Raymond Zhong: Thank you for talking. I’m sure you’ve talked to a lot of journalists recently. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I just went back from Berlin and Amsterdam, so a lot of journalists there, for sure, but not yet locally.

Raymond Zhong: Really? I’m based in Beijing. I’m not really local. I came here because I thought disinformation on the Internet was a big problem in Taiwan, but maybe that’s not true.

Audrey Tang: You’ve read the two CPJ reports?

Raymond Zhong: I saw the CPJ report. Yes. I thought it was a big problem, but then I’ve been here a few days, and I feel like people are actually pretty confident it’s not a huge problem.

Audrey Tang: It’s less of a huge problem when compared to the previous election.

Raymond Zhong: Yes. You think it’s, compared to last year, better?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, definitely.

Raymond Zhong: That just seems also because Taiwan has been dealing with Chinese interference for so many decades. People are pretty savvy about what information they get. Is this whole problem overrated? Are we talking about a problem that’s much smaller than we think?

Audrey Tang: I would say so. The magnitude of the problem can be seen in two ways. One is in the raw attempts and the creativeness of those attempts like spam email. It used to be a large problem. We talk about it less now. It doesn’t mean there’s no spam.

Audrey Tang: There may actually be more people putting their time and energy into improving ways to spam and scam people. It’s not, in raw numbers, less people practicing it. That’s one side.

Audrey Tang: One is, you just said, the confidence level that the society feels that whatever new mechanisms they invent and throw at us, there’s some way for the liberal democracy to respond in a timely fashion.

Audrey Tang: In terms of confidence level, yeah, the Taiwan society is cautiously optimistic compared to the previous election.

Raymond Zhong: What’s changed from last election?

Audrey Tang: How do I start? The election this time is not tied to referenda. That’s obviously one of the very large divisive topic off the table. The election this time is also defined by three candidates who have, broadly speaking, compatible views of Hong Kong in similar issues, which is quite different from the previous election. That’s another point of divisive removed.

Audrey Tang: Just from the structure of the election, there’s, what we in the cybersecurity call, less surface for attackers to sell the spot. It doesn’t mean that there’s nobody that wants to sow discord. It means that the topics on which they can sow discord is a little bit more limited compared to the previous elections/referenda.

Raymond Zhong: Do you think there’s much changed in terms of the actual information environment, in terms of the platforms, in terms of the companies that are involved?

Audrey Tang: The platforms have signed this counter disinformation self-regulation policy, which helps. It helps raising awareness, for one. They’ve also taken actions to attribute publicly, like coordinated inauthentic behaviors. Also because of Hong Kong, people in Taiwan have seen how a real operation looks like in practice, on social media platforms, with less self-interest attached to it right.

Audrey Tang: People become more objective, that people can see when the media publishes something about the Hong Kong issues. People can see with less immediate self-interest in their political ideologies, that it really is an information operation.

Raymond Zhong: What does make you worried? Are there any specific types of vectors that your thinking still has the biggest potential to impact the election?

Audrey Tang: In terms of disinformation?

Raymond Zhong: Is it YouTubers this time? Is it Deepfakes? Is there anything that you are worried about?

Audrey Tang: I’m personally not specifically worried about any surface, because what we’ve done really is a rapid response mechanism that reacts to new and emerging methodologies. Deep fakes, if we’re not prepared, would have been one of the differences, just in terms of the expense to generate a convincing synthetic video has dramatically fallen in terms of cost, compared of last year.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, as you said, people here have seen 動新聞, the animated news, for quite some time now. [laughs] The very fact that there could be synthetic convincing videos is already in people’s mind.

Raymond Zhong: You don’t need to make a deep fake, a very expensive deep fake. You can just make a 動新聞.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Raymond Zhong: Sorry. This is my first time reporting in Taiwan. I don’t know the environment very well. Is 動新聞 still a big part of what people watch?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there’s still various motion-captured illustrations in the media, like short animated videos in their not necessarily news coverage, but in their short films and things like that. It’s not always associated with news, but motion-captured video is a part of everyday landscape.

Raymond Zhong: Were there examples of animated disinformation in the last election?

Audrey Tang: In the last election?

Raymond Zhong: Or even 2016.

Audrey Tang: That’s a good question. I would say there’s no media using an animated doll like reenactment of something as the main vector of disinformation, but mostly because people understand that these are synthetic. They’re not really good source materials for remixes. Of course, deep fake means that any of those synthetic video can look arbitrarily real.

Raymond Zhong: Why is a meme so powerful then? As you say, people recognize a 動新聞 is not reality.

Audrey Tang: It’s synthetic.

Raymond Zhong: It’s synthetic, but people will believe a meme if they see one image.

Audrey Tang: They won’t neccessarily believe a meme. They do share the meme, different idea.

Raymond Zhong: OK, but they’re willing to share it.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s fun.

Raymond Zhong: 動新聞 could also be fun. It could also be a vector.

Audrey Tang: These are orthogonal. 動新聞 is one of the ways using motion capture and avatars to lower the cost compared to hiring an actor. That has nothing to do of whether the message is humorously viral or not.

Raymond Zhong: I’m just curious why, if we didn’t see any examples of animated disinformation, why not? What’s the reason?

Audrey Tang: Because people know that you can synthesize such things and would not share it as if it’s real. It’s much easier for the disinformation makers to share an actual footage and then make it what we call mal-information frame around it.

