Neta Halperin: …definitely fine by me. I was surprised, because I know that usually on Tuesday you go for a tour?

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right, but since the epidemic, the first wave in Taiwan in May, that has been temporarily suspended until we lift off the national-wide alert.

Audrey Tang: For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been in low single digits like zero or one local confirmed cases, but it’s not formally lowered the alert level. We’ll have to wait till the alert level is over.

Neta Halperin: OK. How is like your usual day routine now with the pandemic being still around?

Audrey Tang: There’s not really much of a difference because we’ve never had a lockdown. We’ve never really had a restriction of movement.

Audrey Tang: I still go to the cabinet office. For example, the Thursday, which is today, is the cabinet meeting day. I wake up. I talk to international friends and see you, and then at 9:00 AM, I go to the cabinet for the cabinet meeting and then the Board of Science and Technology meeting and so on. It’s all in all, pretty normal.

Neta Halperin: Of course, you have Wednesdays, which is a special day.

Audrey Tang: For conference hours. Yes, which is now partially resumed. I mean still, people prefer to meet through video communication more than before May, but there’s still in-person visits and lectures, and seminars at the social innovation lab. That usually takes place on Wednesday, or Tuesday nowadays, since we’re not touring anymore.

Neta Halperin: OK. Now, I got it all figured out. Yes, the puzzle. Great, let’s begin our first part of the conversation. I guess you got the outline.

Audrey Tang: I did.

Neta Halperin: As I wrote, I think in our first meeting, it would be great to focus on or to make sort of an arc from the Sunflower protest to your government work and emphasize, of course, during the COVID-19 and see the link between it all because it fascinates me, and I’m sure many readers. Let’s begin there.

Neta Halperin: I loved the part and I read it in several places the fact that you were working at Socialtext when you read about the process that is gaining momentum, and you opened the companies chattel and wrote that you have to leave immediately because the…

Neta Halperin: Yes. Well, I come from literature, so, of course, it was interesting for me to think about a figure that feels so hard, the actual moment.

Neta Halperin: Have you before ever feared that the democracy in Taiwan is in danger?

Audrey Tang: Well, of course, ever since I was born because I was born into a martial law, the world’s longest martial law for decades.

Audrey Tang: My parents, both journalists, worked with one of the largest newspaper at the time, and they have to constantly struggle for their journalistic freedom. There’s no direct election of president or any of the Parliament or anything when I was born.

Audrey Tang: I think democratization in Taiwan is not a given. It’s something that my parents and grandparent’s generation struggled for, and we got it, some aspect of democracy with the lifting of the martial law at the end of the ‘80s and then culminating in the presidential election in ‘96.

Audrey Tang: I think democracy is always seen as something that’s hard won and whenever there’s any suggestion that maybe it’s better if we consider authoritarian model, a top-down takedown, lockdown.

Audrey Tang: Whatever it is a non-starter in Taiwan because we just got that, and I still remember the era when we did not have any freedom to speak of under the martial law, which temporarily suspended part of the constitution.

Neta Halperin: Wow! That was a moment of actual fear for democracy, and you told that both your parents are journalists. Have you ever had any political ambitions before all of this happened or maybe ambitions to be a journalist or anything else?

Audrey Tang: Sure. I do think that my work is similar to that of a journalist in that we make ourselves available to provide communication, to empower people who are not given a voice when it comes to democracy to decision making, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Moreover, the Internet is designed as a way to reduce the impact that any particular censorship agent can have on the voice of any individual, as long as there’s a will to connect and communicate between two points in the Internet.

Audrey Tang: There is a way to facilitate that communication. It’s also about giving agency, like competence to people who have something to say.

Audrey Tang: I do think that, in Taiwan, what we’re looking at ever since the Sunflower is that no major political party, a dispute, the need to civic participation, open government, and so on and more.

Audrey Tang: Precisely, because during the Sunflower Movement compared to other occupies, we’ve seen that citizen journalists contributed a lot to the dialogue so much so that after three weeks of occupy, we set on something that’s good enough consensus that was then taken and ratified by the head of the department, which is a achievement that very few other occupy movements can claim.

Neta Halperin: Wow. You come from hacking which is such an anti-establishment position.

