Audrey Tang: Welcome, and I’m really happy to welcome the first visitors to this brand new place. We, the moda, just started operation at the end of August. Already at the beginning of August, work has been carved out for us following the drills by the so-called People’s Liberation Army.

Audrey Tang: After Nancy, the speaker’s visit, we saw unprecedented cyberattacks, distributed denial-of-service the likes that have never been seen, 23 times higher than the previous peak. That, combined with disinformation, with hybrid cognitive warfare, tries to portray, for example, a couple hours of the Presidential Office website being down or the moda website being down, the Foreign Affairs Ministry’s website being down.

Audrey Tang: It’s actually not a successful infiltration. No confidential documents have been leaked. However, during the time that the websites were down, disinformation was spread. It’s a new kind of cognitive attack. Eric was having maybe half an hour of sleep every day…?

Eric Juang: Yeah, maybe seven days like that. I couldn’t actually sleep that entire…

Audrey Tang: No sleep at all?

Eric Juang: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Tireless efforts.

Audrey Tang: Because he was in charge of the information system and cybersecurity at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the time, before we poached him here.

Audrey Tang: He was right there in the trenches.

Eric Juang: Yeah, right there. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Defending on the front line, quite literally. We successfully defused that disinformation attack, using humor over rumor.

Audrey Tang: I said publicly that because the moda website, which was online the hour that the drill happened, “I welcome everyone to attack our website because it’s tied to the Web3 backbone. If you take us down, all the Bored Apes go down as well, so try that,” [laughs] — the NFT profile pictures, I mean.

Audrey Tang: That successfully dispelled the rumor about the denial of service because, after all, dialing a line to keep a line busy is not the same as actually infiltrating the command center. Within a couple of days, the disinformation died down. People understood what we actually went through.

Audrey Tang: After that, I think resilience waking up, a wake-up call on the combined previously separate arms of counter cybersecurity attacks and counter disinformation attack has been taking her point since August really.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been working nonstop to be more resilient. We really welcome people here and to share the message of resilience for all and free the future. I look forward to a conversation with you all.

IPAC Member: Thank you very much, minister, first of all, for making the time because there are busy times for you, as we just heard. We’re happy to be in these brand new rooms. Let me maybe just pass the word along because this is a delegation that is not just from one country, but from seven different countries.

IPAC Member: We’ve been traveling, or parts of us have been traveling to Washington D.C. a few weeks ago. We learned in other meetings today that this is just one delegation of many to follow to visit Taiwan, which we think is a good sign of solidarity with the fact that democracies need to stand together in these times.

Audrey Tang: We’re being turned into a journalistic report?

IPAC Member: Yes.

Audrey Tang: That’s great.

IPAC Member: Maybe just for your information, Reinhard Bütikofer who had to be the chair of this delegation is waiting, hopefully, his negative PCR test. That’s why we’re co chairing.

IPAC Member: We’re co-chairs anyway.

IPAC Member: We are co-chairs. Maybe let me just start out if that’s OK for you. Maybe you’d just share some insights, how the Nancy Pelosi visit to Taiwan basically came with some consequences for you.

Audrey Tang: As a wake-up call.

IPAC Member: Exactly. But before that, you were already known at least in Germany and across Europe as being very outspoken and very knowledgeable when it comes to cybersecurity in a field where other countries could learn a little bit from you. Maybe you can share some insights also, how you included these learnings in your daily work?

Audrey Tang: Certainly. My previous job, before taking on the moda minister role, was minister in charge of social innovation, which means co-creation in civil society. Social innovation relies on a vibrant, free society where people can look at any emerging trends and then respond even quicker than our government.

Audrey Tang: My role was, as a amplifier, to take the latest innovations from the civil society and deploy it in our work. We understand that for example, during the pandemic, there are a lot of top-down lockdown measures that’s maybe necessary or justified on public health reasons, but if the people do not understand the scientific, like why, behind those measures, they don’t tend to last long.

Audrey Tang: People eventually just got fed up with it after a few months. In Taiwan, we very successfully countered the pandemic. I think the only New Zealand did better than us worldwide without a single day of lockdown. The reason why is that it’s the people, the civil society coming up with the innovative measures starting from, of course, the mask rationing, all the way to a rapid testing, and vaccine pre-registration.