Audrey Tang: Like sharing there was a large protest in the presidential office yesterday – “All the media ignore it. It means that the ruling party has censorship capabilities.” – but neglecting to show that this video is actually three years ago. Of course, the media didn’t report about it because that was very old news. This kind of mal-framing is cheaper to produce because the footage is already there.

Audrey Tang: It’s easier to share because it’s more simple to understand without making any leap of faith. This kind of mal-information, third, you can try different framing and variations and do some A/B testing and see which one goes viral. Whereas using synthetic video, you have to at least rewrite a script somehow. It’s just cheaper, while being more effective.

Raymond Zhong: If this time we’re getting lucky because the candidates are pretty aligned on the big issue, in the future that might not be true. Are there longer-term things that you think the government or civil society here needs to do to insulate Taiwan for the future, or are you confident in the long term also?

Audrey Tang: That’s two different questions now, actually. If it’s not disinformation, it could be other factors as well. It’s not something that we say, “Oh, the disinformation has been fixed.” Then we pretend that propaganda or information operation or whatever is no longer there.

Audrey Tang: Of course this whole system is still there. It’s just maybe disinformation stops to be a useful vector. They will then move to other vectors.

Audrey Tang: Just our relative cautiously optimistic saying that we’ve got disarm disinformation to a certain degree of resilience doesn’t mean that…It’s like we are earthquake-proofing our buildings. It doesn’t mean that it survives a typhoon.

Raymond Zhong: As you said, we don’t talk about much spamming, although of course there is spam.

Audrey Tang: There are still a lot of spammers.

Raymond Zhong: There’s still money to be made from spam. People will try it. Is there something that can be done technologically or in terms of the system in Taiwan that will make it less of a vector, or are we already doing everything?

Audrey Tang: Media competency is something that still need to approach more cultures in Taiwan. The basic education media competency website, which you can find easily, it’s a good start. If you look at the MOE website on media literacy, you can easily see that they’re still pretty much targeted at current K-12 level.

Audrey Tang: For the elderly and elderly of different cultures and different languages and so on, there is still a lack of inclusivity in the shared curriculum when it comes to media competency.

Audrey Tang: That’s something that I believe the community colleges, the university social responsibility programs, just MOE in general, and also Hondao Foundation or the foundation that works with the elderly, they are all working toward being more inclusive when it comes to media competency.

Audrey Tang: The website I mentioned is mlearn.moe.gov.tw. You will see that they still are targeted at K-12 and just certain part of the population. We still need to be more inclusive.

Raymond Zhong: Is Taiwan’s market for information working? Is it working in the sense that the best information gets out there and travels the farthest, or is there still something that’s broken in the market, where misinformation or bad information spreads more than it should?

Audrey Tang: There’s always room to do more. At least the innovation in this area would not need a central authority to approve. The best ideas may not be reached yet, but everybody who try all these various mechanisms don’t need a central authority approval.

Audrey Tang: According to Civicus, we’re the only jurisdiction in Asia now that is completely open in this regard, that whatever the journalists want to work with civic technologists they have the most freedom to experiment. The other one, I think, is New Zealand. That’s it.

Audrey Tang: In terms of new innovations in, for example, collaborative fact-checking for the presidential candidate race or things like that, we do have really good room for the civil society to try out those ideas.

Audrey Tang: Wherever the market is broken, there is also opportunity for people to collaborate and make a better mechanism out of it. I would say that the self-repairing capability in Taiwan is very healthy, but obviously we’re obviously not at the optimal point. We’re not even at the Pareto-optimal point.

Raymond Zhong: Whose responsibility is it to get to the…

Audrey Tang: Everybody is responsible. We’re a democracy. It’s all the citizens’ responsibility.

Raymond Zhong: How big of an impact has Wang Liqiang had on this election so far?

Audrey Tang: That depends on how the Xiang Xin evolves. It’s an ongoing thing.

Raymond Zhong: Is there going to be any judgment before the election?

Audrey Tang: I don’t know.

Raymond Zhong: I don’t think so.

Audrey Tang: I don’t have any access to the administration. I don’t really know. So far, I think people are still paying attention, not necessarily to Wang Liqiang but to what Xiang Xin and the network is up to.

Raymond Zhong: Is it safe to say that it’s already helped the DPP in some way because it’s another thing that makes people nervous about China?

Audrey Tang: It’s less about making people more nervous. It’s more about putting on the record something that people have known, sometimes firsthand, for some time. There was no names on it. What this does is that it puts some names on it.

Audrey Tang: As of the information operations, a lot of people already have friends or families that were being paid during the last election to do information operation things. It’s not exactly a secret.

Raymond Zhong: In cybersecurity terms, how do you view China as a bad actor? What’s your model of Chinese influence? Is it getting more sophisticated? Is it still very obvious what it’s doing? Is it learning? How do you view it? How do you model it in your head?

Audrey Tang: In cybersecurity, what we’re looking at is, essentially, it’s an advanced, persistent threat. [laughs] You were asking about advanced part. It’s a two-way sign. I personally remember when the Great Firewall wasn’t great at all and it’s very easy to circumvent.