Audrey Tang: The authoritarianism, of course.

Neta Halperin: What was moving to work, not for the government, but with the government, was a huge shift or whether?

Audrey Tang: Not really, because my mandate comes not from any particular election district or constituency. Fundamentally, it’s a different legitimacy theory compared to a representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: The tension you mentioned is usually applied when somebody who work for their constituents and represent their constituents’ interest, but I see my work not as representing anyone but rather designing spaces, pro-social social media that anyone can re-present their own voice, their your own ideas.

Audrey Tang: I’m not a filter or a middle person that speaks on behalf of anyone. I’m more like a speaker in a technological speaker, like a speaker machine sense, not a speaks person for somebody’s sense.

Neta Halperin: It has this element of curating, I think.

Audrey Tang: I think of most of my work as bringing the insights that originally the interaction designers for town halls for museums, for public libraries and campuses, or even national parks, these public infrastructures that forms the backbone of what we call social sector here.

Audrey Tang: Community building is the one. There’s this long and proud tradition of community building in Taiwan even during the martial law, but of course, how to translate that pro-social movement and energy through nonviolent communication, dynamic facilitation of in-space technology to the digital space.

Audrey Tang: That’s a open-research problem. I see most of my contribution is to facilitate, that facilitating, not myself being a facilitator, but taking the facilitator’s methodology and bringing it so that is scales deeply.

Neta Halperin: Yes, the structure.

Audrey Tang: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Neta Halperin: Well, of course, I read a lot about your part in the protest, which was very interesting because it’s so different than the protest that we had here in Israel.

Neta Halperin: To sum up, maybe the key principle to my understanding guided you were trust and sharing.

Neta Halperin: For example, the fact that you made sure that there is live-streaming that can enable citizens, which are outside of the parliament feel that they are taking part in it, and also, at the same time, prevent all kinds of misinformation that was against protest participants.

Neta Halperin: I think trust was a keyword in your specific activity.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I would add to that that is not about me being a trusted figure. I don’t think of things that way. It’s more like an infrastructure to enable mutual trust because to give no trust is to get no trust.

Audrey Tang: Previously, it’s difficult to give trust when all you have is a broadcasting radio microphone. I imagine about how you can trust someone that only listens when they were have a way to give their voice back.

Audrey Tang: There need to be a multi-directional, a poly-lateral communication framework for the trust relationship to work, not in a previous centuries gatekeeper model, which of course, all journalists are familiar with, but rather this century’s competence model.

Audrey Tang: It is a conscious choice that we choose that term “competence” when it comes to media competence, education, and so on, because literacy, the word from last entry, assumes that the individuals are just readers or viewer and consumer of information but competence suggests agency.

Audrey Tang: Everyone need to be empowered to be a producer and creators, steward of information data and media before this mutual trust can meaningfully happen.

Neta Halperin: Of course, this continues in your part and in your role as a digital minister that you create this stage that everyone can voice themselves.

Neta Halperin: At the same time, still misinformation and create maybe discourse, which is more complex but without all kinds of heavy foreign effects. I was surprised to understand that one of the tools that you mainly use is humor.

Audrey Tang: Humor over rumor.

Neta Halperin: It’s not that you normally hear about humor as a tool, as a governmental tool. What is your favorite example or a moment that you understood that it’s working?

Audrey Tang: Well, there’s many examples. You’ve probably seen the very cute, Shiba Inu dog. You’ve seen the premiere Su Jin Tang’s buttons, which is a homonym with stockpiling. There’s many examples.

Audrey Tang: I think the underlying logic is very intuitive because in Taiwan, any approach that begins with censorship would face extensive resistance from anyone over the age of 40, who still remember the martial law.

Audrey Tang: We are a pluralistic democracy. Anything that looks like a takedown or censorship is simply a non-starter. Therefore, we needed to think of innovative ways to outrun and outpace the conspiracy theorist and disinformation operations.

Audrey Tang: The underlying psychological theory is this most disinformation is driven by outrage, which is one of the most viral emotions online, but outrage lead usually to revenge, discrimination, beginning of hate speech.

Audrey Tang: You must know what I’m talking about, rendering with capacity of empathy, null and void in a antisocial corner of social media. When people start sharing those stories with mindless abandon, we have the infodemic.

