President Ronald Reagan: Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.

President Ronald Reagan: We maintain the peace through our strength. Weakness only invites aggression.

President Ronald Reagan: Trust, but verify.

President Ronald Reagan: I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. America’s best days are yet to come.

President Ronald Reagan: You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

Host: On this episode of “Reaganism,” we are joined by guest host Rachel Hoff, Director of the Center for Freedom & Democracy, and Audrey Tang, the Digital Minister of Taiwan since 2016.

Host: Rachel and Audrey discussed how civically minded computer programmers in Taiwan, in partnership with the Taiwanese government, are working to strengthen their democracy and improve their governance using the Internet and digital tools.

Host: They also discussed how Taiwanese social media fosters consensus rather than polarization, and how Taiwan is fighting misinformation and election interference. If you enjoy the conversation, remember to subscribe to Reaganism wherever you listen to podcast, and leave us a five star review. Thanks for listening.

Rachel Hoff: Minister Audrey Tang, welcome to Reaganism. I’m so excited to speak with you about your role as Taiwan’s Digital Minister, which you’ve served in that role since 2016. First, I would love to hear from you about your background.

Rachel Hoff: You are a former child prodigy. You worked at companies here in the United States and Silicon Valley before returning to Taiwan to be involved in Taiwan’s civic tech community, which we’ll talk a little bit about as we go on.

Rachel Hoff: Just to start, how did you get interested in computers and technology and in particular, come to believe in the power of technology to solve problems?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. I’m a middle school dropout. When I was 14 years old, I told my principal, head of my school, that during my work in a science fair, I learned that there is this new thing called the World Wide Web, and people were publishing knowledge for free and our textbooks were at least 10 years out of date.

Audrey Tang: I told the head of school that I want to do research 16 hours a day, not just 8 hours a day after school. After reading over my emails with some researches, principal who heard me said, “Okay, from tomorrow you don’t have to go to school anymore, and I’ll cover for you.”

Audrey Tang: That’s how I learned about World Wide Web to Internet community and this open knowledge tradition that everyone shares their cutting edge research, which is why these particular podcasts were also published into the commons as a token to repay the learnings that I did from the Internet community when I was 14 years old.

Rachel Hoff: That’s wonderful. I will then welcome as well our new listeners who maybe have not listened to this podcast before through that portal as well.

Rachel Hoff: You serve, of course, as Taiwan’s Digital Minister. It’s a cabinet level position that we don’t have here in the United States. For our audience, give us a little bit of context. How many countries in the world have digital ministers?

Audrey Tang: About a dozen or so, but a few more have this idea of digital ambassador. That is to say, like a representative, but not to another sovereign country, but rather with multinational semi-sovereign entities such as Facebook and Google.

Rachel Hoff: That makes sense. More to the point, what exactly is a digital minister?

Audrey Tang: People asked me that a lot when I first became Taiwan’s first Digital Minister in 2016, and I usually explained at the time in Sustainable Development Goal terms – meaning that I want to build effective partnership with reliable data, open innovation – and they said, “No. This is too abstract. Our citizens do not memorize the global goals.”

Audrey Tang: I have to speak in plain language, which is why I composed a poem, really a prayer as my job description. It goes like this. It is really short.

Audrey Tang: When we see the Internet of things, let’s make it the 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’s always remember the plurality is here.

Audrey Tang: So, a digital minister’s job is to ensure that technology works in the service of the society, not the other way around.

Rachel Hoff: That’s powerful stuff and it, I think, describes in a very intellectual way on the one hand, but also from the heart about connecting people, the foundational aspects of your job.

Rachel Hoff: Tell us what your role looks like day to day. I’m sure there’s no typical day or week in the life of Taiwan’s Digital Minister, but what are some examples of the things that you engage on a daily and weekly basis?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. At the moment, my focus is on helping the Central Epidemic Command Center to ensure that we continue to win against the pandemic with no lockdowns in the past, almost two years now.

Audrey Tang: Also, the associated infodemic, that’s the disinformation crisis like spams spreading at a virus speed of scam, so scamming spam. That’s another thing that goes with the pandemic is the infodemic. We countered that, again, with no takedown because we strongly believe in the freedom speech of the press in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Day to day, I work with a civic technologists, people who do not belong in the government, but rather in their spare time contribute new ways to do contact tracing, to do vaccine reservation, to ration out the mask more effectively in Taiwan. They call themselves g0v or gov zero.