Audrey Tang: Especially because there’s a lot of people working on circumventing it, the Great Firewall become greater, because then people are paid to coevolve with the circumvention. Both the bypassing techniques as well as the filtering techniques become much more advanced. This is what we call generative adversarial networks. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: When the PRC try to – I wouldn’t say replicate, but introduce – similar authoritarian installations to other jurisdictions, sometimes the difficulty is that the people there just wasn’t at this constant struggle against people who circumvent it.

Audrey Tang: They sometimes don’t have the same motivation or resources for innovation because their authoritarian regimes may not rank harmony stabilization – whatever that’s called – as the top priority for the jurisdiction.

Audrey Tang: I would say the advanced part is not purely technological. It symbolizes that jurisdiction’s relative priority vis-à-vis other things that they could be spending their budget on.

Raymond Zhong: China prioritizes interfering with Taiwan. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: “Social harmony and stabilization.”

Raymond Zhong: In terms of interfering in Taiwan’s projects, right? It’s also a high priority?

Audrey Tang: Well, the same Great Firewall has been turned into a great cannon. That’s the “persistence” part in persistent threat. Just recently, it’s been used against LIHKG. Obviously, the main LIHKG is considered by the great cannon wielders, a higher threat than any website in Taiwan, because they choose to attack the LIHKG website.

Raymond Zhong: Which website would they attack if they wanted to?

Audrey Tang: GitHub, maybe. [laughs]

Raymond Zhong: That would make them a lot of enemies, not just Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It’s a large collateral, but they did attack GitHub in 2015. That was some years ago. The point here is that I model them as a rational agent that perceives the existence of LIHKG now, or GitHub a few years ago, as a threat.

Audrey Tang: Instead of saying that it’s about any particular jurisdiction, it’s about the vector that they believe will destabilize the “harmony.” Sometimes, they made some damage and sometimes, they didn’t.

Raymond Zhong: Their goal in Taiwan is not just preserving harmony. They want to take Taiwan back. They want to use the democratic system to bring Taiwan back. That’s a more complicated goal than just harmony.

Audrey Tang: It’s difficult to imagine how one can achieve that using purely cybersecurity means.

Raymond Zhong: It’d be a lot easier if they could avoid a real war to the information war.

Audrey Tang: The critical infrastructure in Taiwan are either not even a part of the Internet or are already so well guarded and penetration tested and really, every day, battle-tested that it’s pretty resilient at this point.

Raymond Zhong: What do you mean specifically?

Audrey Tang: There is a National Server Security Act that defines the critical infrastructure and the personnel and the budget required to protect that and the federated design and the resilience design that even if one of them falls, it doesn’t propagate back to the other parts.

Audrey Tang: It’s definitely something to be very diligent about and may be building industry in Taiwan, but it’s very difficult to imagine a scenario where whatever you’re talking about, the annexation is done in purely cybersecurity means. It’s difficult to imagine that.

Raymond Zhong: I mean interfering with the elections, actually, supporting pro-China candidates or leading Taiwan gradually in public opinion…

Audrey Tang: Without backfiring?

Raymond Zhong: …without backfiring. That’s the goal, I can imagine, right? I’m curious how good you think China has done so far?

Audrey Tang: As in not backfiring? It’s hit and miss. Some of it works. Some of it, when exposed and attributed, backfires. It’s hard to predict the effect, definitely.

Audrey Tang: There’s no scenario in which I would imagine that there’s just a series of information operations that are all hit and no miss, that eventually becomes what you said, a kind of democratic takeover. The attribution system in Taiwan would have been completely disabled for that to happen.

Audrey Tang: The attribution, at some point, always happens. At that point, it becomes exponentially difficult for the information operation after this point without worrying about it backfiring from that attribution.

Raymond Zhong: When you talk to the CPJ, your suggestion about fake news and disinformation is that there should be rapid response, you flood with good information in order to fight…

Audrey Tang: Funny information. Not necessarily good. Just funny works.

Raymond Zhong: Funny information. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Humorous.

Raymond Zhong: I think the issue is if people have lost faith in all information, the don’t believe the media. They don’t believe social media. They know everything has bias. They know everything is, potentially, manipulated. Then, your solution doesn’t really work. It still doesn’t restore faith.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, but it’s not an either/or. It’s not what you said, an extreme case. It’s like saying if somebody doesn’t have Internet connectivity, then you can’t reach them through social media.

Audrey Tang: That’s true but even for these people, not to mention that broadband is a human right in Taiwan, but even for those people, as I said, if you target the memes so much so that it’s humorous in their local culture, they will hear it from their friends and families anyway.

Audrey Tang: That’s how the media competency education works. It’s enabling the local people to become more informed information providers. They’re, essentially, citizen media for their friends and family. We empower them with the same set of tools that as a journalist, one needs to learn about source checking, about fact-checking, about balanced viewpoints, and narrative building, and so on.

Audrey Tang: Then, once they’re equipped with those tools, they don’t need the Internet to do such work. Journalism existed long before the Internet. That is, essentially, how this empowerment works. All the fun cat pictures are there just so that people become interested in learning something about journalism.

Audrey Tang: It’s not to say that they’re just blindly copy-pasting those cat pictures. That’s not what we’re after.

Raymond Zhong: Do you think, in Taiwan, there’s a lot of trust in the mainstream media in what the government says also? That’s a separate question.

Audrey Tang: In institutional media and in government?

