree to disagree on these, but actually, people agree with most of their neighbors most of the time on most of the issues. Surprise.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we then took these and bound ourself to use only these as the agenda for our multistakeholder conversation. Then Uber agreed to work only with a driver with professional license.

Audrey Tang: They agree with the insurance, agree without the registration, then basically empowering existing taxi fleets to develop Uber-like, like search pricing or whatever, pricing mechanisms. Uber must always work with what we call a multipurpose taxi driver.

Audrey Tang: Now, if you use Uber in Taiwan, you always find a legal taxi driver, but then the legal taxi driver has been far expanded. They no longer drive the yellow cars because they’re not hailing on the street and so on. That is basically something nobody can say, “I’m perfectly fine with it,” but everybody say, “I can live with it.” That is the idea of rough consensus.

Audience Member: That idea of driving a government like this, has that been part of the government here for a long time, or is that something you came in with?

Audrey Tang: Since 2015, yeah.

Audience Member: How are more traditional politicians reacting to these ideas?

Audrey Tang: It’s less risk, more credit, also less work.

Audience Member: It’s a version of digital democracy. You’re also, at the same time, a representative democracy. It looks like a good combination. It’s not referendum, but it’s public discussion. How to make them work together? This is also what should be what you discuss now…

Audrey Tang: This is just crowd-sourced agenda-setting or CrowdLaw. This is not taking over the representative role. Obviously, if you look at the representation as about the development and the delivery of services, in this case, public rules, our methodology is working instead on the discover and define stages, which is often done in a ad hoc fashion.

Audrey Tang: What we’re trying to do here is just to open up the agenda-setting power here through petition, sandbox, and so on, emphasizing the idea of building a “how might we?” question, which is about common value just by different positions.

Audrey Tang: For the representatives who always anyway start working around this stage, it’s literally just less risk, less work, and more credit because they know that they’re responding to a common agenda. Of course, they still have the entire freedom of how to develop and deliver such multi-purpose taxi regulations or whatever.

Audrey Tang: We know that people are involved in the discover-and-define process, which is the first diamond. That’s our relationship to representative democracy.

Audience Member: If that’s the way the political process is moving, why then do we still need elected representatives?

Audrey Tang: Because there need to be someone, or some team at least, that maintains the conceptual integrity of the entire legal system.

Audience Member: But they could be corrupt.

Audrey Tang: Well this discover-and-define is based on the idea “nothing about us without us.” Anybody who’s potentially affected need to have a voice into the common definition of the important values to keep. How to implement those norms is a professional matter.

Audrey Tang: If they are corrupt, then people can very easily see that they’re corrupt. Whereas before, because of principal-agent problem, there really is no way for us to see the common value of the principles. Then the agent has a lot of leeway.

Audrey Tang: This way, the representatives can, of course, still offer a lot of creativity on how to develop or prototype it better, but they have to answer to a very clearly delineated “how might we?” question or “I might we?” statement.

Audrey Tang: This is the same in Internet governance. The “how might we?” are the RFCs. Then the implementers, of course, are commercial entities. They are sometimes corrupt, I guess, but if they don’t conform to the Internet standards, everybody discover in no time.

Audience Member: You come from the g0v community. How do you feel since you moved to politics? How receptive are people, the classical political class, to this? Do they find this is the way to go?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely.

Audience Member: No resistance?

Audrey Tang: No, we are the resistance.

Audrey Tang: I mean, against authoritarianism and digital dictatorship.

Audience Member: If you read the transcript of our conversation yesterday with your friends, we asked, “How do you estimate the threat from disinformation to Taiwan?” A young man said, “11 on a scale…

Audrey Tang: That’s @chihaoyo.

Audience Member: …out of 10.”

Audrey Tang: Up to eleven.

Audience Member: Would you agree with that assessment? What is your analysis and take on this?

Audrey Tang: I really don’t know whether he said it in a tongue-in-cheek fashion, or is he dead serious.

Audrey Tang: Chihao is an artist, you see. I don’t really know [laughs] how much of it is art. Anyway…

Audience Member: That’s a good question. What is the content forum?

Audrey Tang: Right. I won’t comment on this “11” part.

Audrey Tang: However I agree on his next point, which sounds more like design and less art. Basically, yes, I do agree that the sovereignty, the idea of sovereignty, is very fragile in Taiwan. This is true, and this is also why I can get away saying I’m a conservative anarchist. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: The traditional idea of Westphalian sovereignty in Taiwan, I really don’t think that people are so firmly entrenched in that idea, for various reasons. In any case, that means then that it’s very easy to have a worldview and get a faction of the population accepting that particular worldview, no matter how different that worldview is from the rest of the world’s understanding.

Audrey Tang: That also means more cultural diversity. That means that everybody need to learn in a transcultural way, that when people bring about the idea of Taiwan, 10 people have 11 different associations of what that means.