Audrey Tang: You see, all the digital services in Taiwan are in websites that ends in GOV, just like your country, .gov.tw. This bunch of people changed the O to a zero. For each digital service you don’t like, instead of protesting about it, you can fork it.

Audrey Tang: Meaning, take an alternate vision to it and put something that .g0v.tw that people can discover and reimagine how to do such public service more effectively.

Audrey Tang: We work with that community and we make sure that their newest innovations, for example, checking in at venues without downloading any apps are incorporated into our policy making in just 24 hours.

Rachel Hoff: It’s a great example of how to leverage those tools for, as you say, not just the COVID pandemic but the pandemic of disinformation and misinformation which I want to get to later in our conversation.

Rachel Hoff: Before that, when you talk about the gov zero community and obviously, very central part of your job is working with what many call a civic tech community. It’s a community, a concept, that’s not unique to Taiwan, but many would say you all have the best or one of the best examples of that civic tech community.

Rachel Hoff: Basically, a group of technologists or computer programmers who maybe use their hacking skills for the forces of good to develop software that helps people, for the cause of public service. Tell us more. Unpack that concept of the civic tech community, in general and then in particular, what that looks like in Taiwan. You give us a great practical example for the pandemic. What is that community more broadly?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Gov zero, around 10 thousand people on online chat channels and organizing bimonthly hackathons, where people gather together, identify one or more of the pressing social issues that needs tackling, then dedicates an entire weekend working on it. It has been going around since 2012, so it has quite a tradition now.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, when we got our first presidential election in 1996, that was also the year where world web became popular. Unlike in a more advanced democratic countries with longer traditions, in Taiwan, when we first got democratized, there’s already the world web, already the Internet.

Audrey Tang: Imagine democracy not as a heritage tradition, but rather a social technology that people can work on to improve.

Audrey Tang: For example, in gov zero, there’s people working on election integrity. Making sure that during elections, all the social media advertisements on political and social issues must come only from domestic sources, and must be published with the full audit of where the money comes from.

Audrey Tang: Or, there are people working in the tallying booth when we’re counting the paper based ballots. We only have those during presidential elections.

Audrey Tang: The live stream tools benefit equally all the different parties so that people can get a real time counting information from the Youtubers that they trust and therefore improve election integrity in Taiwan. That’s also a great counter disinformation tool by making sure that the real facts spreads faster than misinformation.

Rachel Hoff: Why do you think this community has been so strong in Taiwan in particular? It’s got such a vibrant civic tech community. What is it about Taiwan that it exists in other parts of the world, but it’s really taken off there?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I believe this is because that we have a very strong social sector. In other countries, the social sector, maybe named the voluntary sector, the charities, the co ops, in social entrepreneurs, and so on. There’s a lot of different names for the third sector as there’s most.

Audrey Tang: The social sector in Taiwan do has higher legitimacy than even the public sector.

Audrey Tang: This is because during the martial law days, even before democratization, there’s already very strong charities and social entrepreneurs that works on disaster recovery, that works on human rights, that works on various issues that gained popularity, and support and respect from people in the population, especially after the turn of century major earthquake.

Audrey Tang: Because of that, our public sector, the democratically elected government policy, has a catch up to do because, since the ‘70s or ‘80s, the social sector has already been winning public acclaim and legitimacy. We only started winning that through the democratically elected president in 1996, which is already a decade or two after the social sector builds his popularity.

Audrey Tang: People generally, for example, after an earthquake or typhoon, come to trust the numbers that stem from the social sector, instead of the numbers published by the Statistics Bureau in the national, municipal governments.

Rachel Hoff: It seems like part of the origin story of the role of digital minister in Taiwan was around the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement. Tell us a little bit about that movement, what it was all about, and what the people were protesting?

Audrey Tang: Sure. In 2014, March, I was there in the parliaments building, helping to connect the occupied parliaments in the streets around it into a local area network. The point at the time was that people were against the sudden attempted ratification of a trade deal with Beijing. It’s called as Cross Strait Service and Trade Act.

Audrey Tang: The CSSTA basically, would allow, for example, the PRC components in our then, new 4G, telecommunications infrastructure. That conversation that we held in 2014 with half a million people on the street and many more online, of course, it’s going to be reverberated when 5G comes in other countries.

