Nathan VanderKlippe: How many words of transcripts are you at now?

Audrey Tang: You mean as in since I become digital minister?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Yeah. You must be at millions of words of transcripts.

Audrey Tang: It’s not quite millions. [laughs] It’s this number of speeches, like 200k.

Nathan VanderKlippe: 237,841 speeches.

Audrey Tang: Each is a paragraph, essentially.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Wow.

Audrey Tang: I can get you the word count. Just a second… This is the word count, not quite a million.

Nathan VanderKlippe: 875,336 words, there you go. Do many people read it?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nathan VanderKlippe: You get hits on it?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Interesting. There are a couple of things I wanted to talk about. The first was the current election. You’ve been one of the people involved in some of the efforts on disinformation and that sort of thing.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Countering disinformation, but yes.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Exactly. The election’s tomorrow. I guess we can now speak about the election process. Can you give me any sense of what you’ve seen? There’s been lots of warnings that this was going to be an issue. There’s been lots of anecdotal discussion about some of the various memes and other bits of disinformation that have spread.

Nathan VanderKlippe: There’s also been efforts by, as you know, Facebook and others, ministries, parties themselves, to counter some of this disinformation at a very fast pace. What have you seen? Do you have any statistics? I know these things are hard to gather.

Audrey Tang: It’s plenty of statistics. Have you seen the LINE dashboard of the fact-checking?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Uh-huh.

Audrey Tang: That’s statistics right there. This is the number flagged as disinformation. This is unique message count.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Do you mind if I take a picture of that?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. This is a public website.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s great. It’s just easier to have here.

Audrey Tang: This is the baseline, based on what people reported. Obviously, there’s more disinformation that’s not…Like there’s more spam than email flagged as spam, but you can get a trend from the number of email flagged as spam obviously.

Audrey Tang: By warning, you say there’s early warning of the scope of the issue?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Which kind of warning are you referring to?

Nathan VanderKlippe: There’s been a lot of people talking about it, from the academic side, from the political side. There’s been a lot of people suggesting that they were concerned about this election.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, but this is a perennial issue. This is not something that’s early become public awareness since the previous election. I wouldn’t say that. There’s always disinformation in each and every election.

Audrey Tang: The main thing that’s changed is the prevalence of social media and video-based social media and the unlimited 4G connection, 10 megabits per second, every place in Taiwan at no marginal cost. People can share large videos or start live streaming.

Audrey Tang: That’s new, the prevalence of 4G, broadband as human right. That is new as of the previous election. Otherwise, I wouldn’t say that either the motivations or the incentives have changed much. The prevalence and, indeed, the amplification is new. That’s that.

Audrey Tang: You asked about the patterns, right?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Right.

Audrey Tang: This time around in Taiwan, there’s more overt pieces of disinformation. In the previous election, if you ask people, “What do you think about disinformation?” especially on the LINE system, usually they say, “That’s just something people remix.” There’s no obvious attribution line to who create it, where it was created, how it was promulgated, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Now, there’s more and more disinformation that the original poster isn’t hiding that they manufacture it or they made it. There’s more and more of the fact-checking ecosystem that also does the attribution and makes the attribution visible, which is harder than the attribution itself. That I think is new.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Baselines are hard. Are you able to do any comparatives in terms of the volumes or types of disinformation this time, perhaps compared to 2018 or 2016?

Audrey Tang: That’s a DoubleThink Lab question. I don’t have it myself, but people in the DoubleThink Lab have been doing precisely this.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s Puma Shen, yeah?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, that’s Puma, precisely this analysis. They have the numbers.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I know Facebook has had a war room here looking at some of this stuff. Can you tell me about some of the stuff that you’ve seen the social media companies do? Is it as simple as shutting down ads and flagging certain content as potentially disinformation, or is it much more sophisticated than that?

Audrey Tang: It’s sophisticated, a little bit more. I wouldn’t say much more, but somewhat sophisticated. First of all, it’s not about taking down ads.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Not about checking?

Audrey Tang: It’s about making sure that the ads are properly attributed. If they take down, that’s because they came from a extra-jurisdictional source. What we’re saying is that the norm around campaign financing here is that we have a separate branch of government called the Control Yuan that publishes the raw data of campaign donation and expense.

Audrey Tang: I call this a norm because people expect to see such raw donation data in everybody who is involved in the election campaigns, regardless of whether they’re a candidate, a candidate supporter, somebody who are volunteering to buy some ads, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Previously, Facebook was not conforming to these ads. The ads were…

Nathan VanderKlippe: Facebook was not?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, were non-transparent. There’s a lot of talks about people using hyper-precision targeting to discourage certain parts of the population from voting. Everybody else doesn’t have this ability into this information operation. Indeed, there’s a lot of evidences in the Russia to the US election report precisely using this tactic.

Audrey Tang: This time around, we’re saying to Facebook and other social media companies that you either conform to this Control Yuan standard, which is publish the raw data for a long time, keeping it after the election, and also making sure that people can independently reuse it in a structural way, which is what our Control Yuan did, so a step more than honest ads.