Audrey Tang: Transculturality is a norm in Taiwan. Everybody can agree that nobody agrees on what Taiwan means. That, again, is how we become…I think it’s a little bit like Switzerland, where the only thing we can agree is the democratic process, and not which football team to support.

Audrey Tang: That, I think, is true here. It made disinformation easier to get through to a faction of people, but on the other hand, just like genetic biodiversity, it also makes it hard for disinformation to overtake a majority of population. This long tail is everything.

Audience Member: Yes, and in that way, it implies resilience, because it’s far more difficult when you have this real diversity.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. That’s what I call it a transcultural republic of citizens.

Audience Member: How much do you have in the schooling system as well all of this? Fact check, g0v, and all these things, and your role as minister, that’s only a little bit for the adults that are already on part of…How much for…

Audrey Tang: It’s part of our curriculum, which I contributed before entering the cabinet.

Audience Member: Have you changed digital education, digital literacy of…?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Just last year, we started a new curriculum of the basic education. It emphasized the idea of media competency, instead of just literacy. Media literacy often has the connotation the people are readers, viewers, or consumers, which, very bad word, when it comes to media.

Audrey Tang: In any case, like passive recipients of messages. In Taiwan, because broadband is a human right, and as high as the Yu Shan Mountain, 4,000 meters, you have 10 megabits per second bidirectionality at €15 by month. If you don’t, it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, people, everybody is a media. It’s not that they’re asymmetric recipients. Anybody can literally start a live stream from the Jade Mountain any time, and at no extra cost, no marginal cost to their wallet.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, we emphasize on the competence of being a media, so teaching media competence. As part of ICP competence, is starting from the first grade in the primary school. If you would like to know what kind of primary school curriculums are being designed, this is the full list at mlearn.moe.gov.tw.

Audrey Tang: All this is open content in terms of Creative Commons license. It allows easy remixing to different cultural backgrounds and to different age groups as well.

Audrey Tang: We take this very seriously, because we believe only when the children learn that they are data producers, they are media producers, that they are producers, can try truly understand what framing effect or whatever other effects are, and be journalistically a contributor to collaborative fact-checking? Which I think is the real way to counter disinformation.

Audience Member: You mentioned that you prefer these alternative, more progressive measures, but we’ve discussed legal measures, and as I understand it, there are certain laws that entail potentially criminal sanctions if you spread disinformation on particular topics. I think agriculture.

Audrey Tang: That was already the case, like many years ago.

Audience Member: OK.

Audrey Tang: All we did is, if the law said “radio, television or newspaper,” we’d update it to add digital media, like the law was made when there’s no comprehensive understanding of what disinformation is.

Audrey Tang: Like there are texts that reflect the age that they were made, and so we took a systemic analysis that’s done by the horizontal minister, Lo Ping-chen, and we updated our existing acts that already has disinformation components, to have the same fines and penalties when it comes to social media and digital distribution. That’s all we did. We didn’t make a new act.

Audience Member: Still, I mean, it still would affect because, I mean, if everyone has broadband access, then as you said, everyone becomes a media broadcaster, whereas few citizens would have access to write something in newspapers or go on TV. Has that resulted in a steep increase of people who are being prosecuted? What does it take to be…?

Audience Member: What if I read something on a Chinese website which says something outrageous about Taiwan, but, you know, I may not know whether it’s true or not, but I share it on social media. Am I then liable to prosecution? What does it take?

Audrey Tang: Right. In terms of, for example, I think SARS is a really good example, and especially because something like that is happening, like, right now... During SARS, I think people generally understand that it really is not a good idea to repeat rumors, when it pertains to transferable diseases that basically can cause panic in a very rapid fashion.

Audrey Tang: The SARS clause, the epidemic disinformation clause, along with the one around election interference, that are like the two more prominent in people’s minds. I would say it is the social norm to say that just as you cannot scream very loudly in a market about, like, “SARS is coming and people who stay here will be infected.”

Audrey Tang: If you do the same on social media and reach, roughly speaking, the same number of people as you would on a market, then people generally agree that this is really a bad idea. Really, if you do this and get prosecuted, and this and do not get prosecuted, there is something wrong with that act.

Audrey Tang: That is a factual response to your question. Then, I think all of this needs to be negotiated in a dialectic fashion with the court because of these acts, the administration makes no judgment at the end. It’s the court system.

Audrey Tang: The judges may have different clarifications when it comes to what constitutes as dissemination to the public. If I share to a group, a closed group with 5,000 people, is that dissemination? Things like that. That will be discovered by the court proceedings.

Audience Member: What’s the practice so far? Like, has there been a lot of cases of…?

Audrey Tang: There’s been quite a few cases, yes.

Audience Member: Yeah, because I mean, even if someone screams at the market that there’s an outbreak of something…

Audrey Tang: Like a coronavirus.

Audience Member: …If I then hear it and I panic, and I say, “SARS!” in the market, even though I don’t necessarily know it’s true, but I also don’t know that it’s not, I mean.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Basically, that’s the intentional part of it. Like, you need to scream it and of course, the prosecutors need to prove that. You need to scream it with the intention of causing harm to public.