Audrey Tang: Where the other jurisdictions may find issues with disinformation, for example, I don’t know, 5G antennas found in mosques or something, we were able to use memes and Internet memes as ways to communicate through fun and humor, to make sure that it reaches the very old people, and the very young people who then spread those public health scientific messages.

Audrey Tang: When there’s also disinformation attack, intentional ones like when people panic buy, responding to a conspiracy theory, there will be journalistic photos of people panic buying. Then there’s information manipulation, trying to portray democracy as chaotic, and only the top down way of doing things, the PRC model, the Beijing model, is ever useful in countering the pandemic.

Audrey Tang: It was a very popular narrative back in 2020, 2021. We countered them again very quickly through the examination. People built ways to show the real-time inventory of masks, PPEs and things like that. Even contact tracing system, which in the PRC means that the provincial governments can actually lockdown anyone at will.

Audrey Tang: Even people who wants to fight for withdrawing funds from their banks, and so on, were subjected to this random redcoat treatment because it was very top down. In Taiwan, it’s entirely decentralized distributed, so people can put the data in the places they trust, it could be a local grocery store, it could be their telecom company, it could be Bluetooth, peer to peer, at any given time.

Audrey Tang: We’ve never mandated any to-down way to do contact tracing. We did do contact tracing very well, but without encroaching on privacy. I think the main point is that social innovation is much better than any top-down measure. When people come up with these ideas, the compliance is better, and also allows human rights or ideas that takes care better of privacy to emerge more naturally.

Audrey Tang: This is the idea of resilience for all, and with everyone, with the people, not just for the people. That forms now the backbone of their modus work on both cybersecurity security and countering disinformation.

IPAC Member: Raise your hand if you have questions.

IPAC Member: Actually, I do have one. I’m wondering what your lesson is from the Ukrainian experience in terms of launching information or counter offensive against Russia. How do you see that as possibly a lesson for Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: To counter disinformation, journalism is exactly like public health epidemiology when encountering the biological virus, except for the virus of the mind. They work exactly the same. For example, when the Kiev situation happened, I stayed up all night to refresh the web page of, I think it was the Kiev Independent, the local journalists covering the situation.

Audrey Tang: Imagine if they don’t have broadband Internet there, if there’s no way to view the video, no way to see President Zelenskyy saying I don’t need to ride in armor and so on. Then the same appetite would be there, and then the disinformation, the propaganda, synthetic big fakes or whatever, will probably saturate the international landscape.

Audrey Tang: What we have learned is that providing low latency, high bandwidth access Internet to journalists and everyone who do journalistic rec during such disasters is very important.

Audrey Tang: That is really the only way to counter disinformation. Otherwise, there’s really no way to get what’s actually happening out. To that end, we’ve decided to work with non-geostationary satellite providers. We already work with some.

Audrey Tang: We look to extend that to more than 700 fixed and mobile spots all around Taiwan so that when earthquakes happens or intentional human made earthquake happens, [laughs] we will be able to make sure that local journalists and international correspondents can get the real-time feed from wherever is that’s happening, even if our fiber optics, the telecom towers, or even the submarine cables are damaged.

IPAC Member: We also have neutral digitalization in Ukraine, but they have another goal. For example, they’ve made some apps for services for Diia. They worked with us before the war. What is mind flow of your ministry? What do you do, because they don’t publish journals? I know about it because I’m also co owner of journalism stations as expression.

IPAC Member: When this was started, we needed to organize some digital line to Poland for independent satellite. We buy power generation. We buy work for journalists in the front, and other company also to do this sample. Obviously, the digitalization, they make something out of it. They buy for satellite for Army, for example. What are you doing?

Audrey Tang: For example, we are now in talks with Alphabet – Google and YouTube – and Meta, that’s Facebook, to make sure that they also need, especially Google, to work with the journalists and practitioners here to ensure that there is a fair share of the advertisement related revenues because they are way to be a choke point to the revenue meet.

Audrey Tang: Especially the textual part of the journalism dwindled, the revenue has more than halfed during the past 10 years and workforce has dwindled more than 20 percent. If this trend goes on, then we will not have this journalistic weapon to counter the virus of the mind when the time needs to come.

Audrey Tang: All around the world, there are ways. In EU, there’s a extension of the copyrights, the neighboring rights. In Australia, there’s a collective negotiation, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Our ministry is also in charge of working with all the Ministry of Culture, of communication, and so on, to ensure that everyone understand that the public good journalism is currently dwindling and we need to work with the international, the largest platform, actually just those two platforms, to ensure there is fair compensation for journalistic work.