Audrey Tang: We think of this as a epidemic, and then the natural answer is, “Let’s develop some vaccines.” We need to vaccinate ourselves against the virus of the mind.

Audrey Tang: We understand that outrage can be channeled to humor. It’s also a way to vent the tension without the hate speech part. The humor have a higher R-value, a higher basic reproduction rights than discrimination and hate speech.

Audrey Tang: When humor has the capacity to spread more dramatically than even outrage, that is when we know that we have developed a vaccine for the infodemic without censorship or takedowns.

Neta Halperin: Wow. It’s interesting to learn that the humor as a tool is deriven from, let’s say, a national wound.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, because otherwise people will say, “Well then, what’s so different about our democratic regime to that dictator we still remember?”

Neta Halperin: From that perspective, I’m very interested to learn.

Neta Halperin: In general, have your perception of technology and its role and significance change during the years, and also at the same time has your perception of politics changed throughout the years and especially recent years?

Audrey Tang: Yes, when I participated in the Sunflower Movement, I think my preconception of how the career of public service works was not entirely factual, but it’s not just me.

Audrey Tang: Many people think of bureaucracy as something that’s stable but boring, a bit slow and not innovative at all, and things like that, and all the innovations happening in startups and would-be unicorns and whatever in the private sector, in the social sector, definitely not in a career in public service.

Audrey Tang: That was my picture of how the government works. After working within the cabinet office as, first, a consultant for Euro-making in 2014, and after being promoted, I guess from internship to full-time in 2016 as digital minister, still in the same office and physical office building.

Audrey Tang: I believe that now I see the public service as the most innovative bunch of people. I have encountered people who are truly original in crafting like humor over rumor, and the entire “fast-fair-fun” principle, and so on.

Audrey Tang: I believe it’s a great loss to the society if the innovations from the public service are siloed in so that only the people working in that department understand those innovations, especially because there’s limited budget data government has at its disposal.

Audrey Tang: There’s only that much innovations that each public servants and their agencies can pursue at every given fiscal year.

Audrey Tang: If we open up those innovations so that our ideas that did not have the sufficient budget to realize completely, nevertheless, serve as a seat of the open innovation, then through Presidential Hackathons, through the e-petition platform and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The community from the outside, people and the private sectors can give resource to those innovations and to realize it sooner and also to do it in a way that everybody is equally able to maintain it without being unnecessarily centralized in the central government so that only the central government know how it works.

Audrey Tang: I believe this is truly what democratization means. That’s why I call myself a public servant of the public service.

Neta Halperin: I completely understand and of course I will…in that sense it probably was surprising in a happy, in a healthy way that the and…

Audrey Tang: So I’m not boring people. It wasn’t allowed to talk about their drafts and ideas publicly.

Neta Halperin: In the same sense, you were invited to rewrite the educational plan. Also, this is very innovative, and as I understood that the substance of this work was to encourage students to think independently, and at the same time encourage teachers to think differently about their role, not only as teaching but learning with the students which is I think super interesting.

Audrey Tang: Yes, and it’s not just about independent thinking, although it does start there. It’s also through interaction to see the world from various different perspectives and achieve the common good.

Audrey Tang: We focus on now education as a way to learn to settle into good enough consensus, learn to settle into common enough values instead of outcompeting on individual-to-individual basis your fellow classmates, which is counterproductive nowadays because individuals does not do much if they do not have the ability to see things from various other people’s perspectives.

Audrey Tang: For things that are trivial and simple and easily grasped by one individual, these things are probably already being automated. It doesn’t need individuals to dedicate their time to do so.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, all the, what the British called, “The wicked problems,” like climate change, or fighting the pandemic requires people to work in a cross-disciplinary fashion.

Neta Halperin: Definitely. You mentioned the civic, or good enough consensus and civic participation together with our radical transparency. Those were the three elements that you were referring to during your Ted Talk.

Neta Halperin: With your permission, let’s talk a little bit about it because it’s interesting. For example, radical transparency. You work as a minister without portfolio because it’s very important to you that all meetings will be held and constricted and presented. That everyone can have access to it, as this meeting, for example, but you work as digital minister.