Audience Member: Yeah, you mean that I know positively that it’s not true. In other words, if I’m someone who spreads a rumor that is liable to affect your election then, and I do it with the purpose to harm your election process, then that is a criminal sanction. If I’m someone who sees that, and I share it on Facebook without, because I’m just…

Audrey Tang: Then the Taiwan Fact Check Center actually has algorithmic co-governing status. If it’s already fact checked as false, you will actually see a line below the story. Before you share, Facebook will actually warn you that, “This has been fact checked by the TFFC. Are you sure that you would like to share?”

Audrey Tang: In that case, the proof of intentionality is easier for the persecutors.

Audience Member: Makes sense.

Audience Member: What is your definition of transcultural? You said that Taiwan is a transcultural…

Audrey Tang: …republic of citizens.

Audience Member: …republic. What do you mean by that?

Audrey Tang: Having the freedom to move across different countries, or even different civilizations, and have the liberty to not be constrained by the culture that one is raised from. This is just like the freedom to migrate, the freedom to move, but in a cultural context, and not a physical context.

Audience Member: It implies freedom of religion, the freedom to say no to religion, and change your religion?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm, change your ideological affiliation or whatever.

Audience Member: It’s another way of, in fact, framing the fundamentals of a liberal democracy, to talk about transcultural society?

Audrey Tang: Yes, but also including the indigenous context and including the indigenous view of seven generations, or the Jade Mountain being a spiritual being, and so on. Like, literally different worldviews.

Audience Member: The other model would be the Ottoman Empire, where you lived in your own community. Jews, Christians, Muslims, and they had their own laws. You would not marry across, and you had that in the US not so long ago.

Audience Member: That’s one way to keep the social peace, that you live in, and you have no contact, so we don’t have confrontations.

Audrey Tang: You mean like in Xinjiang, yes?

Audience Member: Yeah, exactly.

Audrey Tang: The philosophical idea here is like the various cultures or various flowers. This is a very old idea. This has, during the warring states…Actually, before the warring states. It always has two sometimes conflicting interpretation.

Audrey Tang: One is the cultured versus barbaric interpretation, 夷夏之防, and one is the transcultural interpretation, 天下文明. These two are always at tension. In Taiwan, I will say firmly that we’re choosing the 天下 interpretation.

Audrey Tang: In particular, I’m taking a 「公民之國，在花之中」 interpretation. [laughs] In any case, we see those cultures as not just to be conserved in different silos, but rather just as the tectonic plates made the Jade Mountain grow two centimeters every year, we make new cultures out of this transcultural interaction.

Audience Member: Yeah. Sorry, just to…I am writing a book about this. That’s why I’m asking about culture and multiculturalism. This is the exact opposite of multiculturalism as an ideology, because the problem with multiculturalism, contrary to transculturalism, is that you are allowed to protect your own culture.

Audience Member: You are not allowed to criticize or say something negative about other culture, and you have laws criminalizing, so you keep the social peace. You define it in a way that, if you are from another culture, you are not allowed to say something about a different culture.

Audrey Tang: That’s the barrier, the defense of 华夏 from 夷狄, right?

Audience Member: Silos.

Audrey Tang: This is a very old concept.

Audience Member: That’s the way Western Europe in the ‘60s and ‘70s tried to integrate cultures from the Middle East and Africa. It looks like it doesn’t work.

Audrey Tang: It doubly doesn’t work on the Internet. Like if you leave a comment on somebody’s Twitter, that’s like three jurisdictions right there, and three cultures, for that matter.

Audience Member: Just a nerdy question, just because you have mentioned 华夏. On the mainland, you also have the idea of 诸夏 that’s being proposed by at least one philosopher. There, I see more justification for narrow authoritarianism.

Audience Member: Everything under heaven is controlled, which it was at the emperor’s time. It’s the now the CCP that does it. I was just curious how you…

Audrey Tang: I don’t really think CCP would take the 诸夏 rhetoric there.

Audience Member: They don’t, no, not the party. There is, like in civil society, whatever you would call that, and among experts in China, there is a revival of the 华夏 concept.

Audrey Tang: I understand that. I’ve read those articles as well. I’m not saying that we monopolize the term, as in 萬華. [laughs] What I’m trying to say is that when they talk about the great revival of the 华 culture, whatever frame in that frame is taking the 华/夷 distinction. Because it’s the rejuvenation of the great 华 culture as distinct from the 夷 cultures. That is firmly…

Audience Member: OK, now I get it.

Audrey Tang: …this view, as distinct from something else. While starting from the various flowers, what we’re saying is Taiwan is a polity of citizens between those flowers. These flowers would then include all civilizations, indigenous, Western, and everyone.

Audrey Tang: This discussion is super nerdy. I didn’t expect to go here. [laughs]

Audience Member: That’s all right.