IPAC Member: The political EU, they have some model for business journalists. [laughs]

IPAC Member: Everyone’s liking it, I guess.

IPAC Member: Yeah, but it’s inconsistent.

Audrey Tang: It’s important. The journalistic process, which is why we also make sure media competence is part of our basic education. Just the process of the middle schoolers fact checking those three presidential candidates during their speech on platform and to get their names posted it, and they found an error in what they are saying.

Audrey Tang: That process inoculates the students, inoculates everyone from this outrage, from this fueled viral ness of disinformation. Once you’ve done journalistic work for a while, then your mind is shielded against such disinformation. It’s like the humanization process. That’s also what we’re funding.

IPAC Member: Maybe we will discuss again and maybe you can help Ukrainian journalists. That’s what is interesting for us now.

Audrey Tang: I’m very interested in doing that.

IPAC Member: Thank you so much. I really like your humor to combat the rumors, and of course, the idea to use memes to spread real information instead of just jokes.

IPAC Member: My question will be since this was an unprecedented attack, a combination of denial service and disinformation, I assume you have some a red team to come to think of what could be the worst that China could do to you. It will be interesting to hear what you’ve come up with, and also, what countermeasures you thought to stop them from doing so?

Audrey Tang: Thank you. A great question. Yeah, we had some simulations beforehand. The drill after Pelosi’s, the speaker’s visit, was the first time that they were so coordinated. Given what the recent political development after the Congress, we expect even more coordination between the cybersecurity arm and the information manipulation arm, and many other arms in the Chinese Communist Party.

Audrey Tang: This idea of resilience embedded in each and every person that is even more important as compared to before. Which is why civic journalism and media competence is so important.

Audrey Tang: We also think that, as I mentioned, it may be combined with the physical, like just disrupting to submarine cables directly to cut away the underlying bandwidth, which is why they’re the non-geostationary satellites are now part of the planning as well.

Audrey Tang: The countermeasure we take is just to be heterogeneous. Meaning that not comprised of one single point of failure. In the moda, we’re very mobile. We all use laptops. Actually, we use four different operating systems. [laughs] There’s heterogeneity even in the way that we construct our IT service. We use all three public clouds and local hybrid clouds.

Audrey Tang: We make sure that there is, at any given time, if any one major provider goes down, either the identity provider, computation provider, storage provider, with a push of a key, we can switch to somewhere else. That is more than just countering the intentional attack. It also protects against like the accidentally somewhere it catches fire as we have seen in the KakaoTalk case in Korea.

Audrey Tang: Sometimes because there’s just yearly drills, but when the real situation happens, it’s a compound issue and people have not prepared against that. If we maintain heterogeneity at all times, it will be like a continuous drill every day. Does that answer your question?

IPAC Member: Yep.

IPAC Member: I have a few questions. The first one is why is often data and open source are adopted here into one system? Why is the government not afraid in times of giving out data in cooperative civil society? This is not like a trend that we see all over the world.

IPAC Member: Another question is about micro targeting and misinformation. The two things combined, it’s a lot at times. Have you seen any trends of micro targeting, in terms of misinformation targeting Taiwanese citizens and how does it affect the discourse in general, or what is the way to tackle micro targeted disinformation?

IPAC Member: Because it’s more operating the way of advertising instead of being just misinformation, in a way. It’s more in the echo chamber of everyone’s own bubble.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, precision attack.

Audrey Tang: Now, Eric Juang here, before joining the Foreign Service, was the champion of open government data.

Eric Juang: Open data, yeah.

Audrey Tang: So that’s a Eric question. Would you like to answer that? Why were people not afraid of open data circa 2012, 2014?

Eric Juang: The start of the promotion of opendata is indeed very difficult. Most government agencies are afraid. They don’t want to release data to the public, because government agencies afraid if they make the data open to the public , maybe they can find any issue in…

Audrey Tang: Maybe we will lose face.

Eric Juang: Yeah. We try to make persuasion and encouragement our government agencies don’t worry because we have a regulation for them. They just follow regulations to open data. Everything will be fine. Due to this, our government tries to open lots of open data. Because the data is open, every citizen can use the data to develop of application.

Audrey Tang: It’s to build alliance with career public service. If people file FOIA requests, it will be the career public service doing the redacting decisions. It’s a zero sum game actually, between the activist on one side and career public service.

Audrey Tang: If we say simply that in our procurement templates and things like that, the IT systems need to simply publish as open data if it’s not related to private sector secrets upon collection. No public servants ever look at those things. They’re just following the regulations.

Audrey Tang: In that sense, we built just like weather data, so there’s a long backlog of data before people turn their attention to it. First it builds predictability. It’s not like we’ll doctor the data. We’ve been publishing that since years ago.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that if things go wrong then people find that they have the same information as the career public service. They have to actually deliver a better solution. The onus is on the activists to come up with better solutions.

Audrey Tang: I’ll use one example. During the mask creation in early 2020, the opposition party found out, the OpenStreetMap Team, that when we published a real-time inventory of the pharmacies and we say, each person has on average the same distance to the next available mask is very fair, population centers and pharmacy centers.

Audrey Tang: OSM people discovered not everyone owned a helicopter. The same distance on the map doesn’t translate to the same opportunity cost in time. In the rural areas, they will have to take five hours bus or something. The distance means nothing. That’s a data bias. Because we publish even before deciding on the way to ration and on, nobody blamed the public servants.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Health and Welfare was able to say to the Legislature, “Legislature, teach us how to do it better.” Then she says something about pre registration and so on, which we implemented within 24 hours. It turns opposition parties into our co creation party, turn a zero sum game into a positive sum game. Just publish as part of the work in the flow at work. That is the main answer.

Audrey Tang: The second one is interesting because, in 2018, we actually had microtargeting trying to interfere with the election. It was bad actually, because, at the time, the Facebook didn’t ban foreign advertisement leading up to the election time. They disclosed nothing about it, so there was no transparency.

Audrey Tang: Whereas in Taiwan, the campaign donation and expense needs to be transparent and published as open data. There’s this huge gap. Because that year is also probably coupled with referendum, it’s very easy to have precision targeted referendum related advertising that’s actually trying to convince people not to vote or things like that.

Audrey Tang: The same civil society people that really forced to control you into release the campaign donation and expense data as open data is the same people threatened to socially sanction Facebook if they don’t adhere to the Taiwanese norms. No matter what they’re doing at the US, they must adhere to the norms.

Audrey Tang: According to someone from the Facebook civic integrated team, who will later quited and become a whistleblower, only a very few jurisdictions where there’s this real threat of social backlash that Facebook invest serious energy in 2019 to enhance the transparency.

Audrey Tang: By 2019, Facebook just changed its course totally and said, “We will just publish immediately who posted social or political advertisement. We will ban all foreign interferences,” and so on. If someone tried to do that again, actually, that will be exposed, that would be a self news. We don’t see that anymore leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

IPAC Member: Sorry. Maybe Judith, and then Luke.

IPAC Member: Thank you. We’ve heard about resilience for all and protecting democratic institutions. As a UK Member of Parliament, I think you’ll appreciate my question, which is about protecting those individual politicians as well.

IPAC Member: We’ve currently got a former prime minister who’s had a phone locked in a cupboard, apparently, after being cyber attacked by a hostile government. How do you think we can learn the lessons from you? You’re in the eye of the stall, what lessons can we learn from you in terms of protecting our politicians as well?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. For example, I sign my public official documents using my mobile devices, but we adopt what’s called a zero trust configuration. It’s a technical term, meaning that the there’s no single root of trust, not the password, not my fingerprint, not the connection, not the SIM card, but a combination of these.

Audrey Tang: At any given time when I sign a public document, the FIDO, my fingerprint is checked on my device, it’s not transmitted anywhere, it’s just on my device. The connection itself, the SIM card, is checked for integrity. The phone’s apps and so on is check for integrity. If any of these show any sign of being infiltrated, so one. The other factor still protect me, and then we can discover who’s actually meddling with my phone.

Audrey Tang: It used to be that for example, if you are a minister and you are physically in a ministerial office in the building and so on, you’re given the privilege to do pretty much everything even though you don’t need those privileges. These are the places that are weakest link in cyber attacks because one phishing email and you’re gone.

Audrey Tang: Zero trust means assume breach, assume every single port will be breached, and then defend every three factors to defend against the breach, so the breach will be discovered and mitigated at the point. This hosting is co zero trust architecture.

IPAC Member: A tricky question, I want to try to draw you to make something with criticism on other countries’ digital infrastructure on the basis that I’ve had somebody impersonating me for about two years, and this has happened to many others. Finally, I had a meeting with MI5, and MI5 said, well why don’t you do a bit more two factor authentication, maybe changing my password?

IPAC Member: That’s the right advice.

IPAC Member: It might be the right advice, but I’m slightly surprised they wasn’t a bit more to it than that. I was wondering whether or not you have made an assessment over here, all the digital preparedness of other countries to counter cyber attacks like you do, and whether or not you have collaboration in that area with them trying to help them?

Audrey Tang: That’s a great question. We’ve worked with our international counterparts in red team, blue team simulated attacks, but that was mostly on the critical infrastructures, like the financial system and things like that, the ATMs, and so on.

Audrey Tang: There’s some collaboration on that front national security, critical infrastructure, and so on. What you’re saying is more the cyber hygiene of people in important places and so on. We’ve not done that, but it’s a really good suggestion, maybe we should explore that.

IPAC Member: Maybe from a German perspective, I heard these stories from Germany as well, people, especially people who are in official positions, might not be assuming that they could be a target.

IPAC Member: That could also not just impact themselves, but the work that they are doing, and also the way a country looks up to their government or to parliamentarians. I hope I speak for everyone in this room, maybe we should try to initiate something, lessons learned.

Audrey Tang: It’s a really good idea.

IPAC Member: Maybe we can just put it all together in a bowl, but lessons learned from also your perspective and assessment, because our minister is from my party and he is also dealing with the digital topics among others.

IPAC Member: There is no ministry for digital agenda. Sometimes we need more expertise. Not be offending any minister, but that sounds like it and maybe that could be a lesson to invite you to Europe, maybe.

Audrey Tang: Initially, when we send those phishing emails to all our ministers.

Audrey Tang: There was micro aggression to that because we measure how many ministers in their office actually click a phishing link.

Audrey Tang: There is a scoreboard between all the ministers and their ministries. It was not very popular for a while. [laughs] Actually, because we will have to file our incomes and savings and so on so much so that the Control Yuan email has to say this is not a phishing attack.

Audrey Tang: In the subject line because we do phishing simulations a lot. That’s really effective because it’s been six years since I’ve become digital minister at large in 2016. The first day I log into Gmail, the Gmail banner said you’re now subject to a state sponsored cyber attack. [laughs] It’s a personal wake up call.

Audrey Tang: We’ve been coordinating a lot of internal training sessions, so that, in every ministry, there’s at least one deputy minister that is sufficiently aware of these things and can be the CISO, the information security officer, to their ministry. We already have a kit, so to speak, but whether it will be considered diplomatically polite [laughs] to share this.

Audrey Tang: Maybe it still makes more sense to have, in your state departments and so on, some point person, that we can transfer this kit to, and for them to run this drill, not us.

IPAC Member: How do you maintain the momentum to carry on with those security measures after you became the minister? Have you scared them enough by your phishing…?

Audrey Tang: Oh yeah. They are very scared.

IPAC Member: …that sort of thing. They are scared enough to do it for three days, and then they…

Audrey Tang: The point is that during those three days, we have to find something that is a easier habit than their previous ways of doing things. For example, if they used to have simple passwords that’s eight digits long, and we suddenly say, you have to have 18 digits. Of course, nobody will actually remember those as if we said nothing.

Audrey Tang: With our zero trust architecture, what we have done is essentially saying just now install this antivirus on your phone which doubles as a, what we call, mobile device management tool so that from the point you install this, you don’t have to use passwords anymore. From that point onward, you just use your fingerprint.

Audrey Tang: Because using their fingerprint is easier than the password, new habits form much more easily. For example, if you want to do device authentication. Instead of seeing as one more factor, you can use it to remove a factor. Passwordless, instead of longer password plus a authentication. That’s the way to go.

IPAC Member: Which phone do you use?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

IPAC Member: Which phone do you use?

Audrey Tang: This is Samsung Note.

IPAC Member: This is better for you than iPhone?

Audrey Tang: I use always a stylus. I’ll always use a stylus because if I use touchscreen for more than 5 or 10 minutes, my brain thinks this is part of my body and I will not be able to put it down. I don’t think only me have the problem.

Audrey Tang: Everyone has this problem. It’s very sticky. If I interact through a keyboard or a touchpad through a stylus, through a mouse, I don’t have this problem. I can put it down and look at the visitor or someone, my friend that I don’t get addicted. Until iPhone ships with Apple Pencil, I’ll stick with a Note. [laughs] The minute that iPhone works very well with this…

IPAC Member: From security point of view, it’s…

Audrey Tang: It’s the same because we trust not the OS or anything, really. We trust a combination of MDM, the authenticator, the hardware security model, the SIM card, Endoleak, so you don’t have to play ultimate trust on any brand. I assume they are all breached.

IPAC Member: The overall narrative still is different to politics as I have learned them in Germany. That is it is OK to make a mistake and learn from it and be able to also publicly not deny it, but speak about it and say well, “Dear legislator, how can you help us do better?”

IPAC Member: That’s a shift in how you also can take the population that is supporting this change. You said gain the momentum of going further and further because attacks or infringement are getting more sophisticated.

Audrey Tang: There’s a crack in everything and that’s how the light gets in. The previous time when I explained this to a Canadian visitor, he was like, “Yeah, but don’t you have party politics?” I’m like, “No, I don’t belong to any party. I’m nonpartisan. I’m panpartisan.” Then he said, “You sound just like a senior bureaucrat.” I’m like, “OK, I’m a senior now.” [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is precisely the point because open data or cybersecurity is not a partisan matter. At the end of the day, the authoritarian expansionism targets member of all parties. They want to decimate trust in the democratic process itself, not any particular party. It only is reasonable we take all hands on deck approach to counter it.

IPAC Member: Your opposition party criticize you?

Audrey Tang: I’m sorry?

IPAC Member: Your opposition party criticize your work or not?

Audrey Tang: Not so much. The opposition party mostly say that they can do something better, and I always thank them for it, and then implement that in 24 hours.

Audrey Tang: There is so much pressure around there to deliver in 24 hours. [laughs] We negotiate, of course. They say, “Do that by next week.” I’m like, “Can we do it in two weeks?” Usually, they are OK.

IPAC Member: I have a question. Remember, five years ago, you talked about to create inclusive society and to let participate our people in Taiwan to politics. After five years, you have new technology. [laughs]

IPAC Member: Maybe it’s interesting to explain also because it was very innovative. I remember that you create a television channel in which people could participate by voting and not only the most vocal ones.

Audrey Tang: The one that resonates with the most diverse groups, so a collaborative diversity. It’s now part of the regulation. The national government council takes care of that work, the open government partnership work. I’m still the co chair, but I’m no longer mainly driving it. It created really good social externalities, real positive.

Audrey Tang: For example, we’ve noticed that a very active segment was people under 18 because they do not have rights to vote, even in referenda. Those online forums become their main way to catalyze change, to propose novel, interesting legislatures even. They built natural affinity with people who are 70 years old.

Audrey Tang: The 17 and the 70, they’re natural allies because they, I don’t know, have more time on their hands, [laughs] can dedicate full time for the benefit of future generations. That is what we have seen. It builds intergenerational solidarity, interestingly.

Audrey Tang: If it’s through the street lobby and things like that, many very senior people would prefer to participate, because their mobility issues and so on, over telecommunications. Video call is very natural for them to participate.

Audrey Tang: Now, they’re also mobilizing to get the national referendum, which is end of this month, to give people who are age 18 the voting right. We’re one of the very, very few countries that are still restricting the voting age to 20. People who are 18 can only vote in referenda, and we’re fixing that.

Audrey Tang: The older people are now also mobilizing online. Again, this is a panpartisan issue. During the pandemic, we’ve also seen that people use call centers, like telephone lines, to express for the people who are even more junior than 17, people who are 7 years old, 10 years old.

Audrey Tang: When they see something wrong or something that can be changed with the counter pandemic measures, they can call this toll free number, 1 922, and someone with a lot of sympathy, empathy, and so on listen to their case, either explaining or escalating their suggestions to the command center, again, to be adopted within the next 2:00 PM daily press conference.

Audrey Tang: We’ve expanded through not just online websites, but also the local community gathering, even toll free numbers that very young people can call, to ensure this maximum inclusive input into the decision making process.

IPAC Member: From which resources people in Taiwan receive information? Using social networks, some other resources, sites, newspaper, I don’t know. Is social network more popular here?

Audrey Tang: The Line end to end encryption messenger, just like WhatsApp, in Taiwan is the most popular. There is more Line accounts than population.

IPAC Member: It is under control of…?

Audrey Tang: Line is Korean-Japanese. Because it’s end-to-end encrypted, it poses a unique challenge to counter disinformation because by the time disinformation escapes from the confines of the Line closed groups, it may be already too late. The basic reproduction number maybe already too high.

Audrey Tang: The Taiwanese civil society collaborated so that just like you can report spam emails, you can also report potential disinformation Line messages by long pressing it and say flagged for disinformation. It’s very useful because it let us know at any given time which ones are the most viral in spreading. For example, I, myself, help clarify a couple of disinformation about this place.

Audrey Tang: Which was yesterday. There was a disinformation that says we’re going just to use this place for a year and then we’ll just go somewhere else, and all the declaration will be squandered. I’m like, “No, we’ll be using this for many, many years.”

Audrey Tang: The important thing is that instead of issuing a press release, which doesn’t reach the original people who receive those end to end messages, the clarification on Cofacts actually goes back to the groups that shares those messages either via The Trend Micro. That’s a private sector antivirus company. There’s a bot doing that. Gogolook, that’s another private sector company.

Audrey Tang: If you subscribe to any of those anti scam antivirus services, or even if just one of your friends is friend with Cofact’s bot, the time that I take to clarify this message actually is well spent because then it goes back to all the original groups that shares this message. Without taking anything down, this is notice and public notice.

Audrey Tang: This is especially useful leading up to the election when there is simply no time to do this full journalistic fact checking thing. For example, the fact checker discovered that there was a disinformation leading up to the 2020 election that says the people in Hong Kong, the young people, are being paid $200,000 to murder each police, their mercenaries, or something. Of course, it’s not true.

Audrey Tang: It’s coupled with a very scary looking Reuter photo. Once the Taiwan FactCheck Center, the independent fact checker, discover that the origin of the message was actually the central political and low units weapon of the CCP, they simply go back to cofacts and so on to basically say the message you just saw is propaganda. It’s sponsored by the CCP, without taking anything down.

Audrey Tang: It suddenly shifts people’s frame of reference, so that people, they still share the message, but now with a different frame. That, just going back to the route, is very important. There’s a immune system that’s built by the cross sectoral approach, collaborative fact checking, co facts.

IPAC Member: Chinese, they create some group for disinformation here, for example.

Audrey Tang: Or they just try out different narratives to see which would go viral. As I said, they are not pro or against any political party, they’re against the democratic process. As long as they can elicit chaos and a distrust in a democratic process, they’ll just go for it.

Audrey Tang: This is really is a lot like epidemiology. Instead of going after the content, taking any content, what we’re doing is to boost the immunization of everyone who contract it. This is more like coexistence and instead of like zero hate, which is not possible.

IPAC Member: That’s a good analogy. We will be having time for one more question, or if there’s no question, maybe for a photo, too.

IPAC Member: Maybe one question if there’s still time. When would you consider your ministry’s success?

Audrey Tang: It’s a success if people who think about when the next pandemic, large disaster, climate crisis, anything. People in any jurisdiction can intuitively think, oh, there’s a Taiwan model. Just like in 2020, New Zealand, I think Prime Minister Ardern said, we’ll just do whatever Taiwan does, which of course, they carry to even more success than we did.

Audrey Tang: This is important because at the time, the PRC was spreading the message that only lockdowns work, through their example in Wuhan. People who have not had experience with SARS, if there’s only one top-down choice instead of credible alternatives, they can actually go overboard with this decimation of human rights and things like that.

Audrey Tang: You don’t have to call it the Taiwan model, you can call it a New Zealand model. In any case, a democratic model is there so that whenever anything that is an emergency happens, it could be cyberattacks or whatever, the natural response in our liberal democratic jurisdictions will be more democracy instead of authoritarianism, instead of sliding back democracy somewhat.

Audrey Tang: Freeing the future, widening the narrow corridor of freedom, I think this is very important.

IPAC Member: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

IPAC Member: Thank you so much for these interesting insights and also showing us the small but also the bigger picture of what is at stake here, and how democracies cannot dig into the same methodology as autocracies do when coming to the digital age more and more.

IPAC Member: The invitation of collaboration in the future of stands from this side. Maybe we can reach out and try to arrange something after that.

Audrey Tang: Of course. I think it’s a great program.

IPAC Member: Thanks a lot.

IPAC Member: Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.