Audrey Tang: Indeed, we have seen projects like the g0v, the vote.ly.g0v.tw. For any pair of candidates, you can very easily compare not just where their Facebook page is, but how much they’re spending on advertisement in an hour-by-hour basis and the reach of such advertisements.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that people can very easily see not only what they did in the previous election, as provided by the Control Yuan with a very detailed breakdown, but a hour-by-hour breakdown of who exactly is being targeted by this candidate’s advertisements, where, and the reach.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Wow.

Audrey Tang: The subtext is that if anybody try to pull a hyper-precision targeting movement that discourage people from voting by spreading disinformation through hyper-targeted means, then there could be a social sanction against it, literally, the next hour, instead of waiting after the election. That’s somewhat more sophisticated.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Facebook is providing that data?

Audrey Tang: Yes, and basically conforming to the same expectation that the Control Yuan is providing.

Nathan VanderKlippe: To your knowledge, has Facebook ever done that for an election somewhere?

Audrey Tang: This is a new system for them. They’ve been prototyping this, for example, for the upcoming US election, I’m pretty sure. This interface, this structured data and so on, is because they have to work with the investigative journalists, the civic tech community, and so on.

Audrey Tang: As far as I understand, the criteria, the structured data, the presentation forms, the ad flag redesign, and so on, is being co-evolved with the demands of fact-checkers and investigative journalism community here.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think Facebook has provided something that’s exactly the same as this before, but if this turns out to work well, I’m sure they will take it elsewhere.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s one. One of the questions I had was in which ways do you see some of the response in Taiwan through this election cycle as developing solutions that could potentially be helpful elsewhere? This is one example. Where also are there examples?

Audrey Tang: The CoFacts system has been ported, as in adapted, to Thai. This is CoFact.

Nathan VanderKlippe: To Thai?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. This is CoFacts. The Taiwan project is called CoFacts. You probably heard of it.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Yeah, right.

Audrey Tang: If you take away the S and go to CoFact.org, as in singular, [laughs] then you’ll see the Thai version. LINE is as popular in Thailand as here. When CoFacts first started, there was no indication at all that a CSR arm of LINE Taiwan is going to provide the dashboard that you just took a photo from.

Audrey Tang: In fact, they were pretty much saying, “We’re just a end-to-end encrypted messaging platform,” and so on, “mere conduit.” At that time, CoFacts was the only social-sector response to what we call the problem of getting the clarification back to where the disinformation are from, a circulation problem.

Audrey Tang: By CoFacts being a viable prototype, it not only influenced LINE Taiwan to work with CoFact-like fact-checkers, four of them now, providing a CoFact-like dashboard from the LINE dashboard.

Audrey Tang: It also influenced other jurisdiction where LINE is available – Korea, Japan, Thailand, and so on – and the civic-tech community to easily – because it’s open-source, there’s no copyright restrictions – start a prototype there and use that community to collectively negotiate with the chapters of LINE in their jurisdictions.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Did you say there’s four fact-checking groups behind that now?

Audrey Tang: With LINE, yes. That’s MyGoPen, CoFacts, Rumor and Truth, and the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center.

Nathan VanderKlippe: We’ve talked about two very different things now. We’ve talked about Facebook taking a corporate action in conjunction with the government. We’ve talked about…Is it fair to say more of a crowd-sourced approach when it comes to reporting disinformation in the same way you might report spam?

Nathan VanderKlippe: What are your observations about, in general, the things that are most effective? Is it as simple as saying, “You need a whole bunch of different ways of attacking this”? Presumably, there’s no silver bullets here. Are there silver bullets?

Audrey Tang: The people who innovate to sow discord and spread disinformation are very innovative and sharing each other’s playbooks. There might be a silver bullet for any particular tactic ongoing. 20 years ago I worked with the Freenet project. I saw first-hand the co-evolution of the Great Firewall and the VPN bypassing community.

Audrey Tang: There really is no silver bullet, per se, as long as the people who sow disinformation are also evolving. It’s a ongoing thing. This is just like cybersecurity. You may have found a 100 percent good solution to a certain tactic, but that only means that from tomorrow they switch tactic.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I’ve got to tell you, from the firewall perspective, it’s not getting any better. It’s getting a lot more difficult in China these days. When you look at this in sum, there’s still been a great amount of disinformation that is circulated. Do you feel like, from an overall perspective, this election has been cleaner from a disinformation perspective? Or do you feel like it’s been a struggle or perhaps even a failure?

Audrey Tang: The surface to sow discord has…

Nathan VanderKlippe: The surface?

Audrey Tang: The potential surfaces to sow discord have been reduced by tenfold.

Nathan VanderKlippe: By tenfold?

Audrey Tang: Literally, because each referenda topic is a division in the society. In the previous election, it’s not just a election. It’s a election plus referenda. Literally, anyone can still campaign on the referenda there, but no candidates can campaign on the election day except it’s a sick day, and some candidates are also proposer of referenda. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It made it very difficult to devise counter strategies or clarification information that can respond to all the different referenda topic at once. As long as there’s a particular one that escapes the attention of the multistakeholder ecosystem around fact-checking, then all the disinformation package can go through that channel instead of by any particular candidate or other referenda topics.