Audience Member: It’s very fundamental though.

Audience Member: Back to disinformation, are there new things in here? I’m thinking not just on fake news, but the whole maybe CCP united front techniques in Taiwan. Do you see some new things here in the elections?

Audience Member: One thing that’s been mentioned to us has been the illegal gambling money flowing in. If there are other examples like that, where you see…

Audrey Tang: Our Ministry of Justice has published quite a few about that. I wouldn’t repeat there.

Audience Member: No, but other things, if there are where you see novel ways of the Chinese basically adapting their playbook. This is, of course, something when Europe with Russia all the time look out for new ways of what you can do.

Audience Member: An example in the last Ukraine election, where there wasn’t that much disinformation, but we find a new of, where people rent their Facebook accounts. It’s real people, so they avoid that Facebook have closed them down, but they can see they’re a bot.

Audience Member: Then they rent it for 14 days during the election. That’s where they then transmit 50 messages a day, anti-Ukraine, or pro-Putin. Anyway, just to hear what kind of new techniques you have also seen here from the Chinese side.

Audrey Tang: Actually, in Taiwan, there is quite a few observations around the antiELAB, because antiELAB has a leaderless structure. The people who work to discredit antiELAB also has to innovate, because previously, it’s about discredited one or two leaders.

Audrey Tang: If you have 2,000 leaders, that’s old playbook. Goes nowhere. They have to do something new. This is pretty good innovation. I mean good in a sarcastic fashion. [laughs] This is a rumor that says “Rioters in Hong Kong are paying $20 million to murder police.”

Audrey Tang: The structure of this is interesting because it didn’t accuse any perpetrator. This is basically saying that they allegedly interviewed a few people who are 13 years old or 14 years old, and they got new iPhones or whatever for murdering or violently attacking the police.

Audrey Tang: There’s even a recruitment poster to invite them to join the Telegram group. If they commit, I don’t know, suicide bombing or whatever like that, they get paid handsomely and so on and so forth. When we made a transcript, I’ll put everything in air quotes. [laughs] Then with interesting comic.

Audrey Tang: Basically, you see quite a few things. This is written in traditional Chinese characters, in Cantonese-ish characters. It’s made to seem like a piece of, like people voluntarily sharing this excellent offer, and things like that. It’s less about discrediting. This is more about painting, radicalizing the protestors element.

Audrey Tang: Of course, maybe because they are first time doing this, they made a few mistakes in their Cantonese. They forgot that they’re still using higher pinging in their Telegram group, so a little bit immature, [laughs] but this is new structure.

Audrey Tang: The TFCC that fact checking center traced the original wording, not the illustration, the original wording to 中央政法委长安剑, which is the CCP’s central political and law unit, their main state propaganda Weibo account. The TFCC then revealed the remixing messages and the inclusion of those photos.

Audrey Tang: They’re actually from Reuters, and the Reuters said nothing about them getting a new iPhone, or being paid, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: The initial re-framing was actually done in the public onin the Weibo of Zhongyang Zhengfawei. What I’m trying to say is that we thought of disinformation manipulation, it’s mostly a covert thing. That’s why the content farms, the bots, or whatever. But this is overt. They sign their name on it, encouraging remixes and things like that. I think they’re also innovating.

Audience Member: Interesting. That fit with something they tried globally as well, where “Huanqiu Shibao” had, on 9/11, this whole, “The West should be aware as well because Hong Kong were as terrorist as the terrorists that attacked at that time.”

Audience Member: I don’t think it got a lot of traction, but mostly ridicule. The effort was there to create a different narrative than…

Audrey Tang: We see roughly the same technique at play with this piece of rumor, which is about a “special red ink” being used on particular presidential candidates’ voting sheet, so that when you vote, you will pass through and render that particular vote illegal, which is false on three different counts.

Audrey Tang: Even that’s the case, that’s still legal, [laughs] and it’s physically impossible. It’s against the not legal law, but physical law.

Audrey Tang: Also, the CEC doesn’t print the ballot. This is shared not in a covert fashion, but very overt, like warning people that when they go to voting booth to vote, “Please pay special attention to the ink print,” and things like that. The transmission pathway is more like this one and unlike the previous more covert ones that we observed.

Audience Member: I have a different question coming from having lived in China for many years and having taught in universities in China, both in Beijing and Shanghai. I met many young, very innovative Chinese people. Sometimes we have that this is China, this is Taiwan, but do you have any relation, any connections?

Audience Member: We often see that it’s getting more and more authoritarian, more and more controlled, but when you are in China and you meet young people, you also feel that they are pushing back.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course.

Audience Member: They are having some of the same thinking as you have here on ways to be creative or pushing back.

Audrey Tang: I also have students in Hangzhou even after I become digital minister. They connect to the shared virtual reality space, and I 3D scan my avatar in. [laughs] In any case, we try this new way of merging classrooms together. The 3D model there, that was the China Art Academy. The people in Kaohsiung modeled the Kaohsiung Art Academy.