Audrey Tang: At the time, already people in Taiwan in the occupied parliament understood, this is not just about demonstrating against something. This is also demonstration, a demo for something. This is for good enough consensus facilitated by professional facilitators helped by civic technologists.

Audrey Tang: Those half a million people can come to agree — unlike many other occupy movements — after three weeks of occupy the set of good enough consensus on not just the 4G issue, but all the trade issues.

Audrey Tang: We succeeded in delivering that consensus, and the head of parliament ratify it. It was a successful occupy in the end of 2014 or the mayoral candidate that did not support this open government style of policymaking what they didn’t get elected.

Audrey Tang: That’s why I was recruited as a reverse mentor, along with many in the gov zero community to serve in the cabinets. I guess I just get promoted to full time after two years serving as intern. That’s the origin story.

Rachel Hoff: From intern to cabinet minister?

Audrey Tang: That’s right because I was a reverse mentor to a previous cabinet minister.

Rachel Hoff: Explain that concept of reverse mentor.

Audrey Tang: Sure. Starting end of 2014. In 2016, we promoted that to a full cabinet level. We work like bi-annually with around 35 young people, usually younger than 35. Each ministry chooses one or two of these young people to work as reverse mentors. The idea is that those young people, I’m no longer young. I’m 40 now. I used to be young.

Audrey Tang: We guided the cabinet ministers to point to the directions that may inform them to think out of the box in policymaking. We provided directions, but of course, it’s still the cabinet minister providing the resources to realize this.

Audrey Tang: My first project as a reverse mentor, for example, is to work with the crowdfunding community to make the crowdfunding laws together, work with the teleworking community to work the teleworking laws and regulations together, to work with the taxi community to regulate Uber, which we did quite successfully, and so on.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, none of these are traditionally a minister’s topics because there were no associations or unionists around such topics. We have to engage the collective intelligence.

Rachel Hoff: From protester to reverse mentor and intern to cabinet minister, that transition into government.

Rachel Hoff: I’m sure in many ways, like on the issues that you were just outlining, it was exciting to have some role in being on the public service side of things, which obviously, you must have really loved because you committed, the next step of your career to serve as a cabinet minister.

Rachel Hoff: What were the frustrations of some of those, the transition from protester from civic tech community on the outside into being on the government side?

Audrey Tang: To be personally, there’s really no frustrations because I’m not working for the government. I’m working with the government. Whatever frustrations that people have on the outside, for example, we run a e petition website where 5,000 people signature can force a ministerial response.

Audrey Tang: If it’s interagency, then we do collaboration meetings. We’ve done hundreds of this. All the frustration, for example, people are saying, “Oh, our tax filing system are explosively hostile.” That’s a real petition, then we invite the people who complain about it to redesign the tax filing system together.

Audrey Tang: There’s people’s frustration, saying, “We get confused with the PRC all the time, let’s change the time zone to GMT plus nine, one hour into the future.” Another 1,000 people said, “No, let’s remain in GMT plus eight.”

Audrey Tang: We got those two groups of people talking to each other, calculating exactly how much it will cost to change the time zone. They all agreed to redirect that fund to make Taiwan seen as more unique by contributing to open government to, for example, the LGBTIQ issues and other international issues like climate action.

Rachel Hoff: When you talk about the g0v community and the civic tech sector more broadly, it seems like it’s really just individual, civic minded individuals with technological skills who want to put those skills to the service of the people. Is there a role in that for the Taiwanese private sector for corporations or companies as well? Or is that kind of a different lane?

Audrey Tang: Definitely, I call it a people-public-private partnership. The people think of the norms, prototype, the habits, the better habits. For example, checking an interactive map before going to shop for medical mask starting February last year.

Audrey Tang: It’s not a government project. Literally, people from the g0v community built dozens, if not hundreds, of such prototypes to ensure that people get masks as quickly as possible.

Audrey Tang: Then, we amplify those norms with public service announcements with very cute doc saying, “The mask are here to protect your own face against your own unwashed hands.” Who could disagree with that?

Audrey Tang: We amplify the norms that a civic type people do by the force on the private sector, the pharmacies, the convenience store chains, the manufacturer of those mask to join the system prototype by the civic tech sector to ensure that we start it from, I guess, less than two masks on average, per person, per week, and growing up very quickly so that we can currently have unlimited mask.