Audrey Tang: Which makes it extremely difficult to defend, but this time around, we say maybe we do a year of election, then a year of referenda, then a year of election, and then a year of referenda. For everybody going into the voting booth, there’s just three things to think about, not 20 things to think about.

Nathan VanderKlippe: You’re talking about restructuring the system of elections in response to disinformation in some ways.

Audrey Tang: The previous referendum was the first meaningful one. That, by itself, is a experiment. We learned from the experiment and – what’s the word? – we pivoted.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s interesting. I understand what you’re saying. There’s a lot less scope for disinformation.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Nathan VanderKlippe: There are fewer questions out there.

Audrey Tang: There’s three surfaces, one around the presidential candidate, one around the legislative candidate, and one around parties.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That said, this is, in some ways, more important. This is the presidential election. The stakes are higher. Do you feel like all of these efforts have in large measure succeeded, or are you disappointed?

Audrey Tang: We’re still 36 hours…

Audrey Tang: From experience, the most concentrated efforts will appear 24 hours before the election, sometimes not intentional, sometimes intentional. Everybody here probably still remember the previous presidential election. The deciding factor occurred after the banning of further campaigns in the form of a viral video. I wouldn’t say anything about success or not…

Audrey Tang: …until the tallying have been done. [laughs]

Nathan VanderKlippe: Are you able to speak with any authority on the source of disinformation that you’ve seen, as in domestic versus foreign?

Audrey Tang: Of course, the TFCC will tell you which disinformation packages are attributed…Like this one, which went pretty viral, is from Zhongyang Zhengfawei, the Central Political unit, the Chang’an Sword. This is pretty clear-cut because that’s right there on their Weibo, and the timestamp is earlier than any remixes or comments.

Audrey Tang: There really is no other possible explanation but the fact that 中央政法委长安剑 – I’m trying to think of a charitable word – adapted the photo from Reuters and put a very misleading frame around it. That’s very clear-cut. I don’t have to speak to any authority about it. I can check it myself. I haven’t spoken to 长安剑 about it. [laughs]

Nathan VanderKlippe: They’re not answering your calls?

Audrey Tang: I didn’t call them, of course. It’s right there on their Weibo.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s one example. In aggregate, is the problem, as you see it, largely foreign-inspired or Chinese? Is it largely domestic do you think?

Audrey Tang: This is like asking where do memes come from. Each popular Internet meme may actually originate from a movie, a particular discussion group in Reddit, or in one of those forums that specialize in making memes. You can find, of course, the original memetic engineer, but the repurpose of that meme for political purposes is somebody else altogether.

Audrey Tang: Add to that the remixers. They remix mostly end-to-end encrypted channels, sort of AB testing, find the ones that go viral, and then start surfacing it on the public social media. By the time you see the payload, it’s kind of too late. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Every point around this is a different actor. Somebody do it for profit. Somebody do it for fun. Somebody do it for the sense of control. Some do it because they’re being paid for it.

Audrey Tang: Really, to say what is extra-jurisdictional and what is not make very little sense except for the very last-mile where it does make sense because you want to know who is paying, if anyone, for the final delivery of the package. Asking, “Where do the memes come from?” is very difficult to answer in a meaningful fashion.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I understand, but it’s an important issue isn’t it not? It does feel like it’s very different for democracy for people inside a country to be having a debate as opposed to a foreign power trying to influence, right?

Audrey Tang: I understand, but you see, I just caught a cold today, and I can’t negotiate dircetly with the virus. We are not in the same category.

Audrey Tang: They speak a bit different language, I mean the virus. It’s the same for the virus of the mind. We, of course, can try to attribute the epidemic, but it only makes sense in a aggregate sense. We try to reduce the spread. We try to increase the distance.

Audrey Tang: For each individual message, for each individual strain of virus, it is important to protect against that as a kind of public health matter and increase personal resilience and drink some coffee so that I’m not as affected.

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t quite make sense to look at it in a piecemeal fashion. By the time we’re done looking at it in a piecemeal fashion, another strain came. It makes more sense to solve it in a systemic manner, to look at inauthentic, coordinated behavior rather than any specific disinformation message.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I presume there will be an exercise in review after the election is over.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Do you have any initial ideas on what might come next? What next steps have seemed to be necessary based on what you’ve seen?

Audrey Tang: When in doubt, we throw a hackathon.

Audrey Tang: Of course, this time, we have a lot of capable people. The DoubleThink Lab is connected with a lot of folks to keep a historical archive of what has transpired during the election. Post-election, it makes sense to look systemically at all those different data sources.

Audrey Tang: Something like that has been done when Twitter did its data disclosure around antiELAB around Hong Kong. Revealing not just the tweets but rather the metadata pointing to coordinated, inauthentic behavior from actors that are state-blessed, so not needing VPN to go through the Great Firewall to access from a block of IP in the PRC to Twitter to work with to 200,000 fake accounts.

Audrey Tang: Facebook and Google, of course, corroborated on that, saying, “We’re also seeing similar activities.” Twitter says, “We’re not the ones to do analysis. We’re publishing all these data, data disclosure, and you, the civic-tech analysts, journalists, you do the analysis.”

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly what the journalistic community in Taiwan had done to look at the Twitter data disclosure. Something like that will probably happen with the post-election data.

Nathan VanderKlippe: This is maybe more of a personal viewpoint perspective. I don’t know how much you deal in these sort of things. When you look at this, there has still been a lot of misinformation flying around. Have you been disappointed with the tenor of conversation?

Audrey Tang: The tenor of conversation?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Yes, the types of conversations, the content of conversation around this election. In an ideal world, we think of elections as places where there’s a contest of ideas.

Audrey Tang: There still is a contest of ideas.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Right, but it’s been a bit shy on policy discussion, this election. Have you been…

Audrey Tang: At a MP level, I think it’s pretty OK. We do see very creative platforms and the ways to deliver platforms. I personally work with the CEC, the Central Election Committee. Everybody is using QR code and layout. Not by everybody. A majority of MP candidates are using these sort of things to make sure that they can visually communicate their ideas on a grayscale printed bulletin.

Audrey Tang: The freedom afforded by QR codes, URLs, and so on is you look bad if you only have a few emotional slogans on your bulletin. There’s a real contest of bulletin materials and how best to format it in the bulletin. Because it’s released now also as structured data, the vote.ly team, there’s quite a few, the votetaiwan.tw team. I’m sure I’m missing a dozen.

Audrey Tang: Many have been reusing these candidates’ platform graphics to analyze the trends and things like that. There’s even a crowd-sourced attempt for people with blindness to type out the main ideas there. I think there is very creative, and because of its creativity and it’s just plain fun, people spend a lot of time looking and talking about.

Audrey Tang: There was a particularly good one from 李正皓. I don’t know whether you have seen that one. It’s really good, and I want to give him special mention.

Nathan VanderKlippe: [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Just a second.

Audrey Tang: The platform,                                                       this one                                                  . That’s him. This is very interesting. That’s his…

Nathan VanderKlippe: I’ll grab a picture of this.

Audrey Tang: …platform.

Audrey Tang: This is really pretty good. Super-creative.

Nathan VanderKlippe: When was this released?

Audrey Tang: Last week or something.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Wow. There’s traditional elements. There’s cartoon elements. It’s very cool.

Audrey Tang: Also, look at the the signatures.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Very cool.

Audrey Tang: I’m fine with this tenor of conversation. This is awesome.

Nathan VanderKlippe: In general?

Audrey Tang: In general, the MPs are doing this pretty well.

Nathan VanderKlippe: How about at the very top levels of conversation?

Audrey Tang: The fact-checked community who do the real-time fact-check around the presidential conversations like the debates and the platform forums have been trying very diligently to put some sense into the policy debate. Have you seen the fact-check project?

Nathan VanderKlippe: I’ve heard about it.

Audrey Tang: This one?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Exactly.

Audrey Tang: They just type, in real time, the transcripts and find out the differences in disinformation versus misinformation versus mal-information in the various candidates. There’s, I think, three from James’ side and five from the Dr. Tsai side. All of it are just she being too humble.

Audrey Tang: For example, this one was saying that Japan…There’s one. Japan correspond delegate ambassador have been visiting Taiwan for 14 times, but when she said that, actually that was the 19th time of this type. Of course, she makes mistakes, though not on the same direction as this candidate.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Mr. Han.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. As you can see, the fact-checking community has been classifying the substantial statements versus the plain emotional statements. There’s a stark contrast between one candidate and the other.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Again, from the high-level perspective, yesterday you had a big rally in town. You had people up there talking about President Tsai’s London School of Economics credentials and that sort of thing. It feels like, from that very high-level debate, it has not been the cleanest of electoral debates.

Audrey Tang: That’s the same in every other presidential election. It’s not particularly bad by presidential election standards.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Interesting. I wonder. You’ve also done a lot of the work and you’ve received, I think rightfully, a lot of international acclaim for some of the work you’ve done on using digital tools for policy and to use very sophisticated ways of marshaling public contributions and that sort of thing on policy.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I wonder. You’ve worked on that for a number of years. Assuming that this government wins reelection, do you have plans for the next four years? Do you have plans for the next four years? What do you see as next? I know that there are other democracies who are looking to Taiwan as an example of how to marshal some of these tools for good as opposed to evil. Where do you think you can go next?

Audrey Tang: The fact that we’ve moved referenda to its own year means that we have a full year for deliberation without the feeling that whatever deliberation we do will be eventually recaptured into partisan politics because the same day as election.

Audrey Tang: It makes it much likely, higher payoff for a Swiss-style, full deliberation before referenda. Whichever side of referenda I talk with, they all want their ideas to be deliberated in more nuance rather than just in very short few weeks with a few people talking and not debating on TV. Then people go into the referenda booth being captured by party rhetorics.

Audrey Tang: No referenda proposer truly want that because each referenda proposer is also a advocate for a new direction for the polity. Just winning the referenda is not enough for them because referenda, they all are binding only for two years anyway.

Audrey Tang: What they really want is to deepen the understanding around that particular issue in the whole society. That’s what only deliberation can do. A more deliberative referenda is definitely on the horizon no matter who win the election.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Using some of the tools you’ve built or just purely for that scheduling reason?

Audrey Tang: Pure for the scheduling reason, but also we’ve been seeing the tools that we built, including the Join platform, which is a very popular platform, like 10 million visitors out of 23 citizens in Taiwan, being used as a jump board to referenda.

Audrey Tang: Virtually every referenda topic in the previous referenda session have seen a more mini version of it on our petition platform before. They use it to mobilize, to rally, to find talking points and things like that, to raise awareness. There’s no reason why we can’t use the tools we developed for the petition platform to enhance substantial deliberation leading toward referenda topics.

Nathan VanderKlippe: You would have an interesting perspective on this. This is a very big-picture question. As you know, we are at a moment of perhaps global fear about the prospects for democracy. There’s a fear in places like the US that the democratic system is not working as it should.

Nathan VanderKlippe: There is a fear that authoritarianism, both in non-democratic systems like China and in democratic systems, like the US, like India, like the Philippines elsewhere, is leading to a perversion of democracy and that democracy is on the ropes in the current context. I wonder. Do you share that fear? Do you share that sense of pessimism?

Audrey Tang: No.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Do you feel optimistic about…And I’m talking about the state of democracy, effectively.

Audrey Tang: Well just look at the CIVICUS Monitor.

Audrey Tang: Liberal democracy is predicated on a vibrant civil society. It’s based on the idea of what I call a trans-cultural republic of citizens, trans-cultural meaning instead of silo multiculturalism, people are willing to look beyond the culture that we were brought up with, that we went to school with, and look at our culture from the perspective of a different culture co-existing in the same polity.

Audrey Tang: From a indigenous point of view, for example, the Tongku Saveq, the Jade Mountain is a spirit.

Audrey Tang: From the viewpoint of Лариса Бакурова who is voting also this week, she was originally from Ukraine, with a different perspective on our democracy.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of people who are adopting a very Swiss view that the only thing we have in common that binds the republic and citizen together is that democratic process and not any particular religion, ethnicity, or whatever.

Audrey Tang: If you adopt this view, then you feel that democracy is just another social technology that everybody can participate in a civic-tech way. We can all think of better ways to do referenda, to do participatory budgeting, to do sandbox experiments, to do Presidential Hackathon, to do petitioning. I can go on.

Audrey Tang: All this is reinvigorating democracy instead of it being fossilized in a particular ritualistic form and people play game theory like gerrymandering, around it. We can instead do reverse game theory, which is mechanism design, to respond to the trans-cultural demands from the social sector, from the civil society, to democracy as a social technology.

Audrey Tang: Whenever you see on the CIVICUS Monitor somewhere that’s completely open, which is kind of rare nowadays in our part of the world. There’s New Zealand. I’m happy about that. Then you feel this sense of reinvigoration.

Audrey Tang: In the obstructed, narrowed, or even entirely closed jurisdictions, of course you feel the opposite. How much optimism you feel is directly correlated to how much civic space there is in your jurisdiction.

Nathan VanderKlippe: It feels like there are broader forces marshaling against the desire or the ability to do that reverse game theory.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Is that not…

Audrey Tang: Not in Taiwan, though.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Not in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Not in Taiwan. If you ask a random person on the street do they want democracy to evolve in a more modern form to respond to people’s need here and now, whether they support any of the three presidential candidates, they’re going to say yes.

Audrey Tang: If they ask them whether you want, through democratic innovation, to link Taiwan more to the jurisdictions around the world that have a fully open civil society, New Zealand, Nordic countries, Canada, and so on, they’re going to say yes regardless of which presidential candidate they respond to.

Audrey Tang: I say this because there’s a real investigation into this. People went to the rallies and asked those questions to the core supporters of the presidential candidates. That’s remarkable similarity. If you only look at the answer of those two questions, you can’t tell a Tsai supporter apart from a Han supporter.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s interesting. To go back to what we were talking about at the outset, to what degree do you see disinformation – here, I mean state-sponsored disinformation – as a threat to some of that?

Audrey Tang: We don’t know about state-sponsored, which is why I’m very careful to say state-blessed.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Fine.

Audrey Tang: To say sponsored, you have to do a financial flow attribution. I think there’s two layers. One is at the cognitive-spaced level, this whole rhetoric around “breakaway” territory, this whole rhetoric of the “great rejuvenation” and the “Chinese Dream”… All these are rhetorics. And also note how I put “re”-unification in air quotes.

Audrey Tang: All these are essentially cognitive-space moves that wherever and whenever people, including foreign correspondents, use these words, [laughs] they implicitly propagate this state-blessed ideology that decimates the civic space of Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: However, we’re also reasonably sure that our use of…I think it’s easier if we use Mandarin words here.

Audrey Tang: When I speak to people and I say that we need to work on technology for 透明, transparency, people correctly understand, whichever political side you’re on, that I’m saying making the state transparent to the citizen. Whereas, in PRC, that would mean the opposite, making the citizen transparent to the state.

Audrey Tang: Wherever I say that the social innovations build trust between the social groups so that everybody gets credit, people understand talking about like credit union or co-ops. Whereas, in the PRC, the words 社会信用 now means a state-sponsored scoreboard that prevents people from…

Nathan VanderKlippe: Social credit, right?

Audrey Tang: …from buying train tickets. But the same words sound the same. Whenever we talk about the importance of people’s mutual respect and peace, 和, that’s also a Japanese concept. They also use that word all the time.

Audrey Tang: The norms here are literally to respect the words you say, to have a sense of justice and solidarity, and to ensure peace together. The same words will probably be twisted to say 和谐 in the PRC, which means something else altogether. It’s censorship, actually automatic censorship.

Audrey Tang: What I’m trying to say is that I’m reasonably confident in the resilience of the civil society here precisely because, first, these words are not being twisted quite as much as the PRC have done twisting these words.

Audrey Tang: Second, the trans-cultural setting, just like biodiversity, Taiwan has the world’s, I think, 10 percent of marine biodiversity in our seas. That means that there’s no single strain of virus can infiltrate or massively change a majority of the population because people are so different in their configurations of ideas. This inherent diversity protects against this kind of propaganda.

Nathan VanderKlippe: You made an interesting analogy to your cold.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Viral outbreak. That’s the only thing I could think about now.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Have you studied public health? When you look at fighting disinformation, do you use public health models in some ways?

Audrey Tang: We do use public health analogies. Memes, being virus of the mind, naturally lead itself to analogies like making sure there’s media competence, education, starting from the first grade all the way to life-long education. It makes sense to say that we’re developing civic tech so that people who are empowered by a journalistic education can contribute to crowdsource fact-checking.

Audrey Tang: It makes sense to say that, if you do hyper-precision targeting and we can attribute it to a foreign source of income, it makes sense to put on a quarantine and say that, during election sessions, only domestic memes are allowed to post advertisements.

Audrey Tang: These are natural analogies. It’s not a stretch. It’s very easy to draw a parallel between them. But, I have not studied public health, no.

Nathan VanderKlippe: This is kind of a personal question I had. It seems to me one of the interesting elements of China’s interactions with the world – and we talked about, for example, Chinese expansionism and the Chinese model – is that, in many ways, the problems that confront China’s leadership are the same as the problems that confront the leaders of democratic countries. Fake news is one of them.

Nathan VanderKlippe: China has developed solutions to many of these things.

Audrey Tang: They spend on more on “harmony and stabilization”…

Nathan VanderKlippe: Than on defense.

Audrey Tang: …than defense.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Exactly. In China, the solution on the spread of disinformation, what their state classifies as disinformation, is things like real-name registration. It’s things like…

Audrey Tang: Facial recognition on the Internet cafés.

Nathan VanderKlippe: …facial recognition, censorship, automated tools to delete the spread of content, as well as human content tools to delete the spread of content.

Audrey Tang: And just downright blocking Wikipedia now.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Exactly, but they have a solution. That solution is actually an effective solution. Do you see it as a given that that Chinese solution is the best solution when it comes to some of these issues?

Audrey Tang: Taken to the extreme, you can say what Russia have currently demonstrated, that they can just decouple from the Internet and become a intranet, that is also a “solution.” If your computer, you don’t want virus, you can unplug the Ethernet cables. You won’t get virus if you seal the USB ports and unplug all the Internet connectivity.

Audrey Tang: If you don’t have any freedom of speech, you won’t have hate speech. That’s true, yes, but calling it a solution is weird. This is like saying to solve a privacy issue, we just make everybody accept state surveillance by default. Without privacy, there is no privacy concerns…

Audrey Tang: This is a solution only in a very macabre sense of “solution.” I wouldn’t quite say that it’s a solution if you want to make sure that it works elsewhere. When we call it a solution, I mean in a mathematics sense. It means that whenever you see a problem like that elsewhere, you can solve that in a similar way if they’re isomorphic.

Audrey Tang: We’re not saying that refusing to solve is a solution, although it is a solution. If your math teacher give you a hard problem that you can’t solve, you can say, “OK, I quit.” That is a solution, but that solution doesn’t transfer to other classmates.

Audrey Tang: Unless you’re talking about a chemical solution, which is another thing altogether. If you just dissolve the paper on which the problem is stated. Yes, it is a solution, but it doesn’t make sense to comment on it.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Your remit is obviously Taiwan. Your job description is not to fix other people’s problems, but I know you travel. How many times have you been to Canada?

Audrey Tang: Quite a few, Ottawa, Vancouver, at least two times to Toronto, three, four times.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I know you travel, and I know people want to hear what you have to say. I wonder. What is your observation in terms of what are some of the elements that are preventing other countries from going down some of these paths?

Nathan VanderKlippe: Is it just the bureaucratic, institutional resistance? What do you feel are some of the obstacles standing in the way of others using some of the tools that Taiwan has built?

Audrey Tang: Canada is a really good model. We held a workshop there, and they are adopting the same tools as we use. They contributed even for the Listening at Scale pol.is conversation. They contributed the bilingual capability, which we then use to work with the AIT on our digital dialog to allow people to comment in either English or Mandarin and automatically get a translation out.

Audrey Tang: That’s a contribution from the Canadian government because everything has to be bilingual there in the federal level.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yes. We do work together, quite closely actually. I would say that Canada is one of our main allies. That’s no coincidence because Canada is, according to CIVICUS Monitor, another jurisdiction that need to solve these issues confronting democracy in a way that doesn’t encroach the freedom of the press and the people.

Audrey Tang: They can’t take a shortcut, saying the minister can “harmonize” any journalist. That probably wouldn’t fly in Canada.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Not yet.

Audrey Tang: No, I don’t think.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That was a very, by the way, Chinese use of the word “harmonize.”

Audrey Tang: I always put air quotes whenever I say it. [laughs]

Nathan VanderKlippe: Canada contributed funding or contributed expertise. Sorry, can you help me understand that?

Audrey Tang: They contributed research too. We publish our digital democracy in, for example, social archive, which is open-access, preprint server. If you search for Taiwan in social archive, you can easily see our contributions, for example, around vTaiwan, so I still publish, even being a digital minister.

Audrey Tang: If you look at the follow-up and citations of that paper, you will see then input from the Canadian. What used to be called the Energy Board. I think they changed their name to something else.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s right. We used to be the National Energy Board.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. That’s right, the NEB, and who really want to use these ideas to do a meaningful consultation with indigenous nations when it comes to energy, like oil pipes. The courts keep telling them that they are not doing meaningful consultations with the indigenous.

Audrey Tang: It turns out that we’ve started some meaningful consultation with the indigenous. Although Canada led us, like the transitional justice equality reconciliation process. It’s a few years before we did the counterpart.

Audrey Tang: We think that in certain indigenous nations, like the Orchid Island, which is a good example where they have sovereign, blockchain, cryptocurrency thing, this data collaboratives, and negotiation around the truth and reconciliation around the nuclear waste issue and so on.

Audrey Tang: These are good examples of using modern digital tools to empower indigenous nations to reflect properly their worldview and put a idea of transculturalism on meaningful consultation. Instead of asking everybody to learn the one, official language, we changed the law last year to make the Dawu language also a national language. Now we have 20 national languages. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: All this is something that is very relevant to the continued existence of the National Energy Board. [laughs] They did quite a huge research, jointly, and published papers on their findings of how the Taiwan idea can apply to their case.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Interesting. Before I move to China, I was based in Calgary, which is where the headquarters of the National Energy Board. In effect, I did a lot of writing about pipelines. I wrote the entire route of two proposed pipelines. That issue of consultation is a central one, so that’s interesting. They’re the ones who stand to be the early adopters in Canada of some of this stuff.

Audrey Tang: Very much so, and that’s because of necessity and also because similarity in configuration.

Nathan VanderKlippe: That’s super interesting. I might reach out to them on that, because that’s super interesting.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the main contact is, I think, Annette. Let me make sure. Yeah, Annette Hester.

Nathan VanderKlippe: I’ll look her up.

Audrey Tang: They may actually make a visit sometime this year.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Oh, so this is an ongoing thing?

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Do you see yourself as building models that could be…I mean, do you see yourself as working? Obviously, yourself is working for Taiwan. But when you’re building some of this stuff, do you…?

Audrey Tang: I’m working with Taiwan, yeah.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Do you have a bigger goal in mind for you, personally? Do you feel like perhaps you can help to build things that are useful elsewhere?

Audrey Tang: I’m also a board member of three international NGOs, while being a digital minister in Taiwan. That’s RadicalxChange in New York, Digital Future Society in Barcelona and soon, the CONSUL Foundation in Amsterdam.

Nathan VanderKlippe: The CONSUL Foundation?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the CONSUL Foundation. CONSUL of course, being the major participation platform for Madrid, just like our Join Platform, and very popular in Spanish-speaking jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: We’re all in this together, right? We’re the resistance – if you take a “Star Wars” analogy – to counter authoritarianism. Whatever we try out in Taiwan, for example, quadratic voting which is a core radical exchange idea to use a mechanism designed to incentivize people to input more in the process of, for example, choosing which team out of more than 100, to receive a coach for three months to build the presidential hackathon product.

Audrey Tang: This is to solve say, marine debris, or whatever. Anyone receiving the trophy – we hand out five of them every year from the president – gets a presidential prominence. Whatever the present prime minister wants will become national public policy and rolled out within the next 12 months.

Audrey Tang: You see a real way to promote and uplift civic tech into g0v tech, like immediately. For that, we need social legitimacy. We use quadratic voting where everybody gets 99 points and they can vote. 1 vote is 1 point, 2 is 4 points, 3 is 9, 4 is 16.