Audrey Tang: What they uploaded is their avatar, too, to the VR space that I created, which is hosted in Changhua in Google here. I put on HTC Vive, and then the chair that were previously empty, I see the young people appearing. It’s a interesting way to have a overlapping classroom.

Audrey Tang: I also give talks to the Global Classroom system, which include university students in Shanghai, but as part of the 50 different countries. I have some exchange through teaching and lectures to the people there who really want to learn about…

Audrey Tang: I think they can use the term social entrepreneurship because civic tech is banned there. Instead of saying civic tech, we just say social entrepreneurship, which amounts to the same thing, by the way. [laughs]

Audience Member: I just want to clarify one point. We just had a lunch meeting, and I think you didn’t read the transcript yet from that?

Audrey Tang: No, I didn’t.

Audience Member: There’s no transcript.

Audience Member: One of the experts there said that, in 2018, the local election, it a mayor in the south who won. The Chinese disinformation was far more effective. Now in 2020, it’s a serious issue, but he was a little bit less concerned because civil society has started to mobilize and…

Audrey Tang: The ecosystem is more mature now.

Audience Member: Do you agree with that point, the 2018, 2020?

Audrey Tang: I agree with this general assessment, but the ecosystem being mature is just one of the factors.

Audrey Tang: The other factor is that the surface of attack to sow social discord, there’s a lot less surface to sow discord because we decoupled the deliberative part of democracy, which is referenda, direct democracy, from the representative, which is voting and election.

Audrey Tang: In the previous one, these two are bound in the same day and with a lot of, in hindsight, really bad designs.

Audrey Tang: For example, one cannot campaign for candidates on the election day, but one can campaign for referenda on the referenda day, but it’s the same day. There are mayoral candidates that initiate referenda, so they can campaign for their referenda while their opponents cannot campaign for their campaign. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Then each of the referenda topic is one fertile ground for disinformation and manipulation. The surface for disinformation in the previous election is literally tenfold of this election. That’s that.

Audience Member: In that sense, you are a little bit more optimistic?

Audrey Tang: It’s more manageable if you have a smaller attack surface. Then the referendum year will be the year after, next August. There will be a set of referenda and, of course, a lot of disinformation around those. But one thing at a time. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s easier to handle if it is specifically about the issues or it’s specifically about the people, the candidates. When the candidates and the issue are intertwined, it made it almost impossible to defend on all these fronts.

Audience Member: I must admit avowed ignorance. I don’t even know your referendum system. Is that something citizens call for or something that…

Audrey Tang: Citizens call.

Audience Member: How many do you have to…Doesn’t it amount of 10,000 or something you’d have to ask for? How does it work?

Audrey Tang: This is new. Previously, it has an extremely high threshold. People, by refraining from partaking in referenda, can fizzle any referenda. That is the 2003 version, which is why you didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know about that either. It’s not very much used.

Audrey Tang: However, the new version, which is the 2019 version, is now every two years. At the fourth Saturday of each August, we have a referenda. It’s called by anyone who can manage to convince the total electing citizens number, at 0.5 percent, to counter-signature.

Audrey Tang: Then you raise a referendum topic. This is by simple majority. People will no longer be incentivized to refrain from casting vote by saying no. If they don’t show up, their side actually lose. Then it’s binding only for two years.

Audrey Tang: It’s a referendum every two years, so every time, the referendum can turn over the previous referendum’s topic because every referendum is binding only for two years anyway. This is a new design. It’s a interesting design.

Audrey Tang: You can vote only if you’re 20 years old, but you can partake in referenda if you’re 18 years old, so two different systems now, on alternating years.

Audience Member: Your personal view on how do you see this compared to – I love the expression – crowd law? This is a new way of doing it. It seems also very classical. You have it in the US, and then you have these odd referendum that are put sometimes on the ballot.

Audrey Tang: A referendum goes straight to the decisional stage.

Audience Member: Exactly. Like Brexit, it’s binary. Either you’re in or you’re out, but you don’t really know what does it mean until you…

Audrey Tang: If you’re binding only for two years, another way to think about it is that this is a sandbox. You can try something out for two years and see what happens, which brings it more at the define stage if you’re looking at this this way.

Audrey Tang: Brexit would definitely be even after this stage because it forecloses other possibilities of development. [laughs] Our referendums doesn’t have this character because, after two years, people can decide to try something else instead. It depends.

Audience Member: Can it be on any topic?

Audrey Tang: No. Not on, say, indigenous rights and not on the various presidential purviews. It mostly only binds the legislative and administrative.

Audience Member: Fascinating.

Audience Member: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Other thoughts, questions?