Neta Halperin: Given the fact that the role of technology in our life is so sensitive and sometimes explosive, do you feel at times there is advantages and disadvantages to this very unusual choice?

Audrey Tang: Well, first of all, I would say radical transparency is the norm in the judicial and the parliament branches in the other two branches in the government.

Audrey Tang: You don’t often hear the Parliament say, “Oh, let’s make a parliamentary interpellation, but it’s off record.” It’s impossible, it doesn’t work that way.

Audrey Tang: Neither would the Supreme Court, the Constitution Count, make a constitutional ruling, but say, “Let’s just publish the results, but not our individual ideas.” It’s impossible, right?

Audrey Tang: I think there’s already traditions of radical transparency, that’s to say transparent from the proceedings and the drafts onward, not just publishing the conclusions in the other branches. I’m just bringing those ideas into the administration.

Audrey Tang: The administration mostly practices this less transparent fashion not because we’re ideologically against it but because as a simple logistic challenge.

Audrey Tang: If all the drafts and all the meetings and interviews, journalists need to be managed and transcribed, there are simply too many of these in the administration compared to the parliament and the judicial branches.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, we understand the assistive intelligence, the AIs, can help simplify most of the transcribing work. It only requires 10 working days for all the participants to correct any lingering misspellings or adding their own references to expand some acronyms.

Audrey Tang: It’s a veritably lower threshold as compared to the previous days when we have to have dedicated personnel after each meeting in order to take real-time notes.

Audrey Tang: Technology, I believe lowered the threshold of radical transparency and the trust that we place in the citizens, especially journalists, and especially investigative journalists. I believe it’s well worth it.

Audrey Tang: Previously, if you worked in investigative journalism and you do not have the context, you have to rely on your sources and interviews. Usually, that they tell their side of the story, you never know whether their side of the story is the full side of the story.

Audrey Tang: Whenever people want to publish the inner workings of the cabinet, three newspapers may tell three very different stories like in different worlds depending on the source they got.

Audrey Tang: If we publish the entire proceeding in radical transparency, then all the investigative journalists can work out their angle of conversation to bring in the actual focal points of their investigation as well as the societal expectation into the conversation in a way that’s productive, right.

Audrey Tang: Instead of just getting the scoop or spending time back and forth like, “He said that, she said that,” we can get to focus on the matter of the report.

Audrey Tang: I believe data journalism, investigative journalism, these are the workers that I consider my natural allies and most of the radical transparency publications, I think are first read by data and investigative journalist in order to further the public debate.

Neta Halperin: Wow! Yes, so really focusing the main things not only what’s around it when we don’t have the information. Definitely. Well, let’s talk about radical transparency and civic participation in regards to COVID-19.

Neta Halperin: I read about the way that things went by and as I understood till today still delegations from over the world are coming to learn how you managed to create a situation where there is, well you could say that you defeated the coronavirus with a single-digit number of losses and only hundreds of infected people.

Neta Halperin: I think also the keyword is again, trust and cooperation.

Audrey Tang: Yes, definitely. I would add to that because it’s not just about the daily press conferences, the toll-free number 1-9-2-2, the very effective contact tracing system that people voluntarily join and store in their telecoms. Not any third-party data processors that reduce the contact tracing from 24 hours to 24 minutes.

Audrey Tang: These are the individual parts of our tool kits to tell them or do that jurisdictions around the world did look at and adapt to their own needs. That is all very well.

Audrey Tang: I do think that the fundamental thing is about competence. It’s about, instead of a handful of experts understanding epidemiology and pushing dictates for what to do, we maximize the individuals in the society’s common person’s understanding of epidemiology.

Audrey Tang: We structure our daily press conferences, much like long-running television shows that serve an educational purpose.

Audrey Tang: Instead of pushing any mandates from a top-down fashion, we explain the science behind it so that people will understand a little bit can then turn around and make those educational materials into memes or whatever to educate the people who are less informed about epidemiology.

Audrey Tang: When new variants came, the Alpha, the Delta, the entire societal resilience is built upon people understanding the science of it, and therefore, discovering new social innovations locally in their neighborhood to counter the pandemic in a way that works for their neighborhood.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, we’ll have pockets of population that follows blindly the top-down regulations and policies without understanding that their vicinity needs different treatment. There will be pockets of infections if we did things that way.