Raymond Zhong: And in government, so if the government were to respond to fake news about President Tsai’s PhD thesis, they issue statements. They say no, her PhD thesis is real. Do people believe that in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: People believe in the full context of accountability. People like to make a fully-informed decision themselves. If this is a message in the form of trust as we’ve got it right, then, of course, nobody really trusts that.

Audrey Tang: If this is in the form of this is the complete report and you can download the PhD thesis from the National Library and read it yourself. Then, people tend to actually go and read it and trust more the people they already trust and what they reported after reading it. There’s quite a few people that really run it into software that matches plagiarism and things like that.

Audrey Tang: When more people do that, the more the authenticity becomes established. This example, you’re saying, this peer-reviewing the academic setting and this is, ultimately, an academic matter. People, of course, trust the academic community more than the governance or the news workers’ community. It depends on the case at hand.

Raymond Zhong: What about the institutional media? Do people in Taiwan trust mainstream media?

Audrey Tang: It depends. For people who have their information sources as diversified, as some of the younger but also increasing the older generations as well, they can make their own judgments of what the bias of institutional media tend to be and then, just pick the institutional media with a kind of error correction lens knowing that this institution is already biased in which way.

Audrey Tang: That is how media literacy works. For people who are media literate, I would say they maintain a healthy level of distrust but not overblowing it either. They understand there’s institutional bias and read and view the messages with that in mind.

Raymond Zhong: For “The New York Times,” and the US, I think we are concerned that there are not enough people like that these days, that lose faith in all large institutions. I just wonder, in Taiwan, what stage is Taiwan at? Is it so bad here or is it better?

Audrey Tang: There are certain, like the public TV system, that people generally trust. At least try and trust enough to run the presidential debates and policy presentations, which is actually going on right now.

Raymond Zhong: If you think about the disinformation problem in other countries, as you say, China has a very clear interest in doing this kind of stuff here. Arguably, compared to even Russia and the US, China’s motivation is much stronger. Why are you so confident that Taiwan is withstanding this threat…?

Audrey Tang: I’m cautiously optimistic. Not “confident.” [laughs]

Raymond Zhong: What are Taiwan’s assets in resisting this?

Audrey Tang: First of all, it’s just like biodiversity. If you have cultural diversity, then there’s less chance for a person who want to spread disinformation to find the ideological backdoor that, in a very swift motion, affects a large swathe of people.

Audrey Tang: Everybody here individuates by looking at the ideological constellations and just picking some stars that feel closer and can inform an individualistic constellation based on the transcultural tendencies they’re working on.

Audrey Tang: As transcultural Republic citizens, people understand first that there really are various cultures. Anything can be viewed through different cultural lenses. That’s something that people here intuit very easily.

Audrey Tang: Second, people understand that despite these cultural differences, we can still move forward using democratic means that are increasingly accessible to everyday citizens, not just by voting but by petitioning participatory budgeting referenda and things like that.

Audrey Tang: The more people participate in democracy, the more context they have. The more context they have, the less likely that a single propaganda can affect their understanding of any particular matter they have participated with. That’s the open government part.

Audrey Tang: The transcultural part and the open government part both serve as good, sometimes good enough, inoculations against disinformation. It’s hard to craft disinformation that targets a large swathe of people when everybody is so diverse in the beginning.

Raymond Zhong: Arguably, the US is very diverse. Do you think that helps the US also? Clearly, because I think one thing we have not seen in terms of, we look back at Russia in the US election, some of the disinformation is very tailored to specific groups, very narrow groups.

Audrey Tang: Even specific ideologies?

Raymond Zhong: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Strictly in the minority ideologies?

Raymond Zhong: Right and specific places. Is China just not good at that yet? Why haven’t we seen that here? It seems that disinformation is quite blunt here.

Audrey Tang: I wouldn’t say that. I would say that the main venue they used, thanks to the work of the analysis teams that there’s a public education, have been received by the large social media companies essentially by the reports. They patched those bugs.

Audrey Tang: For example, during the Taiwan election, it’s no longer possible to run a precision targeted social or political issue advertisement without disclosing exactly who gets affected by it. It’s just not possible anymore. It’s definitely impossible if you’re a foreign national. That closes one obvious vector.

Audrey Tang: You may want to take it to YouTube or Twitter. It turns out they don’t even allow this kind of advertisement anymore. It’s not like the people who sow discord this time is somehow not as competent. It’s just that the venues they could have been using have been attributed by the investigation into the Russia case and then preemptively closed.

Raymond Zhong: That’s true. Some of those avenues have closed. I went to Taoyuan this afternoon and talked to a city councilor who had a Facebook page just for his constituents in Taoyuan. People tried to buy it. All those people offered a lot of money to buy that. That’s quite targeted. Also, you can imagine…

Audrey Tang: One can’t easily fight against the vector of someone handing you their password.

Audrey Tang: That’s a different thing. The damage is less acute because you can’t be as precise when you do that.

Raymond Zhong: That’s true. I was not here for the last election. What were you specifically worried about in terms of disinformation last year?

Audrey Tang: Last year, for precision targeting, because it was the first election in which the raw data of campaign finance will be published by the control branch, we know that a lot of people, instead of going through the campaign donation and expense, knowing it will be fully public for the first time, instead just went to precision targeting advertisement, because they don’t have to disclose that.

Audrey Tang: That was my main worry back at that time.

Raymond Zhong: Precision targeting for advertisements on social media?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, social media. Now, of course, the norm is such that people know how is it like to disclose campaign finance by the Control Yuan.