Audience Member: We heard earlier today also that Taiwan is an aging society.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: There are fewer younger, but all of this sounds very innovative. I think Yuma’s already asked, but there’s no resistance? In a lot of societies, it would be the more conservative, older generations that would somehow resist ideas like this, but you actually…

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Audience Member: …that there’s a lot of support for these creative…

Audrey Tang: There’s no resistance on that. The most active participants in our platform for e-democracy, join.gov.tw, which is our one-stop platform, actually 15-years-olds and 65-years-olds spend the most time on the platform. We have 10 million visitors. Considering Taiwan, 23 million people, that’s a lot of people.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have a real theory. My anecdotal hypothesis is that these two groups have more time on their hands. They care more about the next generation because one is, literally, the next generation, [laughs] and less about their private interests but more about public interest.

Audrey Tang: A lot of the most impactful petitions, for example, one that calls for banning of plastic straws, which took effect last year, and many impactful ones are done by people who are around 15 or 16 years old. They cannot even initiate a referenda. There really is no other institutional way for they to partake in democracy. Of course, they do that a lot.

Audrey Tang: The 65-years-old have the personal connections, the wisdom of how to mobilize people to support. There’s a lot that they can do as well. That’s my theory.

Audience Member: It’s going across generations.

Audrey Tang: It’s cross-generational solidarity that really made this happen. People feel that, because everywhere in Taiwan there’s broadband, it’s equal opportunity. We’re not really excluding anyone by introducing such digital democracy institutions.

Audience Member: Another question, if I may, is on we often, and we’ve heard that several times, especially coming from the Chinese, the disinformation and the mix of civil and military and dual use of some of these things.

Audience Member: You seem to be, some of this thinking that you’re sending seems to be at the forefront of some of the new ways to use new technology or the innovative way of using it. We just met with the Ministry of Defense, their research. They said that they had these big data centers and people working there.

Audience Member: Are there any connections? Are there any cooperation between your ministry and the Ministry of Defense in ways to tackle this disinformation and using these new technologies?

Audrey Tang: I think they are quite aware of the things I’m doing. I am not at all aware of the details of what they’re doing. The reason why is [laughs] that my office is by voluntary association. One ministry each can send a delegate to my office. My office is literally just these delegates.

Audrey Tang: We have 32 ministries, so I can have 32 colleagues, at most. Actually, I only have 20 colleagues or so, meaning some ministries never send people. Defense is one such ministry, so I really don’t have any direct connection to anyone working in the Ministry of Defense.

Audrey Tang: All the people-facing ones, like communication, culture, education, you name it, of course, interior, send people. After a year, the foreign service send people. Joel right here…

Audrey Tang: …is wearing two hats. [laughs] We work mostly on public diplomacy, but then I don’t really know anything about the secret or top secret thing that MOFI is doing.

Audience Member: It’s interesting, because often the most technology-advanced people, at least that’s in the Danish case, we have this hacker academy, and that’s in the military. You would have them in the top-level industries, these new technologies, and then in the defense sector and the ministries. It’s interesting that…

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, if you want to find top cybersecurity experts, maybe the financial sector? [laughs] Taiwan is literally at the forefront. Any system that has a high reward gets a lot of cyber attacks. Our cybersecurity experts, when they are studying, they don’t do exercises. It’s real cases every day. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Because of that, of course, there’s some in the military, but a lot in the civilian landscape just based on survival necessities, like Israel.

Audience Member: All the big companies have their own hacker academies.

Audrey Tang: Right, and we work quite well with the HITCON, which is the primary white-hat community. Because our systems are open-source, our gov-tech is based on civic tech. For example, when I set up my own collaborative system called Sandstorm, this is what I work every day.

Audrey Tang: Because I don’t touch state secret, as explained, I can show you what I’m working on at any given time. This is literally what we are working on right now. The more active applications are these ones.

Audience Member: When are you doing an interview with Peter Harmsen?

Audrey Tang: Peter…

Audience Member: Harmsen. I just saw that on your…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, Peter Harmsen. He called and asked a very similar question to what you just asked.

Audrey Tang: This will be published, too, on the SayIt website. You can see, after becoming the digital minister, everything that I hold, like in this office, as a chair, any lobbying attempts, any press interviews, are recorded. I walk with almost 5,000 people now on over 1,000 occasions in a lot of speeches.

Audrey Tang: The great thing about this radical transparency is that people always, when they lobby, like David Plouffe, who is a professional lobbyist working with Uber at the time.

Audience Member: Yeah, I know him.

Audrey Tang: …had to make…

Audience Member: That’s Obama’s…

Audrey Tang: Yes. He had to make all his arguments based on the Global Goals, climate-change mitigation, and things like that because everybody knows that this will not only be on the record but actually on 360° record. People can put on a VR and relive this conversation.

Audrey Tang: David said that there are some more details we can work out. I say, “Sure, I’ll just publish whatever you send my way.” This is a great way to make sure lobbying are based on public benefit. [laughs] People can very easily see what I’m working on. This is literally what I’m working on.

Audrey Tang: Every week, every Monday, we just meet here and look at the nearby…this is our lunch boxes, and then the system automatically inputs my favorite dish. Then we can order lunch together, automatically.