Neta Halperin: I think this answers what I wanted to ask. My follow-up question, which is how to get to people that live in much rural areas that…because what I read seemed very fit to people who live in big cities.

Neta Halperin: What about other populations that need specific treatment or different discourse?

Audrey Tang: I believe one of the most potent thing is this toll-free number, 1-9-2-2. Anyone can pick up their land line and call toll-free and speak for hours if needed, and ask everything that they fear or they hope that the government can explain to them.

Audrey Tang: Last year alone, there’s more than two million calls and this year, probably more.

Audrey Tang: My counterparts in other countries sometimes ask me, “Oh, you must use this very advanced voicemail AI analysis, or robotic call center technology.”

Audrey Tang: I’m like, “No, they’re staffed by the professional call center people from, not only our largest telecom, but also the CG charity, the largest social sector that also helped in disaster relief like post-earthquake work, as well as getting the BNT vaccine from the Germany.

Audrey Tang: They’re donated those purchase vaccine to the government along with the Taiwan semiconductor and folks come, and so on.

Audrey Tang: We have this very well-trusted charity, a social sector that people simply placed their trust in more than, maybe their municipality, or even the central government.

Audrey Tang: We have varied people with a lot of empathy and previous experience working in SARS, in the large earthquake, in floods, and typhoons, and so on, listen with empathy to people’s real phone calls. They’re all real people.

Audrey Tang: Our work in assistive intelligence and machine learning serves not to intermediate between people and people, but working behind the scenes so that we can lower the time required for those call center people and supporting charities to locate factual information and dispel the rumors, but the interface is always somebody else with empathy and active listening skills.

Neta Halperin: Wow. The human element plays a crucial role. In regards to that, were there any disputes around the vaccine itself, the whole significance of vaccination?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there are people who worry about specific types of vaccination. There are people who would love to get B and C, but not on AstraZeneca. There are people who would love to get AstraZeneca.

Audrey Tang: I, myself, got two shots at AZ, but would worry about our home brew. Our homegrown vaccine, the Medigen. There are people who only get Medigen and nothing else.

Audrey Tang: There’s this intense loyalty in vaccine preferences, which is why we develop one of the world’s only system where people just tick the vaccines.

Audrey Tang: They accept and they received the SMS precisely at a point where the vaccines arrived that lowers to their age brackets. We utilize this vaccine preference in a way like a market.

Audrey Tang: If you are not picky about vaccines, you get vaccinated very quickly. If you are picky about vaccines, you know that there is a fair queue and you know approximately when will be your turn. It’s sought through essentially mechanism, design or market design, and it’s all open data.

Audrey Tang: Anyone can see each other’s preferences in five-age groups like age this to that, age this to that. In real time, anyone can analyze that data, and then make up their own minds on vaccine preferences.

Neta Halperin: There is more of an ongoing debate what vaccine is better and most preferable, but there is not a dispute around the question whether to get vaccine or not.

Audrey Tang: If we mandate that people need to get vaccinated regardless of type, then all the fears and doubts around specific vaccines will band together and feel conspiracy theory about vaccination itself.

Audrey Tang: By making the conversation about individual preference and people who prefer not to get vaccinated will simply wait a little bit so that younger people can get vaccinated sooner.

Audrey Tang: We not only make sure that we can get the vaccines jabs to people’s arms as soon as they arrive, but we diffused this whole conspiracy theory because if you don’t prefer, well, somebody else prefers it, and we can show through open data exactly how many people prefers that.

Audrey Tang: It renders the preference into a social object that people can talk about like today’s weather, or the stock market price, or something like that, and this pro-social conversation dwarfed the conspiracy theories.

Neta Halperin: This is so interesting and so important to navigate the discourse itself, not only the vaccine, but also the discourse.

Neta Halperin: It leads me to the question that, from my point of view, it seems that the principal you use in order to succeed in some projects or tasks, or a dilemma, are always very simple. It means that they are very easy to explain.

Neta Halperin: It seems that there is not a need of an imaginary budget in order to build them. They do require a lot of imagination and innovation, and of course, diligence in order to make it happen.