Audrey Tang: In the self-regulation of the multinational media companies, we just say, “This is the norm here in Taiwan. We would really like to see you doing what our Control Yuan does.” We couldn’t quite say that last election because the Control Yuan haven’t published their first raw reports of campaign finance and expense to the public analysis.

Audrey Tang: Now, they have, so we just talk to them saying, “This is a norm in Taiwan. Here, you are expected to either disclose it as transparent as our Control Yuan or better, or you can choose not to run political and social advertisement during election.” By and large, they understand that this is social norm here.

Raymond Zhong: What’s the norm?

Audrey Tang: The norm is for the Control Yuan to not only do the auditing of campaign finance and expense by themselves, but rather publish the raw data of each individual record on a public platform for everybody, including investigative journalists and data scientists to independently analyze.

Raymond Zhong: They would publish advertising also?

Audrey Tang: If it’s billed as such. The previous election, what we’ve witnessed is that instead of going through campaign donation and expense to advertisement, they just simply paid for advertisement, therefore not entering the campaign finance system. It would have been hidden from the investigative journalists and data scientists.

Audrey Tang: What we’re saying is then, “This is norm in Taiwan.” If your Facebook, your Google, or whatever does sign on the self-regulation, we will say, “This is what the Control Yuan published. You’ll need to at least publish this much. Otherwise, it creates a perverse incentive for people to go to your system instead of the campaign donation one.”

Audrey Tang: That’s what Facebook has done. That’s what Google and Twitter now say, “Well, we’re just not running political advertisements this time.”

Raymond Zhong: Did that norm change since the last election?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, because the last election was the first one that the Control Yuan published this publicly.

Raymond Zhong: How did the norm change? Was there a specific…?

Audrey Tang: There was a law change.

Raymond Zhong: When was the self-regulation agreement between the platforms?

Audrey Tang: It’s actually informally just agreed upon right after the previous election. It’s written into word as something that could be cited. It was June 21st this year. This is the keyword if you want to look up online.

Raymond Zhong: Who is part of the agreement?

Audrey Tang: The initial signatories were Facebook, Google, LINE, Yahoo, and PTT. That was the initial five.

Raymond Zhong: Is PTT less influential in politics than it used to be?

Audrey Tang: I don’t have that metric here.

Raymond Zhong: Anecdotally, do you have a sense?

Audrey Tang: They stopped accepting registration of accounts. I guess as time goes by, that also means less young people are on PTT.

Raymond Zhong: Is that going to change if they start registrations?

Audrey Tang: I really don’t know.

Raymond Zhong: Why did they stop?

Audrey Tang: They couldn’t quite sort out newly registered fake accounts. Their ability to sort out fake accounts is dwarfed by the massive attempts of registering fake accounts.

Raymond Zhong: Was the Kansai Airport incident a major factor in last year’s election? Was it important?

Audrey Tang: It was important in raising awareness of the necessity of fact-checking networks. That was literally one of the first cases that TFCC processed. It really helped to show people how TFCC works and how, if it worked relatively well before this incident happens, it could have prevented part of the incident.

Raymond Zhong: You think so?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Raymond Zhong: TFCC is government-funded?

Audrey Tang: No. They don’t accept funding from governmental parties. The individual donations are only up to NTD one million each. Anyway, it’s crowdfunded.

Raymond Zhong: Why do you think that incident made such a big impact at the time? Obviously, it was tragic more than most fake news. Was there something else about it that…

Audrey Tang: I think it’s mostly that because of TFCC’s work, that really outlined exactly what happened. What prepotently have happened. People really see information operation in a higher detail. This is step by step how information manipulation works.

Audrey Tang: A full attribution, of course, always is educational. I think it was subsequently uneducating. Do they report on it, where they added more attribution work? People learn a lot about that. I think that is an important part in it.

Raymond Zhong: Ultimately, correct me if I’m wrong, TFCC has not also attributed any of that to Chinese government, right?

Audrey Tang: You mean this thing?

Raymond Zhong: The origin of the information, the bad information.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that they have said that what they have cited by the local media was originally…

Raymond Zhong: On Weibo.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, on Weibo. These were copy-pasted a source on Weibo, but they don’t quite say it’s sponsored by which entity or organized by some entity. Obviously, the initial round of reporting was simply turning some Simplified Chinese on Weibo into Traditional Chinese. That part was part of the attribution.

Raymond Zhong: Why do you think this case is having such an impact now? People are still talking about the…

Audrey Tang: Because it’s connected to something that people remembers. That’s tragic.

Raymond Zhong: Do you think it’s changed people’s impression of DPP also? It’s exposed something about DPP?

Audrey Tang: As a nonpartisan, I don’t really know how DPP thinks about this case or how the candidates think about this case. For the record, I don’t know how KMT think about this case, either.

Audrey Tang: By and large, people understand it’s something tragic. Anything that assists in the tragic progression, no matter which sources work before or after her is seen as a contributor to the tragedy. That is natural.

Raymond Zhong: Do you think the parties are responsible for creating a lot of disinformation?

Audrey Tang: The parties? As in political parties?

Raymond Zhong: Political parties.

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, there’s so many political parties that it’s impossible to make a general…

Raymond Zhong: The major parties.