Audrey Tang: This system is very simple. It’s developed by a fellow in our office. He didn’t have cybersecurity training or whatever. He just wrote a simple JavaScript application. Underlying cybersecurity system, called Sandstorm, is audited and, indeed, penetration tested in the white-box fashion by people who participate in the top DEFCON CTF, actually second-place winners in 2019, for half a year before we deploy this.

Audrey Tang: Each and every open-source application we run here are automatically shielded against cyber attacks. This is our relationship with the white-hat community. They expect that there’s plenty of rooms for they to do penetration testing because it’s open-source.

Audrey Tang: They can just do the pen testing, and we pay them really well. They meet with the minister, the president, all the time so they don’t fall to the dark side, which has more cookies.

Audrey Tang: In any case, that’s our view with the white-hat community. They’re not required to join the government or join the military. They just keep auditing open-source applications. Their work are being compensated.

Audience Member: I’m impressed. This sounds very good, but if you look around the world, if you look at Freedom House’s index on freedom and Reporters without Borders, it seems that, globally, democracy is…

Audrey Tang: Is retreating?

Audience Member: Yeah, in decrease. We have a debate in Europe and in the US, “Is democracy in crisis?” Polarization, the digital technology, immigration, cultural clashes, some people longing for a strong man.

Audience Member: Taiwan, if you look at the structural factors, you have a big outside threat. You have the digital technology and all this kind of disruption. Don’t you have any of these trends that we have in Europe and in the US? What’s your assessment of this? Is democracy in crisis here as well?

Audrey Tang: No, because we’re the resistance. I haven’t watched the latest movie. [laughs] We are the resistance, and we define the character of our democracy as looking at technology and defining them sometimes in direct opposite as what PRC is defining.

Audrey Tang: I talk about transparency, radical transparency, in my talks. Not once do people mistake my meaning. They know, when I say transparency, I mean I make how the state operates transparent to the people. The exact same word in PRC will be taken to mean state surveillance, making people transparent to the state.

Audrey Tang: They use the same word. It’s just different, simplified characters, but the meaning is opposite. When we say, here, social entrepreneurship and to improve people’s trust and build social credit, we mean something like credit union. There, social credit means something else entirely. It’s a state scoreboard and state surveillance.

Audrey Tang: When we say public-private partnership, we mean sandboxes and private-sector initiated regulatory innovation. They mean embedding CCP party branches in every private-sector company. That’s still public-private collaboration.

Audrey Tang: I mean it’s a confusion of category. It’s a twist of words. What I’m trying to say is that being aware of this, we’re, maybe more than any other jurisdiction, defining our development in a way that partake in a redefinition of the more Silicon Valley-like, technology-neutral, singularity, techno-optimism, and in a way that pay attention to the effective partnership, open innovation, and mean it.

Audience Member: The more authoritarian the mainland becomes, the more democratic you become?

Audrey Tang: It’s like mirror image. It really is like mirror image. The Silicon Valley over-optimism and now delusion – despair I would even say [laughs] – is less pronounced here because, from the very beginning when Uber came, we asked everybody, “What do you feel about it?” and have a social norm around it.

Audrey Tang: When there is a IoT proliferation, we asked, “What kind of beings are you connecting to the IoT device? Can we put voices to the rivers, to the mountains?” and things like that. Three years ago, when I became digital minister, people asked me this very question, like, “Which direction are you taking it?”

Audrey Tang: Say something about the Jade Mountain growing two centimeters every year. They’re like, “This is too poetic.” [laughs] “We need something that’s more satisfying, that’s more connecting to digital technology.” I wrote another poem, which is literally my job description. It goes like this. It’s a really short one.

Audrey Tang: When we see “Internet of things,” let’s make it an Internet of beings.

Audrey Tang: When we see “virtual reality,” let’s make it a shared reality.

Audrey Tang: When we see “machine learning,” let’s make it collaborative learning.

Audrey Tang: When we see “user experience,” let’s make it about human experience.

Audrey Tang: And whenever we hear that “a singularity is near,” let us always remember the plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: That’s my job description, literally.

Audience Member: That is poetic.

Audience Member: Do you know Martin Gurri’s book, “Revolt of the Public?”

Audrey Tang: No…

Audience Member: He’s a former CIA analyst. He wrote this book in 2014, which, in fact, is a prediction of Trump and Brexit. The main thesis is that there is a revolt of the public against old elites in the media, politicians, business, because there is a sense of a growing distance between individual citizens’ lives and the response of the elites.

Audrey Tang: The “(dis)empowerment.”

Audience Member: They make decisions, and they don’t feel that they are involved. It seems to be growing, the dissatisfaction. That’s why we have these populist parties and you have crazy politicians in most countries. Don’t you have the same trend here?

Audrey Tang: No.

Audience Member: What about trusting government? Can you see that, from year to year, with these new ways of doing things that trust government has risen?