Neta Halperin: For example, the fact that if there is any conspiracy theory, or any misinformation that you usually respond within an hour or two. Regarding to the COVID-19, it seems that what guided maybe your office, your team was to do things very simply.

Audrey Tang: It’s about fast, fair, and fun. It requires a lot of preordained configuration in a society, and we don’t have the capacity to mutate as fast as the virus do. I think whether it’s about countering the epidemic or the infodemic, the principle needs to be simple, because early, simple ideas travels faster than the crisis itself.

Audrey Tang: If we require very complex setup, then at the end of the day is just a few experts that were able to explain why exactly we take this measure and even fewer people have the capacity to adapt a measure when the situation calls for a different measure.

Neta Halperin: Definitely. Let’s talk about the third a principle, the good-enough consensus, or rough consensus. From my point of view, it was reflected in the most interesting way in the whole issue of same-sex marriage.

Neta Halperin: I’m really interested to hear about the process that led to…Because I know that the bottom line, and it was really interesting to me to learn about it. It sounds like a brilliant idea, because it stems from really knowing the inner culture, the complexity, and to be familiar with all the nuances that means a lot to people.

Neta Halperin: Was it a long process? Was there a struggle? Obstacles? I’m interested to hear about the process.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Yes, I believe that the process, which, of course, you already read about, the constitutional interpretation, the two referenda, and things like that, I think one of the memories that stands out is the name of the act itself.

Audrey Tang: We already know how to solve this through legalizing the bylaws, the rights and duties, but not the in-laws, the family to family relationship.

Audrey Tang: What to call this particular Act? There’s this very fierce debate. If you call it union or companion, or wedding, or marriage, or whatever, every word carries a different connotation. The point is to make sure that people can interpret in a way that’s comfortable in their local culture.

Audrey Tang: We’ve had this fiercest debate internally within the administration on what you call the Act. Finally, we call the Act and I quote, “The Enforcement Act of the Judicial Branch Interpretation 748.” This name is completely neutral. It says, “There’s a constitutional interpretation, and we’re making Act that enforces this interpretation.”

Audrey Tang: Basically, making a neutral ground that can carry the different cultural interpretations. I believe this is a transcultural innovation that maximizes the respect that the cultures can have with each other.

Audrey Tang: If we choose a wording from any particular culture, it will be sacrificing essentially the perspectives from the other cultures. I think this is one of the search innovations that stood out to me.

Neta Halperin: Wow! Together we talked about the simplicity and the fact that something should be very fast and easy to innovate definitely, but you also take in consideration the feelings of the groups involved in any project or initiation and this is also very interesting to me.

Neta Halperin: We talked about misinformation and we talked about humor as a way to deal with it, but I know that you are also dealing with a lot of misinformation from China.

Neta Halperin: Does it require any different thinking or different way to manage with it because as I understood you don’t erase all misinformation and conspiracy theories?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Even before 2020, we have already been cited as a country most exposed to external disinformation operations. Of course, as mentioned, the attacks largely came from and still coming from the PRC regime in Beijing.

Audrey Tang: We know their motivations. It’s to destabilize our democracy and institutions in order to impose their particular branding of authoritarianism. If we turn authoritarian in response to disinformation operation, well, they won.

Audrey Tang: Because their point is to show that democracy doesn’t work and only authoritarianism works. Whatever counter-measure we take need to deepen not take away the freedom of speech and democracy.

Audrey Tang: That’s very difficult, but I think we did manage to figure something out. One of the ways that we deploy, again, before the pandemic for 2020 is called “notice in public notice,” instead of taking away any speech, we add context around it.

Audrey Tang: For example, during the anti-ELAB protest leading up to our presidential election, there was a trending message that made its round across the Taiwanese social media who said that, “How come protesters and so-called relatives who allegedly paid $20 million to murder the member of the Hong Kong police force?”

Audrey Tang: That, of course, was wrong, like a gross misinterpretation, but the intention of the campaign was very clear. It’s to lessen the influence of the Hong Kong situation on our presidential election. It only gets trending in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Actually, people in Hong Kong didn’t see that message. There is a very concerted operation.