Audrey Tang: At that time, in just a couple of months, we iterated, until that we can have, for example, 9 medical grade masks per 14 days.

Rachel Hoff: I want to bridge the conversation now to talk about not just the gov zero platform and the tools that have been developed to create more citizen responsive governments, but to talk about social media as well.

Rachel Hoff: Here in the United States, Facebook has been back in the headlines recently about modifying the algorithm to turn off safe guards against disinformation and allowing some of the increased engagement and presumably, increased revenue on Facebook as a result, but ultimately contributing to polarization and dissent rather than the integrative aspect of social media.

Rachel Hoff: Taiwan has a different approach of leveraging social media technologies for the purpose of forging consensus among the population rather than creating polarization and division. Tell us a little bit about how that happens.

Audrey Tang: Certainly. During this Sunflower Occupy, we discovered that as long as people have a more pro social public square, so to speak, to listen to one another and scale, then they will not take the outrage into a more discrimination, vengefulness, other hateful outlets of those emotions.

Audrey Tang: Building the public squares are very important. Just as you would hold a town hall instead of a nightclub with smoke filled rooms, people have to shout to get heard, private bouncers, addictive drinks.

Audrey Tang: With all due respect, the entertainment sector serves a important role in the society. It’s just the role is not to hold town halls. To try to deliberate policy on Facebook would be akin to choosing a particular nightclub branded Facebook to held our policy discussion.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that wouldn’t work, and so it’s not about constituents. It’s not about the quality of people, but rather about the quality of this space.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, for more than 25 years now we’ve got pro social social media in the form, for example, a PTT, which is entirely subsidized by the academic network. It has no shareholders and no advertisers, and it enjoys academic freedom.

Audrey Tang: For example, in 2019 December, when Dr. Li Wenliang from Wuhan shared on their social media that there’s seven new SARS cases from Wuhan, well, that didn’t reach the people in Wuhan as we all know, but it did reach the PTT. Within just 24 hours of reaching the PTT, we started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan.

Audrey Tang: On PTT people contributed their expertise, their knowledge to triage this particular piece of information. Building pro social public infrastructure in the digital realm could make consensus together. When we make policy around say Uber, we also use AI, that’s assistive intelligence to ensure that people can see what other, there’s families and friends and so on.

Audrey Tang: Maybe they didn’t talk about Uber, but we can visualize their common feelings very quickly and easily. People understand. We actually have much more in common than we previously thought.

Rachel Hoff: If you paint a picture for our audience of the average Taiwanese citizen, do they have a Facebook account where they share pictures of their cat and their lunch and then also have accounts on these other platforms where they’re engaging in the pro social social media?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I guess, we maybe have more facebook accounts than we have in population. Of course, people do enjoy sharing cute animal pictures but people also understand that we have more than 23 million people.

Audrey Tang: More than half of them have participated on the join platform, the one stop e petition participatory budget, regulatory, pre announcement, and commentary, like your regulations.gov., and various other things like auditing or probably budget spending, and so on platform.

Audrey Tang: On this platform, people understand that if they erase a topic, even before they are of the voting age, indeed one quarter or more of the initiative were started by people younger than 18.

Audrey Tang: They could say, for example, let’s ban plastic straws in our national drink, bubble tea, and then, after collecting more than 5,000 signature, that results in a true inter agency face to face meeting, not just with the public servants, but also with the manufacturer of those plastic straws.

Audrey Tang: We can figure out a way forward together and the people understand only this space have binding power that can actually get the policies made and regulations changed. All the Facebook posts about it, they are just there to make sure that people are aware of the issue.

Audrey Tang: For example, posting a picture of a sea turtle choked by a plastic straw on Facebook, but then the link goes to the joint platform.

Rachel Hoff: The joint platform and the petition initiative is such a fascinating one. We have changed that org, of course, here in the US, but with the joint platform in Taiwan, if it gets 5,000 signatures, the government agency has to at least consider it, right?

Rachel Hoff: It doesn’t create policy itself, but it puts the government agency in the position where they have to either consider it or explain why they’re rejecting it?