Audrey Tang: Well, the government should trust people.

Audrey Tang: I really don’t think people should trust the government.

Audrey Tang: The people’s trust in the government should be directly proportional of how much the government trusts citizens.

Audience Member: As a former government official…

Audrey Tang: Speaking as a card-carrying conservative anarchist here, the governance systems, by nature, they do have a sense of professionalism in it. Career public service is, indeed, my main target audience to build digital systems about.

Audrey Tang: Career public service need not be confused with government as a abstract entity. Career public service are people. What I do, mostly, is to bring them to people. This is what my typical Tuesday is like. I go to the most rural, indigenous, offshore island and so on places, meet them in their town hall.

Audrey Tang: I always visit maybe a night before, maybe two nights before, and to do a couple ethnographic hangout. I hang out with them a bit, learn their local culture and so on. When they have their town hall meetings, I bring through high-speed, multi-room connectivity, just as the one I prototype here to bring career public service, or section chiefs, or so, 12 ministries, to look through video presence what the local people are discussing in their agenda.

Audrey Tang: This makes the government’s trust to people more pronounced than if we ask a few representatives to come to Taipei to present their cases, or to do focus groups, or whatever. This is about bringing tech to people. This is not about asking people to come to tech, whether it’s gov tech or civic tech.

Audrey Tang: What people’s subjective feeling is that they’re just discussing things as usual, but they understand that the public service previously anonymous, previously highly abstract, are people who care about the same things. When they innovate, they can actually form a team and present a case to the presidential hackathon and maybe win a trophy.

Audrey Tang: Every year we give out five trophies. Each trophy is a projector that shows the president promising to a team whatever they have brainstormed in the past three months will become public policy within the next year. They are collaborators.

Audrey Tang: If the public service says something that upsets the local people, you can’t punch people over a projector, so it’s only that I am at risk. By absorbing the risk and sharing the credit, we make sure that we form, for example, this is a classical case.

Audrey Tang: This is AirBox. This is people who care about air pollution using very cheap boxes, less than €100 each to measure the PM2.5 and mobilize against what they perceive as the government’s negligence on environmental factors when it comes to air quality.

Audience Member: What they do in the mainland where they keep hiding the numbers.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, this basically forces the environmental minister to come out, and because we can’t beat them, we must join them. They must negotiate.

Audrey Tang: They negotiated with the civic tech community who say by collective bargaining we allow the environment minister to join in our calibration of our numbers and join our distributor ledger, which is an immutable record of air quality, because at the time, the EPA only have 87 stations.

Audrey Tang: No match to the more than 2,000 stations from the civil society. The civil society say, by allowing the EPA to join the civil IoT system, we ask something in return. We want air measurement devices in those industrial parks. These are private property. We can’t break and enter and install them.

Audrey Tang: It turns out we own the lamps in the industrial parks. We use their spec, their AirBox designs, joining their network to form data collaboratives. Basically, I think almost half of these are primary school. They use this as a way to teach data governance, data producers’ ethics, and so on, data competence to the high schoolers.

Audrey Tang: They think that whatever AI algorithm they can develop to predict air quality or whatever, they can upload to the civil IoT system, the world’s, I think, 20th-fastest supercomputer, to just analyze this together.

Audrey Tang: Data collaboratives, I really think, is what sets Taiwan apart, not just from the PRC, but from anywhere that doesn’t have the absolute freedom of speech that make the social sector gaining legitimacy in an unprecedented way, vis-Ã -vis the public sector.

Audrey Tang: Which is why I say the government must trust the people, because if the government doesn’t trust the people, this looks like a nightmare. Only by radically trusting the people can we figure out some co-governance possibilities with them.

Audience Member: Have you been to Copenhagen?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Audience Member: You should come again. We do hold a yearly summit called Copenhagen Democracy Summit, where we also discuss the interplay with tech. It’s next time the 19th, 20th of June. It would be great to have you.

Audrey Tang: Of course, I can come, either in the flesh or as a robot.

Audience Member: Yes, both is…

Audrey Tang: Or as a hologram. We can figure something out.

Audience Member: That would be a great pleasure.

Audience Member: Thanks a lot for this meeting. I knew this was going to be exciting when I had asked to see, but you completely surpassed all the expectations. Everything you do, I think for all of us as well, that are used to seeing ourselves as Danes, that come from the number one on happiness and on many other indicators.

Audience Member: This is actually something where we would say, “OK, this is different and at least quite beyond how crowd law is made in Denmark.”

Audience Member: I don’t think…

Audience Member: Crowdsourcing agenda setting.

Audience Member: It’s not in the doctrine.

Audience Member: I don’t know if I can be old fashioned enough to give you a card.

Audrey Tang: Of course. One part of my card is designed by the MoFA. This is me.

Audience Member: OK, thank you.

Audience Member: Can we have a group photo with…

Audrey Tang: Sure.

Audience Member: Thank you.