Audrey Tang: Instead of taking it down, we add this mandatory banner whenever it’s showed in social media, a self-regulation by the popular social media companies include Facebook would then show, “This has been disputed and the investigation from the Taiwan FactCheck Center pointed out that the first time that this narrative came out was from the Weibo account of the PRC central political in-law unit, that 长安剑 Weibo account.

Audrey Tang: They fabricated, misused Reuters photo attempting to paint the image as the teenage protesting engaging a violent activity for monetary gain, but that there was not what the original Reuters report said.

Audrey Tang: Just by adding this frame to the conversation, people still share it, but they share it with competence, with agency, and understanding that they are really is disinformation operation going on.

Audrey Tang: Imagine if we took that down instead, then there will be a lot of accusations about censoring speech. Actually, the conspiracy will even fuel itself by changing to different keywords.

Audrey Tang: I do believe engaging citizen journalists and professional journalists to provide real-time fact-checking in the form of notice and public notice again is a longer-lasting vaccine.

Neta Halperin: It’s interesting. From this angle, all over the world, we talked about the fact that journalism and the whole world of journalism is getting weaker.

Neta Halperin: There’s a lot of debates whether it’s a necessity, or will we have journalists and journalism in the format that we are familiar with in 50 years time. What you are describing is a very strong journalism in Taiwan. Is that correct?

Audrey Tang: The journalists take practice is being democratized. It’s like participating open science, open access and research. It doesn’t mean science goes away.

Audrey Tang: It means people who are primary and middle schoolers, even in very rural areas as long as they have Internet connection, they can do science. That doesn’t mean that science need to be forever a privilege.

Audrey Tang: It means that science need to establish its mutual support with the society so people feel proud in contributing to science. The same goes for journalism.

Neta Halperin: It’s very encouraging. Throughout the years, you have demonstrated a very maybe ambivalent approach towards a technology.

Neta Halperin: For example, when you talked about your history, your past or upbringing, you said how much the World Wide Web has helped you live your life and create a community, understand that the Internet can be a supportive, fruitful space.

Neta Halperin: On the other hand, I read in few times that you call the social media antisocial media. Meaning that you are well aware and emphasize the unequal or decisive elements within it.

Neta Halperin: Has your approach changed, and of course, what can the government or your office specifically do?

Audrey Tang: I think the divisiveness, which I called antisocial corner of social media is there. I don’t think anyone disputes that there is polarization as where distrust on the Internet, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no pro-social elements in social media.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that, instead of saying, “Tech is good,” or “Tech is bad,” we simply say: Whether it’s built for this purpose? For our purpose, like in a government to further democratic deliberation whether Facebook is a good medium or not?

Audrey Tang: I usually use that analogy saying that I love the nightclubs with dances and drinks, and it’s a pretty good place to relax and chill out. But if you want to hold a town hall meeting, you will not choose your local nightclub because it’s very loud. You have to shout to get heard. There’s addictive drinks and private bouncers.

Audrey Tang: You would probably choose a public library or university campus. You will not choose that nightclub, but it doesn’t mean that you say nightclubs are bad, or the entertainment sector is bad. It’s just it’s not fit for the purpose of holding a town hall. I believe the same for the digital infrastructure.

Audrey Tang: There’s private sector infrastructure that’s designed to entertain people so people can relax and share cute cat pictures, but there are digital infrastructure built for democracy.

Audrey Tang: We need not to confuse these two, and the government need subsidize and honor, and hold ourselves accountable to the pro-social part of the social media that is designed with democracy in mind.

Neta Halperin: In regards to that, you openly said that you’re very optimistic about democracy, but today, we usually talk about technology as the enemy of democracy.

Neta Halperin: We know today that Big Tech companies have the ability to gather all the information in the world about us and understand things about us even before us, crucial elements or even sets.

Neta Halperin: I think what the differentiate your activities or the Taiwanese government activities, a lot of goodwill if we take, for example, g0v project, or vTaiwan, but we can’t say it about all the government, and of course, all other strong institutions such as a Big Tech company. You mentioned Facebook, for example. I think a practical question, but also a philosophical question about the era we live in.

Audrey Tang: I believe that democracy is self. It is a social innovation and technology. Back when in Ancient Greece, they use very innovative stone tools to pick their people randomly to attend their castles. That’s technology.

Audrey Tang: You can’t deny that it’s technology. It’s not digital, of course, but it’s still very innovative. The point is that we can improve democracy, just as we can improve, say, semiconductor design and layout.

Audrey Tang: People can think of innovative way to improve the bitrate so that individuals don’t think that they can only contribute to the community of democracy by voting, which, like three bits every four years uploaded.

Audrey Tang: It’s a very small bandwidth is that we can design, like quadratic voting, Presidential Hackathon, things like the continuous petitions, and like that, so that people can say, “Oh, I wake up with a good idea, and 24 hours later, it became policy.”

Audrey Tang: By making the democracy relevant, it is to think of democracy itself as a technology so that if we keep thinking, “Oh no, democracy is just this fixed ritual, and new tech has nothing to do with democracy,” then you have people in the public service and people in the tech sector not understanding each other and talking different languages.

Audrey Tang: The insights that people deliver from the Wikipedia community, that OpenStreetMap community, the larger free software and open-source movement would not have a chance to apply to the government as a platform.

Audrey Tang: I do believe speaking common language is like design thinking, media and the digital competence shared vocabularies between their practitioners of democracy and of digital technologies is one of the most important thing of our era so that we can further digital democracy together, not just defending democracy, advancing democracy.

Neta Halperin: This is super interesting and super important. We did mention vTaiwan and g0v.

Neta Halperin: I’m interested to know whether you can give me an example of a specific project within this initiations that can help the reader understand the importance in it.

Audrey Tang: Sure. I talked about the 1-9-2-2 SMS toll-free number contact tracing and vaccines, but I think if you ask a random Taiwanese person what g0v project they have personally used, they will say is the mask rationing map.

Audrey Tang: Last February, when we introduce mask rationing, people did not have easy access to wear in their vicinity are there still pharmacies with masks left.

Audrey Tang: Without asking the government, civic technologists simply build their own maps to show in real time the availability. Not everyone is comfortable of using maps on their smartphone.

Audrey Tang: Very quickly, chat box through instant messaging, voice assistance for people with seeing difficulties…really more than 100 different applications were developed concurrently in just a few weeks to visualize, to help people navigate to the places that still have masks in stock.

Audrey Tang: I think one of the most insightful thing is that it also corrects data bias.

Audrey Tang: When we designed a mask rationing distribution, we said, we look at the pharmacies and they overlap almost completely with population centers distribution. We think it’s fair because on average, any individual in Taiwan, have the equal distance to the mask.

Audrey Tang: However, the people in the OpenStreetMap community working with the legislator and golf, analyze our data and say, “No, it’s not true because not everyone on the helicopter.” The same distance on a map doesn’t translate to the same time opportunity cost.

Audrey Tang: In the most rural areas, they have to wait for the bus for public transportation, they have to spend three hours, to reach the same amount of distance to a nearby place with small business.

Audrey Tang: Now, imagine if we don’t publish open data. Then the people may criticize through anecdotes, but they could not suggest better distribution algorithm, because they do not have the raw data.

Audrey Tang: We’re publishing the real-time raw data in a dashboard, just like stock market prices, and so on, so that people can co-create what they’re not just demonstrating to protest. They’re demonstrating by offering a demo, saying that if you do these tweaks, then you’ll be more fair.

Audrey Tang: The administration – Minister Chen – far from defending the existing policy, simply said, “Well, legislator, teach us.” So the very next day, we changed our distribution algorithm. We introduced pre-ordering, pre-registration, and so on, and solve their problems together.

Audrey Tang: Not many members of the parliament previous to the open data ideas offers this kind of co-creative solution, but now everyone is just part of the solution, because instead of accusing one another, the best innovation simply wins through popular support.

Audrey Tang: I call this the people-public-private partnership. The people came up with the idea, we amplify the idea, and the private sector implements the idea.

Neta Halperin: Wow! And this is a g0v project?

Audrey Tang: Yes. It is a g0v project…the mask rationing map.

Neta Halperin: OK. I fear we’re about to finish our current conversation, but we can continue to talk about vTaiwan in our next conversation, and all other interesting subject. It was a great pleasure. Thank you so much for your time and see you soon.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ll see you this weekend. Live long and prosper. Bye.

Neta Halperin: Ciao.