Nick Aspinwall: ...for sure. I’m just going to grab my notebook.

Audrey Tang: Take your time.

Nick Aspinwall: Great. I’ll record as well.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nick Aspinwall: Zach probably told you the gist of what I’d like to ask about. The first thing I want to ask about is the TFD conference, which I know that you spoke at.

Audrey Tang: Were you there?

Nick Aspinwall: I wasn’t there.

Audrey Tang: You wasn’t there?

Nick Aspinwall: I wasn’t there. I had some prior obligations, unfortunately, but I read an overview of what you said. You said some really interesting things. I want to know, first of all, what were your feelings about it. What was your takeaway from what was presented there?

Audrey Tang: I don’t think they recorded the conference, my talk and everything.

Zach Huang: Yes, but I haven’t got a video.

Audrey Tang: Maybe by the time your article appears on "Diplomat" there will be a video of the complete talk. The overviews are really just that, overviews, but the general idea that we should treat misinformation, disinformation, and criminal offenses differently, I think that is a message well-received.

Audrey Tang: I also get a idea that the disinformation, or organized spreading of social discord, is really riding on the lack of action around misinformation, whether it’s just individual speculation. The longer we keep from actually tackling those invitations to have a real conversation or a dialogue, the easier for the rumors to spread, especially on end-to-end encrypted channels.

Audrey Tang: If we proactively discuss those rumors when they still are individual speculations, then everybody gets more inoculated and become psychologically more safe around each other. When conspiracy theories that are organized start to spread, it’s like in immunology.

Audrey Tang: If you have a population and a significant proportion of them is already inoculated, then the virus of the mind, or biologically, it’s very unlikely to actually spread and cause a epidemic. That’s I think the main takeaway, both my message and the metaphor that was echoed by other people in the workshop.

Audrey Tang: I think that is something that people are generally willing to see this as a metaphor of. That’s part of my slide.

Nick Aspinwall: Of course, you’ve been a big proponent of transparency. You’ve talked about the convergence between open governance, open data, projects that you’ve been a part of, like vTaiwan and g0v.

Audrey Tang: And Join platform and PO network, everything, office hour, also.

Nick Aspinwall: You’ve talked about the link between that and building a sense of public trust.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Nick Aspinwall: Can you talk a bit more about the importance of having that in Taiwan’s democracy?

Audrey Tang: I think when people speculate about the government, it’s mostly because the government did not share their context, the why of policymaking. People see the result of policymaking, that’s to say the policies. Very rarely do the government, prior to this administration, share in a substantive way the policymaking context.

Audrey Tang: My experiment is twofold. The first is for all the ministries, everybody publishes what they are actively working on, online, so that people can see all the budget items. For each of those 1,300 different projects, people can have a real conversation around the project that they care deeply about.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, people mostly care about long-term care, social housing, and things like that. When people, for example, look at one execution plan and the procurements and research that this plan is currently going, it is a ongoing conversation that allows anyone to ask even very...

Audrey Tang: This is very not clearly worded speculations, but it reflects a real authentic worry, in that the information disclosed is not written in a frankly enough way for people to easily absorb. The career public service at hand then provided a far easier-to-understand overview and links to further material and so on.

Audrey Tang: This bypasses the parliamentarians so the other people can have a direct conversation with public servants in real time and in public. For the public servants, they only have to reply once anyway, [laughs] so they don’t have to explain over 40 calls. That’s one thing.

Audrey Tang: Another thing is that people mostly care about their domestic municipal or city-level issues. By partnering with the municipalities and cities we make sure that people can participate, not just on national-level issues, but also on participatory budgeting and other, like e-petition, iVoting, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Once people get into the habit of visualizing the budget, seeing something that’s lacking in it, proposing something, gets allocated, the budget, to actually do something that they collaboratively discuss with people, then they get into this mindset that maybe public servants are a bunch of professionals that really care about public welfare.

Audrey Tang: People did not have face-to-face or real-time, in-the-public conversations about them, and so the public service also feel really isolated from people. This is not just for the psychology of people, in general, but also for the psychology of career public service in that they can show their professionalism and also take credit in the nice ideas that they have opined.

Audrey Tang: At the end, those two sides -- one is an ongoing discussion, the other is a citizen-initiated idea -- they converge toward mutual trust in the sense that people feel that if there’s anything unclear or anything, a rumor that’s about to spread, they can reliably get something from someone who they have met with, or at least interacted with, so the rumor has no place to spread.

Audrey Tang: Like if you have a good friend who you are meeting every week, if you hear gossip about that friend, of course, you will ask that friend. If that friend takes a quarter, [laughs] like three months, to get back anything to you, and only in cryptic, 140-letter messages, then, of course, there’s a lot of room for speculations, too.

Nick Aspinwall: You have your own ideology of radical transparency. You’ve described it as a proactive approach, rather than reactive. When you’re talking about ministers and the government forging connections with people, do you see this as a way that you can personally build trust with your constituency?

Nick Aspinwall: Can you talk a bit more about how that, itself, is its own defense against misinformation? I think you mentioned at the conference that people would wonder if you could track their phones by GPS.

Audrey Tang: With GPS, yes. Mostly if it’s come from my name or a photo, of course, people can project anything on it because they don’t have a face-to-face real-time interaction with me. I built this very inviting space, the Social Innovation Lab, and invite people to meet me every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. People can come and have a real visit.

Audrey Tang: I regularly publish not just a transcript, but also a video or live stream of my visits, so it becomes impossible for people to pretend [laughs] that Audrey is this...There’s this latest parody of those rumors that says "Audrey is a Omega-level mutant." It’s a very Marvel worldview.

Audrey Tang: Of course, once you have actually met me and attended those mini-hackathons or office hours, then you can find out for yourself who I am and the kind of work I do.

Audrey Tang: The point here is not just for the people who pay me a visit or the people who I tour around Taiwan to visit. I give about 10 speeches and regional visits every week. It’s not just the person I met, but also through radical transparency, live broadcasting, and publishing online.

Audrey Tang: Anyone who attended can also tell their friends, "Audrey is like this, and here’s the YouTube link for you to see." That builds, again, the authenticity of dialogue. When I give a lecture, for example, I almost never lecture. I just let people ask me any questions. My agenda is literally crowd-sourced [laughs] with the people, not for the people.

Audrey Tang: That builds trust because then people can see that I’m ready to answer anything people care about. If I don’t know, I just say I don’t know. That, again, builds trust, because then people won’t have this imaginative idea that a politician knows everything [laughs] and is capable of answering everything. People can see, transparently, my limit and my current endeavors.

Audrey Tang: Just this morning we had this conference on platform economy. They asked me very hard questions. By going through them all, it is also a way for people to see each other’s feelings and how they resonate. That, again, is very important. It’s not centered around me. I’m a channel or a chat room moderator [laughs] so that people can see what everybody has to say as well.

Nick Aspinwall: You mentioned getting very hard questions. I know that you’ve talked a lot about how you engage with trolls.

Audrey Tang: Yes, hugging trolls.

Nick Aspinwall: You also mentioned that this is important to engage in the fight against disinformation. It’s very important to go after people who may propagate disinformation to understand their motives. What is your process for doing that? People question "What are the motives of these people?" You take a proactive approach to that. Can you describe a bit of what that is?

Audrey Tang: Troll Hugging 101? People who troll, that is to say, they post ad hominem attacks or other inflammatory messages, they may be organized, of course, but on the social media, you can check very quickly that maybe they’re just individuals acting in a very attention-craving manner.

Audrey Tang: My theory is that mostly they’re people who don’t perhaps get sufficient social interactions, like hugs or kisses, offline, and then they have to find the physical equivalent of relationships online. They found out very quickly that the surest way to get people’s attention online is to put down something inflammatory and for people to respond.

Audrey Tang: All the relationships built this way are transactional, meaning that the next day they still wake up feeling very empty. It’s not a long-term relationship. They’ll have to find some other bulletin board to troll, and then get the junk food-like attention that doesn’t sustain them well.

Audrey Tang: Troll hugging, very simply, is that I look at a message. I only reply to the fraction of it that are actually constructive and that are authentic. Meaning, they reveal some part of themselves. I ignore everything else, -- ad hominem attacks, name-calling, whatever.

Audrey Tang: This serves two purpose. One, it shows everybody watching the social media screen that if they want attention, they only have to propose something that’s constructive. Second, it shows that name-calling and whatever doesn’t really work on me. It’s as if I don’t see them.

Audrey Tang: Of course, this requires a psychological safety on my part. When I see any word that makes me upset, I play some music, I make some tea, and basically re-associate those words with pleasant memories, sensations. The next time I see that word I feel pretty good, actually. It is a kind of cognitive behavior therapy on my own psychology.

Audrey Tang: With this psychological safety, engaging with only the authentic part, more often than not the trolls are encouraged to reveal more and more of what they actually are worried about or anxious about and, in the same pattern, let everybody else learn from their sharing of authentic experiences. At the end of it, I would then invite them to my Social Innovation Lab, where I will actually, physically give them a hug.

Audrey Tang: By revealing their authentic selves, they become constructive participants in the community not necessarily with me, but with me as a focal point, so that people can see, when you see ad hominem attacks or whatever inflammatory messages, it’s possible to respond in this way that increase public solidarity and trust.

Nick Aspinwall: When you talk about the psychology behind trolls, the state of mind that they’re coming from, those who make ad hominem attacks, do you think that when we talk about disinformation and messages that are...

Audrey Tang: Intentionally fake?

Nick Aspinwall: And that have the potential to attack a social cleavage. I know that you’ve said there can be a difference in their sourcing.

Audrey Tang: Between misinformation, which is more like individual speculation, and disinformation, which is organizing intentionally.

Nick Aspinwall: There may be another difference between someone who is doing that out of their frustration, as you said, or out of their...

Audrey Tang: Trolling, basically.

Nick Aspinwall: Someone who’s trolling or someone who is potentially part of a more organized campaign. When you analyze those respective motives, as there’s been a lot of talk about that, I wonder what you think when you look at that and try and understand the motives of someone part of one of these organized campaigns. Do you approach that in the same way?

Audrey Tang: No. If it’s individual speculations or trolls, they usually have a distinct pattern, in that they are acting out of a need of, as I said, attention-seeking behavior. This is very different from a organized disinformation campaign, where you see a lot of repeated messages, variations on the same theme, ignoring of the context, and basically sowing discord, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Audrey Tang: I would say there’s a qualitative difference in their behavior. With some experience, you can tell which is which very easily. I don’t waste time on the organized disinformation. They may be automated bots, for all I know.

Audrey Tang: Still, I think it’s a good intervention point. They are actually attacking something that we have solid information on. I can also piggyback on their campaign and provide useful hyperlinks for people to check the facts for themselves. Sometimes it helps to reply, not me, but generally, with this alternate agenda chatter. Is it true or not? Is it actually like that?

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t cost anything. It’s literally a split second, but then it makes something that is more like real-time strategy game into more of a turn-based game, where people take a deep breath and start doing the fact-checking work. Instead of being taken by the provocation or the outrage, people can stop and think, "Oh, is it true or not?"

Nick Aspinwall: Can you talk a bit more about the Executive Yuan’s fact-checking website?

Audrey Tang: You mean the Real-time Clarification?

Nick Aspinwall: What would you call it?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not a fact-checking website at all. It’s just Real-time Clarification. It makes fact-checkers’ jobs easier by supplying our viewpoints, but it’s not fact-checking. It says "Real-time News Clarification." We didn’t say anything about fact-checking on this website. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: Sorry, what was your next question?

Nick Aspinwall: Can you tell me a bit about what led to its creation and the metrics behind it? You’ve mentioned the average response time is...

Audrey Tang: Five hours, four hours. This started in the National Development Council’s page at www.gov.tw. The Executive Yuan this year decides that this is not just the ministries’ business. The Executive Yuan, itself, would also like to contribute to Real-time Clarification.

Audrey Tang: There’s two stages. The first one, which was May last year or something, where we, in the Cabinet meeting, talk about misinformation. I did make a suggestion that each ministry need to make a real-time, open, and structured response whenever there is a trending misinformation about that particular ministry.

Audrey Tang: All the ministries took heed of the suggestion, and the National Development Council worked to aggregate all those real-time clarifications into a single RSS feed and a single point of presence on the National Development Council.

Audrey Tang: This year, it was promoted into something that is administration, Yuan level. The Yuan-level people also posted their own responses, in addition to syndicating all the different ministries. That was done by Minister without Portfolio and spokesperson Hsu Kuo-yung before he went on and become the Minister of the Interior. That’s this year’s development.

Audrey Tang: Regardless of whether it’s ministries level or ministries plus Yuan level, the motivation is always to contribute the part of the world that we see in a real-time way, so that when people see some speculations or rumors in morning news they get into the habit that waiting until noon, and then most likely there will be a clarification from the government’s side.

Audrey Tang: We’re totally not saying the media should not deal with speculation. We’re totally not saying the media should wait until noon to publish. It’s not like that. In a paper-based world there is this layout, balanced report, but in the Internet age, it’s impossible because people would take something out of context and spread it, anyway.

Audrey Tang: We’re looking for temporally balanced reporting, where after a few hours we have our own piece. Of course, the civil society can then follow up with their own conversations. This is called clarification. It’s not called fact-checking.

Nick Aspinwall: It’s more of a mechanism for the government to provide its viewpoint if there’s something that it feels that...

Audrey Tang: Also, proactively.

Nick Aspinwall: Right, and be proactive. Can you explain the distinction between an initiative like this? Is it a way for ministries to be more proactive than they have been? Already, they’ll put out press releases or responses to times that they’re mentioned in the news. Is this just a way for that to be expedited or is it distinct from what they’re already doing?

Audrey Tang: It’s mostly expediting existing infrastructure. The other two point, open and structured, is also important, structured, meaning that people can use machine-to-machine technology to turn it into a newsfeed, a Twitter bot, a LINE bot, or anything that can easily let people search among those clarifications.

Audrey Tang: It gives, for example, search engines a single place to index so that when you type in those controversial words, it’s more likely for these to show up. It also gives independent fact-checkers, like the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center, it could be cited as a source.

Audrey Tang: It’s just a press release without any metadata about what this press release is responding to, then it’s hard for [laughs] the Fact-Checking Center to mark this source and that source as adding different pieces to one another. By adding structured data, in a open fashion, we enable fact checkers to work with these as material.

Audrey Tang: Of course, if these are wrong, the fact checkers can also use other sources to correct these as well. That’s why they’re independent fact-checkers.

Nick Aspinwall: Would you check something like that? If, for example, the Taiwan Fact-Check Center fact-checked one of those items and they generally take a little bit longer, would you go back and potentially correct what you have up there?

Audrey Tang: Nobody gets every fact completely, especially when there’s a public official being quoted in some way. Then the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center actually goes and checks this rumor. The Director of the Social Affairs Bureau in Taichung in a City Council inquiry says something about the gender field in the National Identity Card is going to move from male and female into L, G, B, and T so everybody had to identify as L, G, B, or T.

Audrey Tang: This is obviously misinformation, [laughs] but it has the potential of growing into disinformation because some people who has an agenda would amplify this message. So the Taichung City issued a response saying it’s been taken out of context.

Audrey Tang: It takes the Fact-Checking Center, and that, because of their fact-checking work, prompted the real-time responses from the Taichung City, from Minister of Interior, and so on. Very quickly people converge on what existing situation is with the National Identity Card, as well as where we are considering or where we’re going. Of course, we’re not going to change the gender field [laughs] to L, G, B, and T.

Audrey Tang: The Fact-Checking Center serves as a midpoint between the various sources and the media that’s maybe about to amplify this issue because it’s very clickbait-y, but supplementing it with something that is authentic and something that people have generally verified independently.

Nick Aspinwall: You mentioned when information goes from misinformation to disinformation. You recently talked about the process that it goes through. For example, it will often start in PTT as a testing tube of sorts, and then it will graduate to a closed network.

Audrey Tang: Different segments of a closed network, like LINE, and things like that.

Nick Aspinwall: Cofacts is on LINE. You mentioned that the website communicates in some way with LINE bots.

Audrey Tang: The LINE bot, Cofacts, the most important feature is that it gives all the trending rumors a URL. Sometimes they are able to spread because they know that these are closed channels. People already have the inclination of believing things framed in a certain way, regardless of the truth of this message.

Audrey Tang: However, once this becomes public knowledge, be able to be found by search engine, and people can cite this URL as a social object, people even paste this on Facebook, on PTT, and so on, and have a real discussion around this spreading rumor.

Audrey Tang: It creates a kind of inoculation because then the rumor itself becomes something that people can inspect. It’s like vaccination being part of the virus, where people can absorb that into the immune system without disrupting the immune system.

Audrey Tang: People can get psychologically prepared that they are going to see a variation of this quickly, publicly, once they finish the [laughs] closed beta. This has the effect of revealing all the closed betas into something that’s public. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that it also lets us know how to amplify a message, like this says Foxconn is rolling out a whale-shaped grant [laughs] to give scholarship funds, and please share it widely, because maybe you can help some college students who are poor, and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This gets viral, but this is actually a real thing [laughs] from Foxconn. It’s actually true, but then people spreading this truth now knows that, if you package it in this way, it goes viral. It serves a educational purpose, as well.

Nick Aspinwall: When you talk about the way that fake news...I know that you don’t use that term.

Audrey Tang: No.

Nick Aspinwall: I wanted to ask that. Can you describe your opposition to the term?

Audrey Tang: Especially it’s Mandarin form, 假新聞, it has two connotations. It could be a journalistic output that is misinformed, which we will call a journalistic misinformation. Or it could mean something like a content form that’s intentional spreading of falsehood, but framed as a journalistic output, while holding them self to no journalistic standards, like pretending to be journalism, which is, of course, one form of disinformation.

Audrey Tang: These two endeavors, they have nothing in common, but then 假新聞 kind of describe both. It’s impossible to have a real discussion if it encompasses two things that has no overlap.

Audrey Tang: When I talked with Dr. Ko Wen-je in Taipei City, he thinks "fake news", should refer to journalistic output that is true, but the editor chose a clickbait title that doesn’t reflect the content, which is, again, very usual, a very common situation now. He thinks that is fake news. Without operational definition, [laughs] it’s impossible to have a discussion, which is why I don’t use the F word.

Nick Aspinwall: We’ve seen quite a bit of that in the US, too.

Nick Aspinwall: I’m going to go back to the question I was going to ask before. When you are talking about how mis- or disinformation progresses, where it can start in a more closed network, like a PTT, first of all, does this apply both to mis- and disinformation? Do you think that disinformation, content farms, for instance, will test their material in a certain way?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nick Aspinwall: How do you generally observe these trends when you’re trying to understand, for example, how a content farm looks to penetrate segments of Taiwanese society?

Audrey Tang: It’s just standard A/B testing. You put all the messages to all the channels, [laughs] and then you see who responds. All those ideas that goes viral, they have something common in it in that it provokes people’s outrage, fear, uncertainty, or doubt. Those are the emotions that makes people creative and change the text.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a chain mail. It changes. It mutates by itself. For people showing discord, it’s first important to see what existing misinformation, speculations. That creates an opening for disinformation because there’s already this sentiment there. You just need to ignite it, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: The second is that you need to test it with people who are already closely knit, who are ready to give variations on a theme. [laughs] Once you put that seed of disinformation to them, they get creative and creates various variations. You can witness which one becomes viral, and then just choose that one.

Audrey Tang: It is really just like a genetic mutation of a virus. You just pick the most powerful strain, spread it even more widely, amplify it up, and maybe find a traditional media that are susceptible to this message to report about it, and therefore amplify, again, this message. That’s the common trajectory.

Nick Aspinwall: Just because there’s been so much discussion lately of disinformation that specifically generates from Chinese content farms, how do you analyze the trend, if anything? In the past weeks or months, as public discussion has ratcheted upon this, how would you analyze that? It’s been discussed as a threat, for instance, that disinformation from China specifically.

Audrey Tang: First of all, it’s easy to obscure IP addresses. I don’t rely on IP addresses specifically, but it’s me speaking personally. There’s various tools for doing this kind of analysis. [laughs] One of them is called analysis.tw. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s a public tool where you can see the trending keywords, the trending themes, how likely one, if mentioning any particular words, is more likely to be viral. Which are Facebook-oriented, which are oriented on traditional media, how those two cross-pollinate each other, and I wouldn’t say content farm exclusively, but which website designed to amplify such a media discussion are gaining by working on which topics?

Audrey Tang: There’s many analysis websites. Of course, just as in Cofacts, we see increase of political maneuver or political subjects the closer we get to the election, but that is to be expected. After the election, maybe the political nature will decline, and we’ll back to the usual "what food, when eaten with another food, causes what disease?" rumors. [laughs] At the moment, as you can see, it is quite political in nature.

Nick Aspinwall: Of course. The first thing you mentioned was the message at the conference you attended of not treating this...You mentioned misinformation, and I just want to clarify misinformation and disinformation being not treated with criminality...

Audrey Tang: Unintentional individualistic and organizing intentional.

Nick Aspinwall: I’ll let you clarify because you talked about criminality.

Audrey Tang: That’s something else entirely.

Audrey Tang: There’s criminal offense like intimidating the public, intimidating individuals, and, during election session, intending to get someone not elected. These are existing criminal offenses. It’s regardless of whether it’s online or offline. If you take a speakerphone and start shouting things that intimidates the public, [laughs] that is punishable, using the same criminal code.

Audrey Tang: There’s years of experience of the criminal justice system dealing with that. In the Sunflower Movement, there’s many people who’ve become frustrated of the Occupy, and there are people who just posted publicly or in discussion groups about their intention to harm the Occupiers one way or another.

Audrey Tang: Because Occupy is a large bunch of people -- they have no commonalities [laughs] except they go to the Occupy site -- it’s construed as intimidating the public because they didn’t say which individual person they’re about to harm. They just said, publicly, that they intend to harm the Occupiers.

Audrey Tang: These are all convicted and punished as intimidating the public. It’s not like the law enforcement doesn’t know how to do these investigations. Of course, during election session, but also during an epidemic like SARS, it is also a criminal offense to spread disinformation intentionally to get people into harm by getting them infected.

Audrey Tang: All these, we have existing legal code to do that. I put this slide just to mention that when disinformation ignites people’s outrage, there’s some individuals who are so taken to this message so that they will escalate again the level to that of intimidating the public. Then they become subject to criminal offense investigations.

Nick Aspinwall: You’re mentioning existing regulations. There was a Ministry of Justice report that said there’s unequivocal evidence of Chinese content farms being used to divide Taiwan. This precipitated discussions to amend a National Security Act. First of all, what is your reaction to how this discussion has played out where further legal changes are being discussed on top of what exists?

Audrey Tang: We are already pushing a new act to the Parliament. I think it’s finished the first reading. It’s the Digital Communications Act. That lays the foundation, the basis, of all the follow-up discussions and enforcement because the DCA establishes a equivalence between offline actions and online actions.

Audrey Tang: It make sure that regardless of where the judge finished their education, [laughs] they will rule the same way [laughs] for the online behavior to correspond to offline behavior.

Audrey Tang: While the DCA itself carries no penal code, it makes it possible to bridge existing criminal, civil, and other codes into online communication platforms. Before it was kind of a gray area because nobody is quite sure what these actions mean in a online context. The DCA serves as the foundational law for that.

Audrey Tang: After the legislation passes the DCA, maybe because the DCA itself says for any emergent issue there should be a multi-stakeholder conversation with the civil society, the social sector, and international actors about how to...

Audrey Tang: The DCA is one of the outputs of the vTaiwan process. vTaiwan, through this process, has already talked about nonconsensual intimate images or revenge porn. Such pictures are a violation of the criminal code. There’s no doubt about it at all.

Audrey Tang: The question is to which degree is, for example, search engine is willing to have a take-down process. Maybe the link is still there, but if you type the keyword, you can no longer search those images, like Google Image Search, maybe Facebook, and things like that. It’s a truly multistakeholder thing.

Audrey Tang: It is not something that we can just code and anticipate all the new forms of digital communications that violates the criminal code in the future. We need to have a process to get the stakeholders to the same table, talk about what they’re willing and committed to, and let everybody else who have some doubts about this process to challenge it and iterate toward it. That is the DCA.

Nick Aspinwall: The way you describe it, it doesn’t have a penal code. It sets a foundation for future conversations.

Audrey Tang: It also links the penal code that’s basically regulating the existing offline world, saying, "These behaviors have their equivalents online in such-and-such way." These behaviors online now can be sued in the existing penal, criminal, or civil code. It’s a bridging act.

Nick Aspinwall: Going back to there was an earlier proposal floated by one legislator in June to assign fines or potential detention to those who were spreading disinformation.

Audrey Tang: You’re referring to the Social Order Maintenance Act?

Nick Aspinwall: Yes. That proposal was made. There have been discussions about amending the NSA. It raises a question on whether disinformation is a matter of national security. Do you consider that a matter of national security?

Audrey Tang: If all the disinformations escalate into criminal offense, of course, it will be a threat to national security. If we see Internet as a place to sow discord and grow mistrust, of course, it automatically become a national security issue whenever there is a disinformation campaign.

Audrey Tang: The whole point of the DCA, of the open government, and of media literacy, fact-checking, is that we make the online environment psychologically safe so that it will not become a national security threat. If you ask me whether it has the potential, of course, it has the potential, but the whole point is not to let those potential be realized.

Nick Aspinwall: There have been other acts, for example, the hate speech act in Germany, the NetzDG Act. The rollout was a bit, I’ll just say, controversial. There was quite a bit of dissension.

Nick Aspinwall: There has been in Taiwan, too. There’s a clear worry, which plenty of government officials have expressed openly, that if you go too far, you could infringe on free speech. There’s a line that can or can’t be crossed. As you are, for example, approaching disinformation as a criminal offense, how does this...

Audrey Tang: No, I’m just saying we’re setting up the psychological safety so disinformation does not lead to people committing criminal offenses.

Audrey Tang: If we haven’t done our media literacy job -- and by "we" I mean all the educators and all the citizens, not just government -- if we haven’t done a good job, and individuals are provoked enough that they commit a criminal offense, either online or offline, then it’s very sad, but it is a criminal offense.

Audrey Tang: It’s not like we criminalized disinformation. It’s disinformation leading people to commit actions that are criminal offense. It is not like we’re going backward to revert into a place that has restricted freedom of speech. What we’re saying is that freedom of speech need to be done in a space that are constitutive to free speculations that are met with real-time clarifications and dialogue.

Audrey Tang: I see misinformation as a invitation to dialogue, and if that dialogue happens, disinformation has less room to grow and less likely to lead to people committing criminal acts. That’s the whole point.

Nick Aspinwall: Through promoting media literacy, having these open conversations in real time is something that you’ve referred to. I think that’s really important because an attribute we’ve seen of disinformation is how quickly it spreads.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nick Aspinwall: The response has to be...

Audrey Tang: The truth need to spread faster.

Nick Aspinwall: Right. In Taiwan, Cofacts is a really innovative tool. It’s quite unique, something the rest of the world I think is beginning to learn from.

Audrey Tang: I think they’re exporting it.

Nick Aspinwall: At the same time, the scope is quite limited. As we know about disinformation, it can penetrate channels that may not have exposure to know how to use Cofacts or to wait for the response to come in. The same for the Executive Yuan’s self-clarification. Is it a priority to make the response faster or broader so that it reaches more people?

Audrey Tang: I would say it’s both. If people intentionally spread disinformation, there’s also people intentionally spreads clarification. All the clarification that we do in the government, all the work by the Taiwan Fact-Checking Center or Cofacts are natural resources because they’re in the open. Everything has a URL. You can quote anything. Wait, that’s journalism, right?

Nick Aspinwall: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: If you want to do journalism, that’s a lot more material for a journalist to work with and have a thriving journalism that people can trust. I think it’s very important because then they would check if this comes from a reputable source like...I was about to say "The News Lens," but you are working for "The Diplomat" at the moment, right?

Audrey Tang: Anyway, a trustworthy source. Then they learn that they don’t have to rely on content farm to get the information that they care about. Reputable news sources will also give them, in real time, the content, which is more reliable and may be framed in a way that is as addictive as the content farms, that is eyeball-catching as the content farms that, nevertheless, carries what was true about it.

Audrey Tang: Then, Cofacts can tell you whether that package is successfully viral or not. [laughs] This a virtuous cycle ecosystem that reaffirms the importance of quality journalism.

Nick Aspinwall: I want to go back to the cabinet clarification website. I know that one of the main tenets of fighting disinformation, from a government standpoint, is to respond in a very calculated and correct way. You don’t want to overstep. You don’t want to be...

Audrey Tang: Fan the flame. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: Exactly. You don’t want to be too assertive in the response and make it seem like it’s just the government giving its side or trying to stamp out dissent. The cabinet website, for someone who does see it, and I know you don’t consider it as a fact-checking website...

Audrey Tang: No, it’s not.

Nick Aspinwall: ...that’s a really important distinction to make. If one does, then it seems like that’s not the role...

Audrey Tang: It’s not fact-checking, no.

Nick Aspinwall: I’m wondering, when you frame the answers and how that website is presented to the people, how do you avoid a perception of that being the voice of the government trying to set the tone of discussion?

Audrey Tang: You raise a really good point. At the moment this clarification actually addresses misinformation, disinformation, and crime. [laughs] It is not clear unless you actually click into it to see it was responding to a legit speculation, like the new identity card website is very slow.

Audrey Tang: "It’s not actually very slow. It just changed its website address, but the old one, the redirection was really kind of slow. We’re sorry about it and it’s been fixed." This is not disinformation at all.

Audrey Tang: This is a legit speculation about what’s happening with the Ministry of Interior. The Minister of Interior very quickly gave this response, which is commendable, and the journalists cited of them. I wouldn’t say it’s fact-checking, because the initial thing that prompted is just widespread speculation about what’s happening. That’s not a organized disinformation campaign at all.

Audrey Tang: There are some response to disinformation campaigns, and there are even some cases where the ministry decide to sue because the thing they’re responding to is already a criminal offense.

Audrey Tang: One clear message I heard from the workshop, from the journalists, is that it will help if we color-code or somehow tag the clarifications so people know that it is just a normal clarification discussion. Or whether it is like Defcon level, like whether this is a organized disinformation campaign and we’re seriously answering that, or where some people already committed criminal offense and this is a notice that this is being sued.

Audrey Tang: Color-coding it is a really good idea that we really should work with the MIS Department to implement. Expect that to be rolled out some time. I cannot commit to a timeline.

Audrey Tang: But yeah, we’ll do this.

Nick Aspinwall: Would you say that, aside from making it more easy to understand...

Audrey Tang: The nature.

Nick Aspinwall: ...the color-coding -- the nature of what you’re doing -- that would also help clarify to someone? I imagine that someone who’s starkly opposed to the current government may see that as a mouthpiece of the government, so to speak. I know that’s a perception that you want to...

Audrey Tang: Sometime, it’s a mouthpiece of the government, just like this one here. This particular clarification is a mouthpiece [laughs] to the government, but there’s no enemy here. There’s no opponent. I think, in those cases, it’s perfectly fine for this place to be a mouthpiece of the government. People want to know what’s happening, but there’s no perpetrator in this case, so to speak.

Audrey Tang: As you said, when there is a legitimate hard question, this should not be used as a way to dodge hard questions or to paint the people who pose hard questions as somewhat antagonistic to the public. This is why it’s important to color-code their responses so people don’t confuse the different ways for our responses.

Audrey Tang: At the end of it, we’re not calling it fact-checking. The fact-checkers are free to check these. If we make a mistake there, it could be fact-checked.

Nick Aspinwall: Could a tool like this be used to dodge hard questions if it were in the wrong hands or if it were in the hands of someone who was, for example, feeling a lot of pressure or had a motive to get a certain message out?

Audrey Tang: If you’re a opposition party, you’re free to run exactly the same system. Nothing in it is exclusively administrative power. All this is is a syndicated blog. That technology was around for like 15 years. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: No. If we say we blog or micro-blog regularly, this is not a abuse of administrative power because any opposition party can do exactly the same.

Nick Aspinwall: I want to ask about how there have been the proposal suggestions made, I believe to your office as well, about finding a way to regulate or to engage with social media corporations.

Nick Aspinwall: When we speak about disinformation, there is plenty of dialogue around the fact that these companies could do more that they are not doing now, but it is difficult to engage them in that way. Has your office had any discussions about either regulating those corporations or engaging with them?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we had a wide discussion around one particular thing that happened on Facebook, which was people selling counterfeit goods through automated bots that’s paid on delivery. You discover it’s a brick, but there’s nobody to return to. It’s a popular e-petitions subject. We had a long five-hour discussion with all the petitioners and all the different ministries related to it, and in a way that are totally transparent.

Audrey Tang: I think this is very important because then it shows exactly what Facebook needs to do, which is to join the local e-commerce association, and then respond substantially to people’s call to more clearly mark the advertisers that has a legit company registration versus ones that does not, and work with the people on the early warning system if someone is abusing its chatbot technology to con people essentially.

Audrey Tang: By using standard Internet governance methodologies, we’re able to just talk with Facebook in a very candid fashion. They agreed to join the E-Commerce Association, set up an office in Taiwan, and basically talk with people and figure out ways to prevent counterfeit goods.

Audrey Tang: This is the model of our communication. It’s always transparent, always in the open, always in response to a real social demand. So far, Facebook, in particular, has been quite responsive in providing technological or social solutions to these things.

Audrey Tang: Frankly speaking, I think those AI-based con bots there is also new to them. [laughs] It’s a new invention in this area back in their time. They’re also very interested in working with the consumer right protection agencies to learn more about these things because these things tend to spread.

Audrey Tang: If it’s proven to work here, of course, it will spread to other jurisdictions. Facebook also want to be prepared, so it’s to the benefit of everybody.

Nick Aspinwall: I think you mentioned supporting bots that reveal dark rumors at the conference.

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nick Aspinwall: First of all, you’re referring to things such as Cofacts when you say that?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

Nick Aspinwall: Is there any way that they can find additional sources of funding? I know that that’s a constant issue where Cofacts is a volunteer-based...

Audrey Tang: You’ll have to speak to the Open Culture Foundation. OCF is the main umbrella organization where these civic tech projects receive grants, actually. I think they got the grant from the OCF, so you can talk to OCF. I know about Cofacts mostly because they develop in the open, and so I just follow their [laughs] GitHub issues. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I know about its technological and social operation and the thoughts behind those designs. It’s all on Hackfoldr, HackMD, and the g0v community. Honestly, I don’t quite know about its funding situation, so that’s a OCF question.

Nick Aspinwall: For what social media can do, you mentioned how you’ve engaged them with selling counterfeit goods.

Audrey Tang: And non-consensual intimate images and things like that.

Nick Aspinwall: I know that when they have ventured into native fact-checking, for example, or trying to promote fact-checked results, when I talked to TFC, they said demarcating whether something has been fact-checked or whether there’s still questions -- in search results, for instance -- could be a productive move.

Audrey Tang: I think Google implemented that, but Facebook has not yet.

Nick Aspinwall: Those proposals, like when Facebook changed its news feed algorithms, it brought a whole host of critics saying that Facebook was suppressing free speech.

Audrey Tang: The way Google shows it, very simply, is that you can search for something, but then it supply you additional information that are supported by fact-checkers, which, I think, is a very balanced way.

Nick Aspinwall: At this point, do you think that the social media companies are doing enough?

Audrey Tang: That’s a social media company question. [laughs] Just like junk mail, just like spam, it’s never enough until the cost of sending spam is raised to a point where it’s no longer financially rewarding to send spam. Of course, every contribution helps.

Audrey Tang: Until we have a reliable spam filter and a reliable Spamhaus project that can identify the people who make the kit to do massive spamming and identify the signatures of those spammers’ lines of operation and, through a combination of technology and community involvement, surface those dark rumors [laughs] of a spam-generation process...

Audrey Tang: It’s a process that I personally took part in. It took us maybe four years to make junk mail no longer a national security concern.

Audrey Tang: It was in early 2000. We’re seeing something very similar with disinformation. We see in the early spam wars days, sometimes people just set up their own email servers and filter out everything that’s unsolicited and, of course, save themselves, [laughs] but not necessarily everybody.

Audrey Tang: They also serve as honeypots, because they know then anyone who send email to that address is probably spam because they’re not personally using those addresses. There are also ways to waste spammers’ time by automatically having bots engage with spammers and things like that. There’s a whole industry of these.

Audrey Tang: Now we’re seeing, in Facebook, for example, individuals who don’t feel Facebook is doing enough. They can just install Feedless. Once you install Feedless on your phone, [laughs] you don’t have a feed anymore. [laughs] It’s just social and not media. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: You can still follow your friends, have chats, visit fan pages or groups, and run events. It’s just you don’t see anything unexpected. [laughs] On the desktop, I use, personally, the News Feed Eradicator, which is exactly the same thing. That’s a easy solution. For anyone who feel Facebook is not doing enough, just install Feedless or News Feed Eradicator.

Nick Aspinwall: I’ve seen tools like that too. I think there’s one called Facebook Purity that I’ve seen before.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nick Aspinwall: Something I definitely want to take away here is, due to the Ministry of Justice, its recent comments, there have been lots of increased...

Audrey Tang: Discussions.

Nick Aspinwall: ...speculation talking about disinformation specifically coming from China to the point where I have come across the concern that...

Audrey Tang: That we’re going backward on speech freedom. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: I’ve come across that. That’s one of them. Let’s start there. First of all, what would your words be to members of the general public who may begin to suspect that that’s going to happen, especially those who are already a bit skeptical of government, in general?

Audrey Tang: It’s natural for them to speculate, and it’s great that we can talk candidly about we take pride in being the only green dot there. [laughs] We’re totally not reverting back. No, we’re not infringing on the freedom of speech because it’s national identity. Whatever existing criminal code, existing ways of enforcing things, we are not taking any aim to prosecute more people because of their speech.

Audrey Tang: We’re making sure that people get real-time replies, through journalistic channels like you, on what the minister is thinking, like me, [laughs] and then get people into the habit of speculation leads to clarification, rather than speculation leads to inflammatory messages that eventually lead people to commit criminal acts.

Nick Aspinwall: Let’s go back. For the general public, for people who are critically questioning where things come from, I know that you’ve talked so much about education in media literacy. I understand that new curriculum are being introduced.

Audrey Tang: Being rolled out on the first grade of primary, the first grade of high school, the first grade of senior high.

Nick Aspinwall: That’s certainly a prescription for younger generations, something that has been called for. I would ask what is the most immediate prescription for the adult population? When I speak for the adult population, I know that you can’t necessarily reach everyone through methods like vTaiwan through open government...

Audrey Tang: Or Join or whatever.

Nick Aspinwall: ...for the less tech literate people or for the people who don’t engage as much.

Audrey Tang: Join has 5 million users out of 23 million in Taiwan, a lot of retired people also, but we don’t pretend that we reach everybody. It’s one-quarter of the population.

Nick Aspinwall: I know you will make a distinction here between mis- and disinformation. A lot of things spread very quickly because there is a motivation in media to get things out before the competitor, to get things out very quickly, which happens a lot here in Taiwanese media.

Audrey Tang: The news cycle is shortening.

Nick Aspinwall: Yes, getting shorter and shorter. Do you have, or does the government have any role in engaging with the media? Of course, not to tell them what to publish and what not to publish, but to...

Audrey Tang: Maybe be some standard operation procedure of what fact-checking steps, which sources to look, before you complete a story. Make it effortless almost for the media to get the latest updates from various governmental channels. I think the NCC are doing this. They are making a SOP for the popular media, or mainstream media as you said, to basically go through these steps before publishing real-time news.

Audrey Tang: Again, it’s an advisory. You don’t have to. There is no penal code in not following that. The hope is that if sufficient amount of journalists signs up to these newsmaking methods, then it will actually make them more reputable. The people who are not willing to do bare minimum fact-checking before publishing journalism [laughs] will get less reputable by the citizens.

Audrey Tang: At the end, it’s the citizenry. If the citizenry prefers quality journalism, then quality journalism will thrive at the end. That’s why media literacy is, I think, the root solution.

Nick Aspinwall: To help citizenry prefer quality journalism.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, to have a citizenry that can be a very active participant in their journalistic process as well, to be willing to share what they have, their authentic feelings or experiences, and contribute to the newsmaking process.

Audrey Tang: If people are passive like in the old broadcast TV days, then they remain a consumer of news. That creates a place of mind where they become much more susceptible of what the news channel, what a broadcast or radio says must be true to a degree.

Audrey Tang: If they participate in the newsmaking itself through blogging or whatever, microblogging, and then can have a real dialogue with fellow citizens interested in newsmaking. They could be a volunteer to the Cofacts. They could be people who inform the Taiwanese Fact-Checking Center.

Audrey Tang: They feel they’re part of the news process, and therefore knows far more than any textbook can teach them about the framing, about the things that journalism standards are for. What does it mean to check your sources and things like that?

Audrey Tang: Just by participatory design in the new curriculum, our commitment is to get people into the mind of news workers. You can call it journalistic thinking, media thinking, [laughs] like design thinking or computational thinking.

Audrey Tang: Once people are of that mind frame, then they become much less susceptible to the top-down broadcast-era messaging. There’s less loopholes, in their mind, for the disinformation to target.

Nick Aspinwall: Could the government ever play a role in explicitly funding programs, beyond education of course, but programs to, for example, heighten the familiarity and fluency of fact-checking operations in newsrooms?

Nick Aspinwall: Is there a way that the government could actually...a lot of times, time is an issue, but money is the biggest one.

Audrey Tang: Also technology. If you have to do everything by hand, you cannot check all those sources.

Nick Aspinwall: Right. Is there a role for the government to potentially fund programs like this?

Audrey Tang: I think that’s the perfect job of the Ministry of Education. If you can teach students, new teachers, and existing teachers who are converting to this digital education stuff how to make news together, surely these games are a gamified way to teach about newsmaking can be converted into something that’s useful for real journalists as well.

Audrey Tang: I personally translated several interactive games from Nicky Case. One explicitly talks about how disinformation spreads, one about how social media destroys trust, one about segregation, and one about the framing effect of media and how media messages kind of perpetuate the world views by itself. I personally translate some of these.

Audrey Tang: I think these are excellent ways for children and adults alike to interactively enhance their media literacy. Some variation of these games can also be a useful visualization tool, useful exploration tool for journalists to link the work that they see together and engage the users in a more interactive and immersive way, so there is more bandwidth between a journalist and their readers, and their readers can interactively understand a piece of report.

Audrey Tang: We see that in many new media now in Taiwan as well. They use this kind of gamified journalism to let the viewer be a participant in a story. We see that in the Western media as well. There is a lot of people experimenting with even virtual reality or whatever to increase the immersiveness of the news as a channel.

Audrey Tang: These are all what the Ministry of Economy, Ministry of Education and so on, they’re heavily invested in as a pedagogical tool, but the same technical improvements of immersive experiences can also be used by journalists to increase the efficacy of their storytelling to people.

Nick Aspinwall: Having interactive games, that’s a very interesting approach. Definitely, I’ll check that out later. Having more immersive, engaging experiences is helping. I think that is also a way of building trust.

Audrey Tang: And I think it’s the future of journalism.

Nick Aspinwall: That brings me back to an anecdote I’ve heard about. It was one of the speakers at the g0v summit, Scott Hubli. He told me about how another frontier of disinformation is things like virtually manipulated images, for example, taking a politician...

Audrey Tang: Deepfake?

Nick Aspinwall: Yeah, deepfake. When you spoke about immersive experiences, I wonder, is that is something that you think is potentially accelerating at the same speed? Is it something you’ve witnessed a lot of or that you fear for the future?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. I give out a free model of a high-quality 3D scan of myself and there is sufficient amount of my transcripts and recordings so that, by now, anyone can synthesize anything said by me. I don’t worry at all. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: What’s valuable is not me speaking some words. What’s valuable is an authentic account, whether on Twitter, Facebook or through email, that I respond very quickly and even face-to-face in my office hours. It’s those relationships, those interactions that count, not the individual artifacts of interaction.

Audrey Tang: I believe people find me very reachable, so if they see me saying some words on a random YouTube video...That actually happened. Someone took my avatar and my name and posted something about the election in YouTube. People generally would just say, "You know, Audrey will not say something like that," because they have a good mental model of me.

Audrey Tang: It becomes very hard to impersonate me even though, technologically, I made it very easy to impersonate me. I think that’s where we’re at. It’s understanding people as people and not understanding people as just a few provocative sentences.

Audrey Tang: If you’re only known as famous quotes, [laughs] a few sentences, then, of course, it’s very easy to fake your utterances. If you’re well known in a way that is very high bandwidth and sustained over a period of years, it’s very difficult to impersonate you.

Nick Aspinwall: I want to ask something that comes to mind when we talk about open information and free sharing of information. Do you ever worry that any given person’s tolerance for information may only reach a certain level?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nick Aspinwall: If there’s a free market of information, then a given person only may have so much tolerance to digest?

Audrey Tang: Of course. That’s why we need journalism.

Nick Aspinwall: But certain messages will rise to the top and those messages are...

Audrey Tang: Counterfactual.

Nick Aspinwall: Right.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I think it’s not a either/or thing. The whole notion of visualization is you can see all the 2,000 sources in just a couple of seconds and see a general trend. That’s visualization.

Audrey Tang: Something the g0v community is particularly good at is to invent new visualization forms for complicated information systems. These are all user-contributed, so maybe there is some misinformation there also, but through blockchain technology, people can first hold each other accountable and not modify mutated numbers.

Audrey Tang: Through applying machine learning in the government-sponsored Civil IoT system, we can get other environmental/meteorological data from all the different sectors into the same place and cross-correlate each other. Actually, there is a hackathon going on. The top prize is NT$3 million to just do sense-making of this enormous amount of environmental data. The one that does the sense-making the best gets a award.

Audrey Tang: I think it is exactly as you said. If these are individual information, then, of course, there is no way to correlate the truthness of the information. If it’s aggregated, visualized, check-pointed onto distributive ledgers, analyzed by a shared data center that everybody can upload new analysis code on, then it becomes a community project.

Audrey Tang: The one with the most sense-making power will triumph, and people can then rely on it as a reliable source of information.

Nick Aspinwall: I think that there are ways to look at the current social media environment and the way that information, whether true or false, spreads with a very optimistic lens or a pessimistic lens. I’ve certainly done both myself. I wonder what your biggest concern is as you see the current dialogue, especially with so much being said about the role of potential Chinese content farms, which could go into hostile state actors.

Audrey Tang: I would only worry if people stopped talking to one another. That’s my real worry. Then freedom of speech is as good as done for. If people don’t trust the Internet, even over end-to-end encrypted channels, they’re afraid of saying something that will cause them to disappear, then we don’t have trust on the communication infrastructures.

Audrey Tang: If they stop visiting, if nobody want to talk with the minister on my office hour, I would worry a lot. [laughs] Then that means the civil society is disintegrating and people only talk to like-minded people or people don’t talk to other people at all.

Audrey Tang: Of course, that is the end game. If there is an organizational actor, as some have speculated, to sow social discord, of course, that is the endgame they want of their society, that the trust is so broken that nobody want to talk authentically about their experience or feelings anymore.

Audrey Tang: That’s my main worry. Not being very optimistic about this, I don’t see Taiwan going to that point any time soon. We’re still very cherishing each other’s various viewpoints, ideologies. We may fight a lot, but still, there is a sense of it’s OK to talk about things, even political things, publicly. The public discourse, I think, has not been dampened by whatever effort that is currently sowing discord. That’s the first thing.

Audrey Tang: The second thing is that, as the digital minister, I built those social innovations with the people. It’s not me designing for the people. It’s people informing me what to design. I intend to continue this trajectory.

Audrey Tang: It is one of the really facilitative roles that the government can take on these issues without infringing, as you correctly pointed out, people’s mind space by having the government set all the agenda and people being subjects to the government. That would be back to fascism.

Audrey Tang: There is every potential for the technologies in the wrong hands to be done in a highly fascist surveillance or whatever way. It’s just we’re not doing that in Taiwan.

Nick Aspinwall: I think that that is a common concern of people. I guess there are parallel concerns. There are concerns of having something like we talked before, the Cabinet website. Should that be in the hands of a government that has designs for control or for suppression or manipulation of a message? I think that that’s something that people may worry about.

Audrey Tang: Very much so.

Nick Aspinwall: There’s an alternate worry, and I’m curious if you’ve experienced this when people come talk to you. When some of the high-profile disinformation stories have come out, there’s been a lot of response of people questioning whether democracy can deal with this, saying like, "Do we need a strong leader to deal with this?"

Nick Aspinwall: The existence of this sentiment runs very counter to the democratic society that Taiwan has. Have you heard such a sentiment? When you hear that...

Audrey Tang: Yeah, very much so. I think it’s reasonable for people to worry about prior censorship. I think that’s the technical word for the first worry that you mentioned.

Nick Aspinwall: For the first one, yeah.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan had a lot of experience in prior censorship. We only gained democracy in, it’s not even 30 years. [laughs] The first presidential election was ’96, so it’s still pretty close. We’re a very young democracy. I’m 37 now. I still remember how is it like to be under martial law, how is it like to have prior censorship.

Audrey Tang: There’s generations of people who know exactly what prior censorship feels like. Of course, they don’t want to go back to the bad old days. That’s something the people younger than me, like Zack and people younger than Zack [laughs] don’t have first-hand experience anymore. When they went to school, it’s already after the martial law’s lifted. They’re the first generation that can actually do democracy.

Audrey Tang: For people to remember the bad old days, of course, they will worry that the government regains the prior censorship control. Therefore, we’re committed to never go back to prior censorship. That is the one thing that we don’t do.

Audrey Tang: When we’re formulating the draft of my talk, the freedom of speech, freedom of news is the core value of Taiwan. It’s not the instrumental value. We had a visit from another civic media journalist, and she was so touched that she has to take a picture of this.

Audrey Tang: Our generation really sees this as core. Maybe five generations in the future, people will start to see it as instrumental, but now it is core. That’s the answer to your first worry.

Audrey Tang: The second worry of a strong leadership, I think we can distinguish between 威信, which is authoritative confidence, and 誠信, a authentic confidence. It’s both trust or confidence level, but one is asymmetrical. The ruler doesn’t actually trust its subject. It’s just the subjects trusting the ruler conditionlessly.

Audrey Tang: The second one is multi-directional. The government trust the citizens first, and some citizens feeling the trust, decide to trust back. It is far more reciprocal and far more equal. Of course, all the governance system that I’m designing is of the second kind, the collaborative, horizontal, new power that grows when there is more people joining.

Audrey Tang: The first one, based on asymmetry, is conditioned on the fact there can only be selected members in the communication channels before it’s broadcasted to the public. I wouldn’t say that in Taiwan, we’re completely horizontal power now. I think nowhere in earth [laughs] has people already finished the digital transformation to the new power.

Audrey Tang: Of course, people think, sometimes wistfully, about the old power because at least there was something that they can rely on, without going through the fact-checking themselves. There is a kind of comfort in having one person that you can unconditionally trust. If that person gets things wrong, everybody is doomed, [laughs] but still, there is a certain comfort in that.

Audrey Tang: I think people growing up with a cacophony of ideas eventually learn to navigate it. That’s what we see from digital natives. People who grow up in a relatively more quiet, dictatorial, authoritarian society, sometime they view the Internet, see there is just too much stuff on it and think back to the old days where they don’t have to make so much decisions and critical thinking on their own.

Audrey Tang: It’s an understandable sentiment, but we’re not going back.

Nick Aspinwall: That’s an interesting point. I know you’ve talked before about the Internet being a place of horizontal sovereignty, where the trust is mutual and all parties can come to the table...

Audrey Tang: Can see where people are.

Nick Aspinwall: ...and be seated at the same level.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nick Aspinwall: It’s not a hierarchical society. You raise a very interesting point because I think that it can be a bit of an abstract concept if people come to this proverbial table of horizontal, equally...

Audrey Tang: Suddenly everybody is a news outline now. What to do next?

Nick Aspinwall: There’s the matter of who to trust and there’s a matter of how to engage too. What is my role? Society has...

Audrey Tang: "Who should I follow on Twitter?"

Nick Aspinwall: That, too.

Nick Aspinwall: Society has always been structured into some sort of hierarchy. Would you mind elaborating a bit more on how your personal philosophy influences the way that you design platforms like this, where the government will play a role, the people will play a role? If it’s in a horizontal environment, then it’s not the top-down sort of strong power approach that we’re used to.

Audrey Tang: Here. [laughs] Sorry, but it really takes this to explain.

Audrey Tang: If the network is connected like this, we can fool everyone into thinking the majority of their friends are binge drinkers, even though binge drinkers are outnumbered two to one.

Audrey Tang: Not that hard.

Audrey Tang: Then we have to let them know each other, but then that doesn’t work. They have too much friends here. We have to take a few out. Here we go.

Audrey Tang: "Congrats, you manipulate a group of students into believing the prevalence of incredibly unhealthy social norms. Good going."

Audrey Tang: Thanks, Nicky.

Audrey Tang: As system designers, what we are building, of course, is not this kind of network. What we are building is what we call small world networks. Basically, it is friends and groups with similarities in between, but also sufficient amount of bridges between those groups.

Audrey Tang: There are mediators who can speak toward everybody else’s concerns and serve as mediators or translators that are reliable across these things, which by the way is the Occupy network. Each Occupy sends two people to liaise with all the other Occupies so that when one goes out, someone else can be reconnected.

Audrey Tang: The small world network is what we are consciously designing, to make sure that there is people who speak the language of both sides, but also people have sufficient confidence in their smaller groups to innovate without being drowned out by the "follow everybody else’s thinking" kind of way.

Audrey Tang: When they really catch something, then they have the mediators who spread those innovations to people and check the understanding with the people who understand both the cultures. We’re building a small world network is the short answer.

Nick Aspinwall: I see.

Audrey Tang: The participation officers or the vTaiwan mediators, the facilitators, that’s all our work revolving around these notions.

Nick Aspinwall: I just want to ask, going back to how to quite define disinformation from China, because it has been bandied about. There have been different terms used to describe what it is to the point where someone in the general public may just see it as this large force. Of course, you look across the strait, and it’s 1.3 billion.

Audrey Tang: I’m sure not all of them are working on disinformation.

Nick Aspinwall: Absolutely not.

Nick Aspinwall: The point being that it can be very easy for something from China to...if it successfully enters Taiwanese society and maybe gets people scared or gets people talking, and they find out that it comes from China, whether or not...As you’ve said, IP addresses can be manipulated.

Nick Aspinwall: The whole population is not working on disinformation, but it presents itself as a looming threat. Some of the conversations I’ve had have said it’s not this big scary thing on the level that it’s been made out be in some circles.

Nick Aspinwall: As a member of the media, I also want to describe this in the correct way. I think that it can be easy to visualize what...I mean it’s very vague. It’s an abstraction. It’s not something that we completely know what it is. How do you see it if you’re looking at Chinese content forums specifically? How do you think of what they are? How do you visualize them in your mind?

Audrey Tang: It’s just like any content forums. They make clickbait platforms and thrive when there is some formula of getting a message viral so they can either earn revenues through targeted advertising in the future or even spear phishing -- why not? -- which is a form of targeted advertisement. [laughs] It’s just illegal.

Audrey Tang: I don’t think of Chinese content forums as any different than any other content forums. People can easily use content forums in any jurisdiction to promulgate messages written in Chinese, or traditional Chinese for that matter, and getting them to spread. We see people using all sort of tools in all sort of jurisdictions. Trying to trace the origin of the content forums itself may not be the most protective thing is what I was saying.

Audrey Tang: Users of that content forums, the users who make coordinated attempts to spread messages on those content forums, they usually, from my experience, want to recruit people into amplifying their message. They’re, in a way, encouraging creativity by who can spread those methods or messages of discord in the most creative way.

Audrey Tang: There is also some sort of vandalizing credit [laughs] on this. People really are attracted to the dark side. Maybe they have cookies. That’s, again, a very normal part of online behavior. There just are some trolls that are attracted to memetic competitions. That is a normal part of online life.

Audrey Tang: I think the only thing that’s not normal, in Taiwan especially, is what people currently feel about the PRC government’s own deployment of technology on their own citizens, the deep fear of someday the PRC takes over Taiwan’s media landscape or technological landscape, and starting to apply the same surveillance system, social credit system, or whatever other system they are innovating, to the Taiwanese population.

Audrey Tang: There really is a deep fear about that. It’s kind of what the White Terror is in Taiwan. That is the backdrop of the sentiment because no other jurisdiction or power has applied quite this amount of surveillance and other dark technologies to this scale.

Audrey Tang: The closest reminiscence of people’s experience of that is during the Chiang Kai-shek era, which is also coming from China. [laughs] It is, I think, a kind of return of the repressed. That is one factor.

Audrey Tang: The other factor I would say is also that people are worried that their current social media scene is not as transparent as people would like. Unless you install Feedless or Feed Eradicator, there really is close to zero transparency of why Facebook decided to show this advertisement over another advertisement, which is distinct from China.

Audrey Tang: It also reminds people of a black-box, arbitrary decision-making process, which then hearkens back to the military law era, like random control and whatever. Of course, a distinction being you don’t have to use Facebook, or you can install Feed Eradicator, but there is a arrow effect. People still find themselves addicted somewhat to social media.

Audrey Tang: I think these two are very different things, but they share something in common, which is people don’t have agency in their life and in the way their data is being treated as an asset instead of a relationship. It goes back to what I talk about trolls, which is people worry, rightly, that their long-term relationships are under threat of being a set of transactions. They’ll lose the humanity of it.

Audrey Tang: Whether it’s PRC and its apparatus, or whether it’s social media with its not very transparent algorithms, both leave people feeling a little bit helpless. I think it’s this helplessness that brings out the projection that you witnessed when you interview two people because it’s easy to add to that image if you already have the source of the insecurity about helplessness.

Nick Aspinwall: With Chinese content forums specifically, you mentioned the PRC’s surveillance efforts of its own citizens. For Taiwanese people seeing that content farms are receiving some form of state support most likely, and then they’re penetrating...

Audrey Tang: They think back of what the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, is doing in Weibo. Some Taiwanese people also have a Weibo account. They know what the party is doing in Weibo. Of course, they would make the mental connection, and then start to think, "Oh, is CCP doing its own thing on Weibo, but the other media and forums were doing?"

Nick Aspinwall: It can create fear or chip away at people’s hope if a content farm makes a significant impact on the Taiwanese news cycle, as we’ve seen, where false stories, disinformation stories have...

Audrey Tang: Have been amplified by traditional media.

Nick Aspinwall: Right, even when they’re disproven very quickly. I think we kind of look back, and I imagine that just everything is eroding.

Nick Aspinwall: I think it’s true. As you mentioned, the occasion where we lost a diplomat is where people collectively look back and start to think, "Oh, maybe we rushed to conclusions. Maybe we should have stopped and said, ’Is it true or not?’ Maybe we should rework our news cycles a little bit," which is great.

Nick Aspinwall: We’re the first generation that can do democracy. Of course, we get something wrong. It’s good to stop and think once in a while, but preferably without losing diplomats. [laughs] It is a silver lining that people are slowing down and looking at the media landscape.

Nick Aspinwall: When that happened, it galvanized a lot of fears of there is this undemocratic threat, this blunt-shaped large object that can...

Audrey Tang: What really galvanized people was people realized this part of themself as one. There’s part of people who really are bloodthirsty and are after sensationalist stories and click-share before reading the article. It’s part of us.

Nick Aspinwall: Absolutely. In this reflective moment, I think there was also the fair bit of finger-pointing at China too. When that happened, it came out on PTT in a few hours that there was a Chinese IP address, but once that happened, fingers started pointing across the strait.

Nick Aspinwall: There was some reflection, but just through that reaction, because there was the fair bit of blame, thinking, "Look what China did," whether or not that’s appropriate, that was a thought process of quite a few people.

Audrey Tang: I took it constructively. I interpret it as, "Let’s not go where China is at the moment."

Nick Aspinwall: There is also a sense, "China is doing this. We need to defend ourselves."

Audrey Tang: That’s right. Then, of course, there’s defense, but there is also proactive action. I know I talk about transparency and trust-building already. But even on this very specific issue, it is possible to proactively take action. Feed Eradicator or Feedless may sound drastic, but they’re really effective. Similarly, is any of those browser plug-ins that reminds you that there are alternate news sources.

Audrey Tang: There’s even local media that you can just walk to their office, knock those doors, and have a talk about your local co-ops or whatever. There are a lot of proactive actions that people can do to increase social solidarity. That, I think, is not a reactive reflection or reactive reaction to look at what actor X did.

Audrey Tang: It is something that we need to do as part of our curriculum, as part of our university social responsibility. We are doing that to prepare the next generation so that, when something like that happens, they will be less susceptible to those external or internal influences.

Nick Aspinwall: I wonder, though, when people engage on social media and start to do their own analysis of pieces of information that they come across and as you encourage and you provide outlets with the government for them to do that...

Audrey Tang: All the tools.

Nick Aspinwall: ...do you think that there’s a risk of the classic herd mentality building where, especially with something like the current government has an open society, allows people to interact in a very directly democratic way in many cases, which is very novel.

Nick Aspinwall: There are vague threats outside of that or vague opposition forces, both within and outside of Taiwan, whether political or otherwise. As we’ve seen with disinformation and social media in general, it has the tendency to polarize.

Nick Aspinwall: Like something with the cabinet’s clarification website, any sort of public presence of the government, we see this in the most free societies, where the robustness of debate can lead to increased polarization.

Nick Aspinwall: I wonder what you think about that because this is a really new conversation we’re all having.

Audrey Tang: First of all, I would say it’s international. As you correctly pointed out, even on the greenest part of the world...

Nick Aspinwall: In the greenest countries.

Audrey Tang: ...there are, exactly as you said, polarizations and people de-friending or losing solidarity because of the encouragement of public debate. It is something that we’re all getting used to, which is why it’s so important for those like-minded societies to partner. That’s part of my talk.

Audrey Tang: Partnership, globally, is really the only way around. For this new kind of virus of the mind, grown out of the new environment, of course, Taiwan can say we have some vaccines. We have universal access. We have media literacy program, which is like universal health coverage, but at the end, we need to work together, just like working during epidemic outbreaks.

Audrey Tang: That the virus of the mind, they know no borders. Unless the medical community work together, [laughs] there is no way to come up with effective vaccines, which is why any small innovations, it could be Cofacts, it could our curriculums, it could be those interactive games that I translated...

Audrey Tang: We talk with our international counterparts in not just GCTF, but all the venues that we can get our hands on to brainstorm, spread the news, and make our open innovations usable to other countries and other communication channels as well, in the hope that they can also improve on it so that we can also benefit from the co-creation process.

Audrey Tang: This is a coalition effort. People who are still treasuring freedom of speech, we’re now very closely tied together to pool our resources, to share our training curriculums, to train the trainers, and to facilitate a thriving journalism scene to let people regain trust on proper journalism.

Nick Aspinwall: I also want to ask about at the TFD conference there were representatives from the US who spoke about how the two could collaborate in combating disinformation. I know that you visited the US quite a few times the last few months and gone and spoken at workshops.

Audrey Tang: They hold workshops.

Nick Aspinwall: What could those collaborations consist of, potentially?

Audrey Tang: Shared curriculums and shared tools are the two that are obvious. We already publish everything we do online, anyway. We do have a curriculum that we’re sharing. After NYC, next month we’re sharing with Toronto. There’s g0v Toronto now. [laughs] They’re also learning the vTaiwan and Join facilitative methods, as well as any associated civic technologies.

Audrey Tang: In a few weeks, there will be g0v Italy as well. G0v is one of those non-trademarked monikers. Anyone who want to work in civic tech can register a domain, g0v.it, or whatever, and have a run at it. [laughs] It’s not like Taiwan colonizes [laughs] other places in the world by insisting on a pattern or a trademark royalty scheme. It is entirely open innovation. It’s really just a meme.

Audrey Tang: People can take it and run with it It builds solidarity. It makes people know that it is not just government state power talking to state power. It is civil society talking to civil society. It is social entrepreneurs talking with social entrepreneurs. It is people who manufacture AirBox talking with other vendors of overseas who manufacture AirBox.

Audrey Tang: All these is communication and solidarity on this citizens’ level. It could be entrepreneurs. It could be social sector or charities. The state level is just sharing our awareness of the existing civil society end of this, and empowering each other’s civil society by giving them sufficient support, tools, and legitimacy.

Audrey Tang: What civil society needs the most is being respected and being treated as a equal in a government’s agenda-setting process. There is a mechanism of doing that. It’s called the Open Government Partnership. The OGP is also one of the venues that we’re sharing all those innovations.

Nick Aspinwall: Is there anything else that you would want to add, especially on transparency in general and promoting dialogue in general? You’ve called it a vaccination for disinformation several times. On how that can be expanded and continued? For example, your own transparency policy, do you think that’s something that the rest of the government could continue, becoming more transparent, as they have?

Audrey Tang: They’re already doing that. Controversial consultations is now the norm.

Audrey Tang: I read the news yesterday that city councils are now required to live stream its debates in a draft proposal sent by the Minister of Interior. That’s really good. Previously only some municipalities, and not completely, and the legislation, the Parliament, did that.

Audrey Tang: When I say spreading, I refer not only internationally, but also domestically into lower, self-ruled jurisdictions. The city council is a perfect place because it is the site of a lot of vertical power, of the old power. If even they can see that transparency compliments, although it doesn’t reinforce, the old powers, then they are much more willing to engage in a proper rule of law and democracy process.

Audrey Tang: All of this is Target 16 in Sustainable Development Goals. This is literally what every country in the UN have agreed to reach by 2030. [laughs] It’s not like we invented the goal. We just discovered a way to work toward the goal in full speed without sacrificing or leaving anyone behind, without sacrificing freedom of speech, and in a way that the old powers are comfortable with.

Audrey Tang: The last point is perhaps the most important one. We are working with countries who are like-minded, but we’re also working with countries that are questioning whether they want to be more authoritarian or whether it’s OK to be more democratic. We’re here to show that it’s OK to be more democratic.

Nick Aspinwall: Potentially, if you were asked for a response to the messaging that the PRC sends to this government, to this country, would you say that it’s a response to continue being open, continue being transparent?

Audrey Tang: Yeah. Even the PRC committed to the sustainable goals Supposedly, [laughs] they are going to be, by rule of law and constitutionally, effective and accountable by 2030. Taiwan can help also, I guess.

Nick Aspinwall: Is there anything else that you’d like to add? I was wondering if I have any more questions from what I jotted down. One other thing that came up, as far as things to do as responses, as prescriptions for the public for disinformation, aside from asking social media companies through a forum to take social responsibility...

Audrey Tang: To become social enterprises. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: I’ve heard a lot of that. I’ll start there. Once again I was at TFC yesterday, and they talked a bit about that. How do we engage? I believe they’ve tried to before and have not...At least it’s still in a very preliminary stage if anything.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, Facebook, in particular, is funding the Media Watch organization to do a independent review of the most trustworthy interactive traditional media Facebook pages, which is a start.

Nick Aspinwall: This is here in Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s here in Taiwan.

Nick Aspinwall: Taiwan Media Watch?

Audrey Tang: Taiwan Media Watch. It’s in the news already. Conceivably, of course, if there’s citizen confidence index in journalism and things like that, then people will maybe see the social media as more legitimate and not so full of rumors, which will actually be of advantage to Facebook as well. It’s quite conceivable why they want to fund that work.

Audrey Tang: As you can see, [laughs] the people who are high-ranked, they already reported them. People who are not ranked well did not report this. I wonder why.

Audrey Tang: At least that gets people talking. Of course, they can do more, and I think they are very much willing to do more because it’s to their advantage, as I said. If everybody sees Facebook as a place full of disinformation and nothing authentic at all, I wonder what that will do to their stock price. [laughs] I’m sure that it was to do it. As I said, it’s not because the Taiwanese Government asked them to.

Audrey Tang: I always stress the fact that if sufficient number of people have frustrations of social media or Facebook, in particular, then we do co-creation. We do a participatory design, we surface the issues, and then we send that to Facebook saying, "This is the will of the people, and we are just translating their message. But if you want to engage, you need to engage directly with the people."

Audrey Tang: We’re certainly not serving as a agenda server of what to ask Facebook. The civil society is doing that. As a facilitative minister, I’m mostly just making sure the words and sentiments they express can be translated faithfully into the language of algorithm, of code, of Internet technology. This applies equally to Microsoft, to Uber, to all the companies that I’m a semi-ambassador to.

Nick Aspinwall: Another thing that I wonder -- it’s more in the ballpark of the NCC probably than yours -- the importance of having a public broadcaster is something that I’ve also heard mentioned as a way to combat disinformation, having a trustworthy well-funded public broadcaster.

Nick Aspinwall: Here in Taiwan, I believe PTS gets something...For example, NHK in Japan is funded 20 times more than PTS, something like that.

Audrey Tang: Even with the very small funding, they still manage to do very good efforts. Actually, I attended to who comes to dinner with the PTS. I’m amazed that they can so much with a little budget, like the Taiwan health care system.

Nick Aspinwall: Funding PTS, for instance, is that its own potential way of having a more trustworthy or a more stable media environment?

Audrey Tang: It’s not just a NCC thing, though. It would be a Ministry of Culture thing. The Minister of Culture already publicly said -- even when she was MP, but certainly, now that she’s minister -- that she really believes the kind of picture you just painted about the strong public media that is not a mouthpiece of the state.

Audrey Tang: We can save that for other diplomatic missions, maybe MOFA, but not the Ministry of Culture. [laughs] The Ministry of Culture I think is on the right track. They have good credibility now to be seen as not a mouthpiece of the state, certainly. Even the Social Innovation Lab that my office is in is actually within the Ministry of Culture, