Interviewer: You came into office with really a brief to transform the way citizens talk to the government and hear from the government online.

Interviewer: So, how’s it going?

Audrey Tang: It’s going really well. Now that we have a dedicated Ministry of Digital Affairs in charge of not just open data and co-creation on data-related applications but actually also spectrum allocation, universal services to the rural and remote areas, and so on, platform economy, and even cybersecurity.

Audrey Tang: And all these things you can read on our website, not just our monthly ministry meetings, but also all the interviews, including this one, and lobbies, visits, and so on, to give a context of the how and why of policymaking, not just the what or the products of policies.

Interviewer: How does all this radical transparency make you more vulnerable to China and China’s project to reunify?

Audrey Tang: Re? When was it unified?

Interviewer: Sorry how does…

Audrey Tang: Reunify? There’s no reunification.

Interviewer: Yes, forget that. Let me ask that again.

Audrey Tang: There was not a single year where…

Interviewer: Yes, exactly. How does your radical transparency make you more vulnerable to China?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, so we talk about societal resilience, which is the society’s ability to defend against polarization, as well as the interference of information that gets people on the extremes, hate each other more, right? So that was the main angle of interference from autocracies to democracies. It’s not pro something or against something. It’s simply to increase polarization.

Audrey Tang: And so, publishing the context of policymaking is a great depolarizing tool, because people, for example, civic journalists, all the different stripes and parties, can clearly see what’s actually going on. So instead of having to wait for four years to replace the administration in order to actually get to know what’s actually going on, this is a great social object around which that people of all different parties and ideologies can come to a consensus, even on the most controversial topics, such as marriage equality.

Audrey Tang: So, I would argue that radical transparency improves societal resilience against the interference of polarization.

Interviewer: But nevertheless, China keeps trying. What is the most… What aspect of Chinese actions in cyberspace, particularly directed against Taiwan, worry you the most?

Audrey Tang: So last August, right before our ministry started, former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. And around the same time, the PLA, their military, from the PRC, started military drills with missiles and all that. And at the same time, we witnessed in a single day more than 23 times more than the previous peak the kind of cyberattacks that denied the service of the ministries’ websites, for example, Foreign Affairs, National Defense, Presidential Office, and so on.

Audrey Tang: But in addition to denying people’s access to those websites by having botnets trying to disrupt the capacity, there were also tampering. The Taiwan rail stations, the advertisement billboards, and so on, were hijacked to display hateful messages against Speaker Pelosi. And also, convenience stores like 7-Eleven that had all its bulletin boards changed. And these two, the traditional cyberattacks, like tampering, and the denial-of-service attacks, all fell into the kind of disinformation campaigns, such as those that claim, “the Taiwan rail station has been taken over,” or “the presidential office has been taken over,” and so on.

Audrey Tang: And when journalists go and check the original website for clarifications, they find it’s busy and difficult to get in. So, there is a kind of strong coordination for the first time between the cyberattack tampering, denial of service and botnets, and disinformation.

Interviewer: So that must have shocked you and worried you. How are you responding?

Audrey Tang: Well, first of all, the stock market didn’t plummet, instead it increased that day. [laughter] So obviously, the society already has some inoculations, antibodies of mind already. And I said publicly to the press that our ministry’s website went online the same hour the drill started, and have not even suffered one second of disruption.

Audrey Tang: After I said that publicly, of course, we got a lot of free testing. [laughter] But still, we remain resilient thanks to our engagement with the web3 community, the decentralized web community. Basically, it means a copy of our website, free of copyrights, can be replicated automatically on everyone who view our website’s computer, who decide to donate a little bit of their bandwidth and so on to help backing us up. So, it’s very difficult for an attacker to shut down more than 200,000 computers all around the world, including on the computers of journalists in autocracies that rely on the same technology like IPFS to keep their reportage free and tamper-proof.

Audrey Tang: So basically, we engage the public crowd, the democracy network to jointly defend against this kind of disruptions, and we’ve been successfully transferring this mode of thinking, this decentralized thinking, to other ministries and so on, so that their website’s data flow too.

Interviewer: Wow. So that… But that’s a big job. I assume that in the last round of Chinese exercises following President Tsai’s visit to the States, you didn’t have a similar onslaught of Chinese cyberattack, or did you?

Audrey Tang: Well, they tried, of course, and saw that we switched to a different defense posture, and it became asymmetrical this time in our favor, right? So, they did not attempt the same amount of denial of service, because they found that, instead of focusing on one server, one computer cluster, and taking it down, it’s now distributed all around Taiwan and the world, and very difficult now to take it down.

Interviewer: But they haven’t stopped attacking.

Audrey Tang: Well, I mean, there’s millions of attempts every day, so that’s like the background.

Interviewer: What about the attacks that are straight… like disinformation or misinformation, that go straight to individuals?

Interviewer: This is all very well to have this context of transparency and a fine effort to make solid information available, but people have to want to look for it, and a lot of people don’t. What do you do about that? Can you do anything about that?

Audrey Tang: Could you clarify what you mean by “a lot of people don’t?” People certainly engage with each other on instant messengers, social media, and so on. So more or less, everyone looks for information…

Interviewer: We were at a workshop yesterday, trying to teach elderly people who have less experience in these things not to trust if they get a message… to think twice about either fact-checking it or not putting in their data blindly and so on. These are not people who default to go and look for the truth in a broader context, particularly if it’s time-consuming.

Audrey Tang: Well, so… There are two things going on, actually, in your question. One is that how does journalists’ work, fact-checking, context-making, and so on, transmit to the people who do not have a habit of receiving broadcast journalist media? I’ll answer this one first.

Interviewer: Okay.

Audrey Tang: So, we have a platform of dialogue between Facebook and Google and so on, and with professional journalists. Google specifically set up the Digital News Co-Prosperity Fund to help the journalists, in addition to using broadcast media, also tap into this sort of social media or precision targeting media or the international fact-checking ecosystem and so on.

Audrey Tang: So that, as I mentioned, when people receive a piece of disinformation, instead of the government taking it down, we don’t have a censorship law like that. The journalists can contribute to the fact-checking network so that when people receive a piece of rumor, maybe they long-tap it and report spam or report scam and so on, and they receive a context, a label from contributing journalists that adds clarity and context to it.

Audrey Tang: If you use Twitter, it’s a little bit like Community Notes, where a controversial tweet is appended with a piece of clarification. Now in Taiwan, it may come from professional journalists or also the civil society or private sector that also engages with the fact-checking network.

Interviewer: So, take that down to the level of the elderly people I met yesterday, learning that what they saw on their screen was not necessarily the truth.

Audrey Tang: Yes, so that’s the second part, right? We felt that literacy or critical thinking and so on is just the first step. It is not necessarily the products of fact-checking, the fact-checks that inoculate people against disinformation. It is rather the act of going through the fact-checking process oneself to learn how journalists work in your work, that actually inoculates the mind. So, the point here is to switch from a literacy-only thinking to a competence thinking.

Audrey Tang: Literacy is when you read; competence is when you produce. And so, the elderly people, for example, in addition to long-tapping and reporting something as probably scam and so on, they can learn to engage with the community like co-facts, collaborative fact-checking and so on, and add context. After they look for the context and so on, they can contribute so that the next person receiving the same disinformation will actually look at the context that they managed to find.

Audrey Tang: Both my parents are in their 70s. They were both professional journalists, so they enjoyed this kind of pastime of engaging as part of the fact-checking community.

Interviewer: It strikes me that China’s approach to controlling cyberspace for its citizens couldn’t be further from what you’re trying to achieve here. How frightened are you that all this is going to get taken away?

Audrey Tang: Well, I would say that around 2014, when the retweet button, share button and so on got really viral, and people were at the time starting to worry that AIs that are like a black box will manipulate people’s emotions and get the most polarized messages across the globe, but not the moderate voices. That was the original worry.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we started developing, as I mentioned, vaccines of the mind, inoculation, cure through participatory fact-checking. But around the same time, the PRC people got so worried that they essentially did a kind of zero hate, like zero COVID policy by banning basically civic journalism, even the mentioning of the word civil society, because they were very afraid of the retweet button and what that can do to their society.

Audrey Tang: Now, fast forward a decade or so, as you’ve mentioned, we evolved in completely opposite directions. They have evolved to precisely take down the messages that they deem as potentially going viral and damaging to their authoritarian regime.

Audrey Tang: And we’ve maximally engaged even very young people to fact-check the three presidential candidates as they’re having a debate or forum and so on.

Audrey Tang: So, I would say that both sides now are very evolved in our use of technology, but it’s on completely different directions that is very difficult to compare.

Interviewer: So, are you afraid that China is going to take back Taiwan and wipe out all this that you’ve been working for?

Audrey Tang: Well, certainly not on the world’s watch. We’ve seen that around the world, that people are now waking up to the fact that Taiwan really is like a lab of democracy and freedom. It’s here that we’ve made sure that technologies that in other places of the world damaged democracy, became anti-social and so on, are actually pro-social here. And we’ve developed along with the people, not just for the people, to develop antidotes to polarization, conspiracy theories and things like that. And fortunately, people around the world take notice and become invested in the success of Taiwanese democracy. And now everyone is sending very clear messages that if Taiwan falls, then that possibility is also gone, the opportunity for technology and democracy to work with each other.

Audrey Tang: So, I’m now less afraid compared to a decade ago when we were just beginning this experiment.

Interviewer: But is it enough to protect you? The engagement and admiration of people around the world and the satisfaction of your own citizens is powerful, but not powerful enough.

Audrey Tang: What do you mean by that?

Interviewer: Well, if China decides it wants Taiwan, with all its resources, huge military and a lot of political will, it seems to me that you’re really vulnerable.

Audrey Tang: As I mentioned, this is mainly a contest of narratives. In early 2020, for example, the PRC was having this narrative to the world that only authoritarian regimes can counter COVID through lockdowns, through restriction of civil liberties and so on.

Audrey Tang: So basically, their main idea was that this is not a liberty vs. public health trade-off, but rather only by going all the way, can you have any chance to counter this virus? You’re nodding, so you remember that, right?

Audrey Tang: And Taiwan, of course, along with New Zealand and other democratic countries, proved conclusively that this is not the case. Because lockdowns or takedowns and censorship, any top-down shutdowns, actually put people in a decontextualized position, where people do not actually know what’s going on. And therefore, their innovation, their creativity cannot contribute to the counter pandemic efforts, and so the authoritarian regimes may, of course, succeed for a while but eventually, as the virus mutates, their co-creation and innovation do not adapt in return. And therefore, that narrative fell down around last year.

Audrey Tang: And so, my point is that if the people in Taiwan back then bought into that authoritarian narrative, that fuels authoritarian expansionism and would send the wrong message to the democratic world, basically saying democracy doesn’t work for those very large emerging threats. But by working together, not just within Taiwan, but with people around the world that believes in this sort of civil society-led innovations, including mask use, contact tracing, vaccination and things like that, we turned what we learned in counter disinformation, the infodemic, into valuable lessons to counter the pandemic. And so, I think together now, people in democracies around the world understand that the Taiwan model really works and we work together to counter the narrative that only authoritarianism is a solution to the emerging threats.

Audrey Tang: And as long as we keep contributing toward that direction, I do not think anyone in the democratic world will want to see that Taiwan revert back to the better days of authoritarianism or get annexed by the PRC into totalitarianism.

Interviewer: What if there’s a military attack?

Audrey Tang: What sort of military attack?

Interviewer: What if China decided to send missiles in, take out your essential infrastructure, blockade, country runs out of essential things pretty quickly and is forced to capitulate?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. so right before the interview, you mentioned that you visited one of our allying islands. We are now in Taiwan proper, but we have smaller islands. And just a few months ago, in the smaller islands of Matsu, the submarine cables that connect Matsu to Taiwan proper was cut accidentally by PRC fishing vessels and cargo vessels.

Audrey Tang: And indeed, exactly as you said, the communications were disrupted. There’s a lot of infrastructural worry, right? Like how are we going to keep communicating with people in Matsu and from Matsu to the world.

Audrey Tang: Of course, we immediately made sure that there is microwave transmission that helps solve the problem, but also we started testing the mid-Earth orbit, non-geostationary satellites from Europe that begin its operation in Matsu as a proof of concept. So, our work in communication resilience is to make sure that even when a big earthquake, natural or unnatural, destroys the submarine cables, there’s still sufficient amount of bandwidth that not just keep us afloat, but also get our messages out to the international community, for the international community to know exactly what’s going on through the international correspondents, such as you, stationed in Taiwan to report what’s going on on the ground because we learned from the Ukrainian example, right?

Audrey Tang: Right after Russia’s unprovoked illegal war of aggression, I was staying up all night just reading Kyiv Independent and other information sources. But imagine if they do not have internet there, then probably the Russian propaganda, synthesized media, will win the day. So, ensuring proper communication infrastructure, including the local resilience of the public cloud providers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon in Taiwan, that is our highest priority.

Interviewer: And maybe it’s a longer game than just an assault, as we’ve seen in the case of Ukraine, President Putin hoped that story would be over in three or four days. Here we are, a year and a bit later, and it’s still ongoing. Is that what you think might happen here?

Audrey Tang: So, the scenario we’re planning for, exactly as you mentioned, is not just a couple of days, submarine cables are cut, and, well, we repair them a couple of weeks later, and everything back to normal. Of course not, right? So, what we are working on, as I mentioned, is to work with a plurality of vendors, of all sorts of different satellite vendors. This year and next, we’re going to work with multiple vendors in more than 700 points around Taiwan, and even some in the foreign sites, to make sure that there’s sufficient amount of satellite receivers, some fixed, some mobile, so it can be dispatched to places in need, and they will just continue operating, regardless of the submarine cable situation.

Interviewer: I know that you’re busy and we’ve almost run out of time, so I would like to ask you about your notoriety now. You are the only trans government minister in Asia. How was your gender identity an issue during the election?

Audrey Tang: It’s not an issue. I’m an appointee, so I don’t have any political parties, and I don’t have constituents. My constituents are everyone.

Interviewer: But you have interaction with the public. How do Taiwanese, especially older Taiwanese, relate to your post-gender status?

Audrey Tang: So, I came out when I was like 24 or 25, so it was already a while ago, and way before I joined the cabinet. This is a well-known fact. And so being, I believe, the world’s first open transgender cabinet member, I think I feel blessed that I do not face any discrimination whatsoever in Taiwan. And that speaks volumes of, in addition to marriage equality, how much progress we have made as a transcultural republic of citizens.

Audrey Tang: Because in Taiwan we have 20 national languages, many different traditions, and some of which are matriarchal, like the Amis, some of which don’t really care about gender and so on. So, this is really great that we are in Taiwan where all sorts of different traditions can freely listen and speak to each other to co-create this rough consensus, meaning that,

Audrey Tang: okay, so we’re not perfectly happy, but we’re happy to live with it and live with people from other 19 language communities and to just co-create and prosper together.

Interviewer: So, this… If it was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen here, you’re saying?

Audrey Tang: Yes, exactly.

Interviewer: Because there’s just a serendipitous context. Context is everything.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Interviewer: One last question. What’s an e-resident? I noticed that you were made an e-resident of Lithuania of all places.

Audrey Tang: Yes. I got this e-resident card from Lithuania that allows me to digitally sign like a Lithuanian citizen. It doesn’t ultimately confer residency status, so my travel to Lithuania is not affected by this e-residency, but it does allow people working on startups and so on to easily open a bank account and to just do commerce with the EU single market.

Interviewer: I bet you love that.

Audrey Tang: Definitely. And we also have our own Taiwanese gold card for digital professionals, so if you are a startup person in Lithuania with like eight years of experience and so on, pretty soon you’ll also be able to apply from abroad without traveling to Taiwan, just on the internet, the Taiwanese gold card for digital work.

Interviewer: It’s very exciting. Thank you very much.