Audrey Tang: It is not just the original petition, which is more like change the arc. We learned something from Iceland, from their platform called Better Reykjavik. After the petition is posted, there’s two columns of conversations, one pro and one contra.

Audrey Tang: Anyone joining the petition, or not, can post their ideas to resonate against each other with upvotes and downvotes. Now, the good thing of this design is that whereas the upvotes and downvotes provide useful signals, we do not have a reply button.

Audrey Tang: We cannot start a flame war across the two columns. At the end of the day, all the pretty good points are surfaced on the top of the two columns, but there is no viral hatefulness or vengefulness that usually results in other more anti-social social designs of social media that prioritizes notifications and reply buttons.

Rachel Hoff: You mentioned plastic straws. Was that an example that happened or are there other examples of policy changes that happened as a result of the joint platform?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, in the past couple of years, all the cups here do not come with the straws. They’re meant to be a drink immediately. The point here I’m making is that the regulations not always worked to the petitioners’ exact suggestions.

Audrey Tang: It did provide a way to increase what they call the bit rate of democracy. Meaning, when we vote every four years among a few candidates, that’s like three bits uploaded per citizen into democracy, which used to be pretty good.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays, people learned that we can live stream all the time. Broadband is a human right in Taiwan, so we need to increase the bit rate of democracy by making sure that people can participate on the day to day basis. In addition, of course, to the plastic straw or the redesigning of the tax filing service, and so on, we also work on more serious matters.

Audrey Tang: For example, how to adjust our referendum act. How to work with the constitutional rulings of marriage quality without offending the more traditional family to family kind of relationship, which is why we legalize the by-laws of individuals, but not the in-laws.

Audrey Tang: When two same sex people wed, their families don’t and they don’t form a kinship relation. That’s a social innovation. That’s direct result of the civic participation.

Rachel Hoff: How about the reaction from your fellow government officials to petitions that come through to join platform or other innovations from the social sector? Are they always greeted with open arms by government officials or is there a push back?

Audrey Tang: To them, I work in a purely voluntary association basis. Meaning, they can send people to my office, as secondments, one at a time. Taiwan has 32 ministries, and my office is about 20 people so that means at least some ministries didn’t send anyone to my office.

Audrey Tang: My office has secondments from the people facing ones such as Ministries of Education, Culture, Interior Communication, you name it.

Audrey Tang: For example, the Ministry of Defense never sent anyone to my office, so not all ministries are on board, of course. Certainly, not going to tell the Ministry of Defense, “From tomorrow, let’s just crowdsource our entire national defense strategy.”

Audrey Tang: That probably doesn’t work but Foreign Service did join one year or two after I become Digital Minister because they discovered Twitter was very good international examples of state leaders using Twitter very effectively, so they also want to learn from the public diplomacy, which is one part of the social sector.

Audrey Tang: I guess they’re gradually embracing these ideas. The closer to the domestic citizen’s ideas, the ministries are embracing it more quickly and there is more traditional defense issues then we’re not forcing them to adapt this technique.

Rachel Hoff: Right. Certain aspects of government work and ministries and agencies lend themselves more to crowdsourcing and disruptive technology than others, I’m sure. I want to shift the conversation now to something that you mentioned earlier, which is misinformation and disinformation.

Rachel Hoff: Several years ago, President Tsai declared a war on fake news and tasked you with leading the media literacy programs for Taiwan. So many democracies around the world are facing this intensive effort around disinformation, and Taiwan is certainly no exception.

Rachel Hoff: Perhaps even one that faces it more than others around the world. False messages about COVID 19 and the government’s response in Taiwan, even false narratives around the president and her educational credentials in the presidential election.

Rachel Hoff: Taiwan’s been tackling misinformation and disinformation specifically in some interesting and innovative ways as well. Can you tell us a little about those efforts and how you’ve been involved?

Audrey Tang: Sure. Just a clarification. In Taiwan, we don’t just say media literacy. We say media competence. This is very different. Literacy is when you’re a consumer of information, and competence is when you’re recording a podcast, like making narratives and making media.

Audrey Tang: In our basic education curriculum, which I helped to chart before I joined the Cabinet, we emphasize the idea of the students themselves participating in making news. For example, during our three presidential candidate debate and forum, the middle schoolers will fact check them in real time and work with the public TV and other…

Rachel Hoff: Middle schoolers?

Audrey Tang: Middle schoolers. It’s not just a exercise. Actually, their output is seen directly by the people watching the debate live. Well, not just middle schoolers, everyone in the society but middle schoolers see it as a civics class assignment.

Audrey Tang: Just like the Banning the Plastic Straw petition was a civics class assignment from senior high. Anyway, the point I’m making is that when people participate in making the news and learning about the importance of rigor in journalism, then they have the vaccine of the mind against the more outrageous media messages that spread by the more anti-social corner of the social media.

Audrey Tang: If they can only receive consumed information, sometimes very difficult to tell one source of information against the other without learning the fact checking skills oneself. Also, we help to communicate to dispel the trending rumors by what we call “Humor Over Rumor.”

Audrey Tang: Basically, we identify by people flagging, voluntarily, spam in their communication media, like if you receive a email, it doesn’t go to your junk mail folder but you think it should. You can flag it as junk mail and that signal gets reported to Spamhaus, an international network.

Audrey Tang: The next time that spammer tries to send to somebody else, it lands in their junk mailbox, not their inbox. We’ve been working on the account response strategy for decades now, so we apply the same strategy.

Audrey Tang: If you’re a Taiwanese citizen, and you enter into an encrypted chat group, usually underlying platform, and you see a viral scamming spam, that’s disinformation, you can long press it and then report it to one of the partners in International Fact checking Network.

Audrey Tang: We have a real time picture of what kind of disinformation are viral at any given moment. There’s maybe just two or three every day, and then the participation offices, the folks who are themselves comedian or work closer with comedians in each Ministry then dispel those rumors by making self deprecating humor.

Audrey Tang: Also cute dog pictures, and so on. People who laugh about those memes, well, they don’t get that much outreach anymore to share the original disinformation and are more in the mood to fact check.

Rachel Hoff: Yeah, it seems like the challenge with fact checking is building and ensuring public trust in the fact checkers. You think that building humor as a means of engagement for the citizens has proved successful for Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: We need to democratize fact checking. Democratize doesn’t mean just to make it inexpensive and accessible, which is this century’s use of the term, but the last century’s use of the term when Taiwan was democratized. Meaning, everybody has a say in it.

Audrey Tang: By crowdsourcing, also the fact checking and offering like Wikipedia, there’s a g0v project of Cofacts or collaborative fact. Anyone from any position can join this collaborative fact checking, and that, by and large, make people feel better because if they think their professional fact checkers are wrong, they have equal voice just like Wikipedia versus the Britannica.

Rachel Hoff: We’ve talked about so many technological tools and platforms that you and the government and the social sector are using. Often, we think of technology as a young person’s game.

Rachel Hoff: When you think about these tools and platforms in the Taiwanese context, what would you say about the adoption of the older of these tools and technologies by the older generation of Taiwanese citizens?

Audrey Tang: I talked about how 16 and 17 years old contributed more than a quarter of citizen initiatives. The second most active group are the 60 and 70 years old, that is to say, the retired population, because maybe they have more time on their hands.

Audrey Tang: Because of this, they form natural allies, the younger people, their grandchildren’s, for example, help their grandparents to initiate citizens petitions, and the wisdom of the elderly translates that call to purpose into something that resonates best with your neighbors.

Audrey Tang: This is based on broadband as a human rights. The senior people who are more comfortable with video conferencing as we’re having now, instead of just writing some petition text using keyboards. They can still fully participate using live streaming and other assistive technologies.

Rachel Hoff: Even those who didn’t grow up as digital natives with access to computer and Internet at their fingertips are able to bring to the table what they do have, which is, as you say, the wisdom of age and bridge the generation gap with the best of both worlds.

Rachel Hoff: There’s been a lot of pessimism both in the United States and around the world about the role of technology, its impact on democracy in a very different way than we’ve been talking about in our conversation so far.

Rachel Hoff: Taiwan provides such an example for how technology can really be leveraged to strengthen and embolden democracy and democratic institutions, the power of social media to forge consensus using these misinformation and disinformation, media competency tools that you described.

Rachel Hoff: Do you think Taiwan just has the right confluence of factors from a civic minded society, highly educated population? Maybe, a tradition of civic trust to make that work? Or is that something that other democracies can learn lessons from and adapt to their own societies, even if they’re very different countries, than Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: For example, the collaborative fact checking has spread to a lot of different jurisdictions in the Indo-Pacific, some of them less democratically advanced than Taiwan, but then people, the social sector there, just as Taiwan’s martial law days, focus on the non political fact checking issues.

Audrey Tang: For example, around the environment, around putting this food and that drug together causes cancer or something. That’s also a very popular misinformation in Taiwan. By focusing on the food and drug, environment, and things like that, they do not directly threaten the more authoritarian government.

Audrey Tang: But still, they do amass the legitimacy that I hope will one day surpass that of the authoritarian government, as what happened in Taiwan during the ‘80s.

Audrey Tang: I would say, any place where there is a social sector, any place where people contribute to issues that affects everyone, everyone’s business with everyone’s help, then there is a room for the Taiwan model to work as tools in a large toolkit, not as a entire transplanted modem.

Rachel Hoff: Does that mean any democracy essentially?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, any democracy, or any place that still has some semblance of freedom of speech, which is the majority of world’s population.

Rachel Hoff: Tell us about your interactions with your counterparts or maybe would be counterparts around the world from other countries where either doing digital work as a digital minister or digital ambassador, or maybe in countries that don’t have such a vibrant social sector or civic tech community.

Rachel Hoff: Do folks from around the world reach out to you to adopt those lessons that you were just talking about to their own nations?

Audrey Tang: Definitely. I nowadays often wake up before 7:00, like today, because of time zone. We’re all time zone travelers now. Because of time zone issues, I wake up to talk to North and South America friends, entering the daytime slowly moving in the Pacific, and even the East, West African, European counterparts.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, we are seeing that the counter pandemic and counter infodemic are global urgencies. Because they’re global urgencies, even in jurisdictions that previously did not have a digital minister, they have to find somewhat some way to counter that.

Audrey Tang: Some time, it is leading Internet companies or anti virus companies in their nation, so not necessarily government officials. It could also be CEOs and CTOs of the counter spam initiatives there, or it could be one of the largest consumer protection organizations, and so on.

Audrey Tang: One way or another, it’s always to boot cross sectoral partnerships to make sure that no single actor can dominate their conversation, and that’s, after all, what a democracy is based on.

Rachel Hoff: Let me close, selfishly if I may, with a question about the role of the United States whether it’s the US government, our own technology community, or American companies, or NGO and non profit sector.

Rachel Hoff: What can and should we be doing to support Taiwan’s digital innovation on the one hand and also to bring some of the lessons that you’ve shared with us today to help our own democracy and democratic institutions here in the US.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that the technologies we use, indeed the internet, have appeared in the United States, but the consensus making pro-social media AI assisted conversation like Polis came from Seattle.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we are using the open sourced free culture movements originating from the US and making sure that we apply it, not just for the governance of Internet but also governance of plastic straws and tax filing. One of the things that the US people can think about is to apply a similar model but a smaller jurisdiction unit.

Audrey Tang: For example, in Bowling Green, Kentucky, they also tried Polis in a civic assembly to talk about the pressing issues, and although people grouped into different two partisan clusters, there are things like putting art in science, technology, engineering and math, put art, that created competence part of it, to it, and also, for example, to diversify the broadband’s situation and so on.

Audrey Tang: These things enjoy broad support regardless of the political affiliation. These are the low hanging fruits that people can work on together as infrastructure projects, and that are not blocked by the partisan dynamics, so think beyond the polarization but rather to work on the good enough consensus using the tools that has a proven record, not just in Taiwan but also in smaller jurisdictions within the US.

Rachel Hoff: As you know, this podcast Reaganism and our work at the Ronald Reagan Institute is dedicated to advancing President Reagan’s legacy to address the challenges of today’s world. President Reagan’s legacy involves many things but at its core is promoting freedom around the world.

Rachel Hoff: The work that you and your colleagues are doing in Taiwan both in government, with government and through the social and civic tech sector is helping not just the citizens of Taiwan, but as you engage with your colleagues around the world helping freedom to advance.

Rachel Hoff: Thank you for your service. Thank you for what you do for the cause of freedom. Thank you, Minister Tang, for joining us on this podcast.

Audrey Tang: Thank you and we look forward to work with you and work with the people, not for the people, certainly not running people’s lives.

Rachel Hoff: Absolutely. Thank you very much and thank you everyone for listening.