Audrey Tang: I personally only associated myself, once, with one particular political party, is the Can’t Stop This Party or literally the unstoppable happy party, the 歡樂無法黨. I sent them a basket of catnip on the formation of their party. That’s the only party I associated myself with.

Audrey Tang: I would say that the more prominent party members, there’s four of them: Brian, Froggy, Chih-Chyi and Retina of the EYECTV. They’re all YouTubers who use humor in their response to further public discussion about public events.

Audrey Tang: Although, of course, many of their content is subject to debate, I wouldn’t say any of them engage in intentional harmful untruth, which is our legal definition of disinformation. The only party that I associate with I think it’s pretty OK on the disinformation front.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know about other parties.

Raymond Zhong: Separate from the China issue, this is something a lot democracies are dealing with. Digital campaigning is now very, you can do a lot of new tricks. You have a lot of tools now.

Audrey Tang: It’s very memetic.

Raymond Zhong: I don’t know in Taiwan how bad or how widespread any acquisitions of official untruth. I just don’t know how big of a problem it is.

Audrey Tang: It’s not unheard of, but I wouldn’t say it’s a dominating factor.

Raymond Zhong: Tell me what a day in the life of the digital minister of Taiwan is.

Audrey Tang: Depends on the day of the week.

Raymond Zhong: Give me a…

Audrey Tang: On Wednesday, I meet with nine batches of people, because today is my office hour. [laughs]

Raymond Zhong: That’s your office hours. What about non-office-hour day?

Audrey Tang: Yesterday, I was in Wulai because on Tuesdays, every other week or so, we tour around Taiwan to listen to the rural, indigenous, or remote places and connect back to Taipei through video conference. That’s a typical Tuesday.

Audrey Tang: A typical Thursday, I attend the cabinet meeting, the office of board of the science and technology meetings and do meetings. That’s the only day I have to be in the Executive Yuan building.

Audrey Tang: On Friday, usually, every other week or so, we have a collaboration meeting with stakeholders anywhere in Taiwan, as long as they can get 5,000 people petitioning or respond vigorously on a regulatory preannouncement, both take place on the Join platform, which has 10 million visitors, which is a lot.

Audrey Tang: That’s Friday, is summoned in two places. Every Monday, our team have a lunch together. That’s pretty much it.

Raymond Zhong: Sorry, the Friday is for a specific digital petition?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, digital petition and…

Raymond Zhong: The government has to respond to it if a certain number of people…

Audrey Tang: After 5,000. Yes.

Raymond Zhong: What kind of petitions do you hear?

Audrey Tang: There’s a listing of all the petitions and regulatory announcement we’ve worked at about in                                                       oc.pdis.tw                                                  . If you type this down, you can easily see all the 58 cases we’ve worked with. There’s some major trends, like animal welfare, transportation, improvement of digital services, public sector work environment, education. It’s a full spectrum.

Raymond Zhong: What did you hear in Wulai yesterday?

Audrey Tang: Lots of things. We were working with co-ops, which is a long and proud tradition, especially in indigenous lands. Increasingly, they’re facing a lot of regulatory challenges and differences as compared to modern companies, because Taiwan just changed our company act. Each company can have a certain sense of autonomy like a co-op, like special voting rights and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Especially the labor co-ops, which is very strange in the eye of many regulators, because they don’t have any capitalist side, it’s entirely they’re worker side. It’s difficult, for example, to talk about the insurance, the procurement, the labor law enforcement which all are designed to reign the capitalists. In the sense of a labor co-op, there is no capitalist in the equation.

Audrey Tang: How exactly do the regulations work? The public procurement, public construction commission designed a check form for people who are in the public procurement in various different municipalities and ministries to check that labor co-ops need to have their co-op charter agree with the public procurement. They cannot just get all sorts of different cases. They have to at least align with their charter.

Audrey Tang: The design is so that if you don’t click that button, if you don’t check that checkbox, then the entire procurement become illegible for worker co-ops, especially worker co-ops to apply. That becomes a discrimination of sorts. Our constitution said specifically that state is required to encourage co-ops. That creates a counter-constitutional situation.

Audrey Tang: We just work with the public procurement agency to just change that check box into a reminder text. Of course, there was 20 different cases. I’m just saying one that requires cross-literature collaboration.

Raymond Zhong: Who goes on Tuesdays? Is it just you or other ministers?

Audrey Tang: All the relevant ministries.

Raymond Zhong: Really?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s convened by reverse mentors of the cabinet, 行政院青年諮詢委員, the youth advisers. They can pick and choose which agencies they feel are related.

Audrey Tang: Yesterday, there’s at least the ministries of culture, the indigenous council, the ministries of education, economy, public procurement obviously, finance, national development. I probably have missed a couple more, at least eight or nine ministries in the meeting.

Raymond Zhong: To return to disinformation, your proposed solution that you gave to the CPJ, how much of that is implemented in Taiwan right now in terms of rapid response?

Audrey Tang: All of it. It’s what I said, one hour is quantitatively shown as the most effective. The current requirement is to respond in two hours.

Raymond Zhong: Who responds?

Audrey Tang: The cross-disciplinary team in each ministry. They all report to Kolas Yotaka, our spokesperson.

Raymond Zhong: When did that start? When did the system begin?

Audrey Tang: It’s proposed early 2017 in a cabinet meeting. It’s implemented in some form when 徐國勇 was our spokesperson. Having a clear-cut, quantitative measure within two hours, 200 characters, two pictures, and things like that, that was since Kolas took the role. July 2018 was when she became our spokesperson.

Raymond Zhong: By July 2018, the quantitative metrics of the…

Audrey Tang: Are starting to form. Kolas improved on it. As the cross-sectoral collaboration progresses, because that also gets a boost when, for example, LINE Today agree to syndicate the clarification pictures.

Audrey Tang: LINE Today only started working on that as their digital accountability plan this year, this July actually, after they signed on this counter-disinformation code of practice. There’s a year or so of preparatory work. It gained a real boost starting this July.

Raymond Zhong: That was when LINE Today agreed?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Raymond Zhong: Cautiously optimistic, what makes you pessimistic? What is the flipside of all this for you in terms of disinformation, in terms of Chinese influence?

Audrey Tang: I’m not pessimistic about anything.

Raymond Zhong: Why cautious? Why not be fully optimistic? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Because we understand that the people who are somewhat discord are also building a community, that they are also learning from each other’s playbooks. Just as how the Great Firewall becomes great is done by learning from the people who counters them and then innovating.

Audrey Tang: We never are not conscious [laughs] of the fact that there are new innovations happening literally every day. With machine learning, it’s not only human that innovates. Of course, we need to stay cautious about it.

Raymond Zhong: Were you a very political person before you became a minister?

Audrey Tang: Like Internet governance? Of course, I organized large open source projects. That’s a political work.

Raymond Zhong: What about more traditional political issues?

Audrey Tang: What do you mean by traditional political issues?

Raymond Zhong: Like the outcomes of elections and Chinese…

Audrey Tang: Oh, representative democracy.

Raymond Zhong: Yes.

Audrey Tang: Even at this moment, because I’m not…

Raymond Zhong: I guess you’re non-partisan.

Audrey Tang: …a member of any party, I am not really working directly with representative democracy.

Audrey Tang: We work on ways to make a more informed citizenry, which in theory makes representative democracy also better and complement the work of the representatives, but I am not directly working with, say, the political party system even now.

Raymond Zhong: What I’m trying to understand is what differentiates Taiwan from many other liberal democracies is the existential questions that hang above Taiwan. The future is just totally up for grabs in Taiwan in a different way than it is for…I don’t know. It’s comparable to what Israel faces. How does that color…

Audrey Tang: All the jurisdictions are feeling some of that now, thanks to climate change, but yes. [laughs]

Raymond Zhong: Climate change is a good example. Liberal democracies are not very good at thinking long term like that. For you, what is your picture of Taiwan’s future relative to China? Is it something that you can actually…Does it impact your day-to-day life?

Audrey Tang: When we are working on digital democracies, we are thinking about the whole community of Homo sapiens and of future generations and of mountains and rivers and the ecosystem, so not just specifically about any nearby jurisdictions.

Audrey Tang: That’s what digital democracy offers, in that the proximity is not territorial. The proximity of Taiwan to, say, Switzerland is very close after we implement the referendum act, to Iceland very close after we implemented e-petitioning and things like that.

Audrey Tang: We have more natural neighbors in the digital democracy scene. That is different from the more traditional West value and geopolitical thinking. I’m grateful that I get to work on this layer. I’m not usually defining my work in this layer.

Raymond Zhong: As a Taiwanese, you must think about China. You must think about the future in terms of what’s going to happen with China.

Audrey Tang: I’m working with Taiwan, yes, but that doesn’t mean that I…

Raymond Zhong: You live here…

Audrey Tang: Sometimes, yes. I travel also.

Raymond Zhong: You don’t think about China?

Audrey Tang: I sometimes think about it, but certainly not in a day-to-day hour-to-hour basis.

Audrey Tang: I think about Taiwan most because the system that I helped design and facilitate, people in Taiwan embrace it a lot. Then, I’m also board member of international NGOs, just today in Amsterdam now, and then, also in New York and also in Spain and so on.

Audrey Tang: The system that I helped design and facilitate do not necessarily have Taiwan as its first users. I’m helping anyone who wanted to do digital democracy. Taiwan is just one particular large, liberal democracy that is willing to try out this new invention.

Audrey Tang: I’m not designing this for Taiwan… I’m designing this with Taiwan.

Raymond Zhong: Is there anything about Taiwan’s particular geopolitical position that you have to adjust for in digital democracy or is it truly universal?

Audrey Tang: I think, of course, Taiwan has broadband as a human right. That makes the legitimacy theory much more robust.

Raymond Zhong: Taiwan has a broadband as what?

Audrey Tang: Broadband as a human right.

Raymond Zhong: Oh, yeah.

Audrey Tang: As in that anywhere in Taiwan, you’re guaranteed almost, 98 percent now, to have 10 megabits-per-second Internet connectivity. In a digital democracy, it’s complementary to face-to-face democracy. It’s one more venue to include, instead of excluding, people.

Audrey Tang: This makes the legitimacy theory much easier to build as compared to other sometimes larger jurisdictions where there’s a large class of people where the best way to deliver digital democracy is still through SMS or even a phone, landlines, or even through ATM.

Audrey Tang: It’s the broadband as a human right that really helps. That’s the only thing.

Raymond Zhong: You don’t think the fact that China is in this position relative to Taiwan makes a difference with digital democracy?

Audrey Tang: Not really. The work that I do working with people in, say, Estonia, they also have their backup plan in terms that their neighbors do something.

Raymond Zhong: Giant neighbor.

Audrey Tang: So it’s not like this is a uniquely Taiwan problem. Many people in Taiwan, of course, are paying a lot of attention on, as you say, the adversarial situation. It’s just my particular line of work don’t need to worry about it as much.

Raymond Zhong: I’m conscious of the time. Anything else in the current election cycle with disinformation that you feel we didn’t talk about, that you’ve thought about recently?

Audrey Tang: Not really. It will be very interesting to see the year after that, the August referendum day, how that works.

Raymond Zhong: That’s 2021?

Audrey Tang: August 28, Yes. Because then we’ll have a new tempo, a new norm really, of a representative year and a deliberative year and then a representative year and then a deliberative year.

Audrey Tang: It will be interesting to look at disinformation in the landscape of a purely deliberative referendum-only year, and how that evolves and whether the work that we’re now doing makes a more informed discussion between the stakeholders or whether this way is still…

Audrey Tang: Like being the polarizing effect of multiple referendums at a single day still outweighs whatever the informed discussion that people had before the referendum day. That’s a large hypothesis-testing time. We don’t know the result. We’re working toward that, but we don’t really know what will transpire.

Raymond Zhong: Until we move to the day when social media is open source entirely and there’s protocols that are available for everyone to build on top of…

Audrey Tang: Like democratized…

Raymond Zhong: We live in a world where social media is very anti-democratic. It’s controlled by these big companies.

Audrey Tang: I don’t know… PTT is open source.

Raymond Zhong: PTT is only one of many. The others are all very commercial. They’re all profit-seeking. In this world, what can the government do? Is there a case for breaking up these companies? Is there a case for regulating them differently? This is a debate in the US right now. I’m curious what your…

Audrey Tang: I know. States Warren and…

Audrey Tang: First of all, I think the Taiwanese social media companies are doing fine. Most of the innovations in Taiwan, like Gogoro… They are not a media company, I’m just using it as an example.

Raymond Zhong: Like who?

Audrey Tang: Gogoro.

Raymond Zhong: Gogoro.

Audrey Tang: They do electric scooters, but they’re also a pioneer in renewable energy and energy storage and also in our carbon reduction. This kind of triple-bottom line thinking in Taiwanese startups is very common, so common that the social innovators and the startup people now coexist in this space and even share the same incubating program.

Audrey Tang: It’s very rare to find a purely profit-seeking startup. They have to at least design some of the public benefit into it or social accountability, partly because the social sector in Taiwan is really strong, really legitimate. Social sanctions are really bad [laughs] for any company.

Audrey Tang: Also that people understand that we’re, as I said, a transcultural republic citizen. Your idea must not overtly decimate other cultures. All of this makes a startup scene that are much more sustainable, a little bit more long-term thinking, and makes, say, impact investment and so on a more acceptable idea. All of this is different from Silicon Valley.

Raymond Zhong: Unfortunately, Silicon Valley still rules the world. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I don’t know about that. [laughs]

Raymond Zhong: Facebook’s influence here is also enormous.

Audrey Tang: It is enormous, but I would not say it “rules the world.”

Audrey Tang: This I will grant: FB is a co-governor. It is a governor in its own right. I would even go as far as to say they are now acting sometimes semi-sovereign. Still, it’s a large distance between that and saying they rule the world, which sounds like hegemony.

Raymond Zhong: Is there a case for government intervention? Or is Facebook inevitably, in its DNA, going to facilitate bad things because of its profit-seeking, because it’s hegemonistic?

Audrey Tang: The oversight board that they’re building, which is a kind of rule-of-law system, a judicial branch within a public corporation without a legislative branch, is something that’s quite novel.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think Zuck is doing this purely for PR. I do think he is giving an earnest try in building some sort of accountability apparatus by learning from the legal theorists as a co-governor.

Audrey Tang: Whether that will work or not, or whether, as you say, that it’s in its DNA as a shareholder-profit-seeking company to be not limited by public accountability, that’s literally the question of the coming year.

Audrey Tang: How it gets answered, not only by Facebook, but by all the large Silicon Valley players, will ultimately, I think, determine how the US government acts toward it.

Raymond Zhong: Yeah. You’re impressed so far with Facebook’s efforts? It’s not PR?

Audrey Tang: No, I wouldn’t say I’m “impressed.” It’s so early in its days. I’m just saying they are giving it an earnest try, but like any of their new products, it may or may not work.

Audrey Tang: It’s not at the stage where I can be impressed or not.

Raymond Zhong: All right, thank you, Minister Tang. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: We’re good?

Raymond Zhong: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Raymond Zhong: Can I ask, in our stories, we say Mr. X, Ms. Y. What pronoun do you prefer?

Audrey Tang: My gender is literally whatever. Some people use Mx. That’s fashionable now.

Raymond Zhong: Yes. We can use Mx. if that’s what you prefer.

Audrey Tang: Sure, of course.

Raymond Zhong: Mx.?

Audrey Tang: Mx. is good. There was a Hebrew-writing journalist. All the verbs are…

Raymond Zhong: In many languages it’s very tough.

Audrey Tang: All the verbs are inflected. I think he alternated between feminine and masculine forms, like every other pronoun.

Raymond Zhong: I see. We can do Mx.

Audrey Tang: Mx. is good. Cheers.

Raymond Zhong: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.