Audrey Tang: These 99 points you can only vote 9 votes, but you still have 18 points left, so you have to look at another and vote for and then maybe another one. Then you found out maybe you do a 7 and 7. Basically, making sure that the marginal cost and marginal return of each vote is the same. That elicits a truthful sharing of what people really know about those Sustainable Goals.

Audrey Tang: Each is a Sustainable Goal target and builds social legitimacy. After 200,000 votes, everybody feel that they have won when the top 20 gets announced. As opposed to, if you only allow one vote per person, half people, actually more than half, will feel they have lost after each election.

Audrey Tang: When I say democracy as social technology, I mean it in a very tangible way. That’s a regulatory exchange idea. When we share our findings, that makes the case easier for, say, the g0v.it people in Italy to adopt the same for their budget.

Nathan VanderKlippe: g0v.it?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, and so on. When we share our idea of, as I mentioned, data collaboratives where the people measuring air quality negotiated collectively with the environmental ministry here for them to put Airboxes, the measurement devices, into industrial areas because we own the land from the government side. They have the social legitimacy, and so we negotiate, one data producer to one another.

Audrey Tang: This helped solve the issue of each individual user of, say, social media companies have zero bargaining power. Anyone who upload a photo tagging other people have decimated the negotiation power for everybody else involved in the same room.

Audrey Tang: This data collaborative idea then become very useful in international settings where people are figuring out how to make a real union-like structure for the people who produce data to enjoy the return and control of how their labor is being used by the surveillance capitalism apparatus.

Audrey Tang: I can go on, but what I’m trying to say is that Taiwan is one of the labs to try out…

Nathan VanderKlippe: Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, is one of the labs to try out those ideas. When we publish, we always publish with an eye on international applications.

Nathan VanderKlippe: One last question because you’ve got to go. Obviously, one of the challenges for democracy is populism. I suppose I have to ask from a very broad level. How, in your mind, do you address that? You’re building tools for public participation. How do you prevent that from being used for populism or majoritarianism?

Audrey Tang: The problem of populism is not that it’s popular. It’s that they exclude people from population. That’s its real danger. If a strand of populism, in the strict definition of anti-elite, establishment, can include more people – people under 18, people who are not born yet, people are people but are traditionally seen as mountains and rivers, and so on – natural personhood, that’s a thing.

Audrey Tang: If populism can include these people as people, then I’m all for that inclusive populism. Populism is getting a bad rap because it’s exactly the opposite in many jurisdictions. Populism is popular with certain people, so popular that they don’t consider other people as people. That, of course, is the real danger of modern-day exclusionary populism.

Audrey Tang: My point is that if we can build the mechanism of democracy toward transculturalism, then from a transcultural ground, any attempt at populism will necessarily have to speak with all those different transcultural ideas because they cannot capitalize on the silo multiculturalism where each silo consider other silos non-people.

Audrey Tang: Every person will feel that they have different lineages within their own personal stories. Any attempt at exclusionary rhetoric will be an affront to that person’s personal life story, being transcultural. That’s what I mean.

Audrey Tang: I wrote this short haiku-ish thing on the name of the country. [laughs]

Nathan VanderKlippe: The one on your twitter?

Audrey Tang: No, this is a new one.

Nathan VanderKlippe: This is a new one? When was this written? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Last month. A transcultural republic of citizens. That speaks to really a very old idea of various flowers or 諸華 you’d say, a very old idea from the warring states, that there’s all the various civilizations.

Audrey Tang: When one is mobile, one can travel between the civilizations and build a transcultural norm from various civilizations. That’s the oldest idea of the rites, or the leader’s job, is specifically designed to say that.

Audrey Tang: But of course, if you look again at exactly the same words from the PRC perspective, they are doing what we call a “夷夏之防”, right? The barrier between the civilized people and the barbarians. That’s the literal translation.

Audrey Tang: When they say they agree to the "rejuvenation of the Chinese civilization," they certainly don’t mean various civilizations including all the Western and indigenous ones. Whatever kind of 华 they mean, is a kind of hegemony of the 华 civilization at the expense of the others.

Audrey Tang: The idea of 華, though, can be interpreted as "between flowers," which is the 天下文明 vision, even literally 萬華, as in ten-thousand flowers. These two are actually two opposing world views, which is why I systemically refuse comparison like what do I think about how fast one is catching up on the other.

Audrey Tang: It’s opposite directions. It doesn’t make sense to compete if you’re running very quickly to a different interpretations of the core idea.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Cool, thank you. If I have any questions on anything, I’ll send you an email…

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Is that the best way to follow-up?

Audrey Tang: Of course, yeah.

Nathan VanderKlippe: OK. Thank you, so much.

Audrey Tang: No problem.

Nathan VanderKlippe: Very nice to meet you. I appreciate you making a few moments this morning. Good luck with the cold.

Audrey Tang: Yes, of course. Yeah, it will heal. I’m pretty resilient… Just like Taiwan’s democracy.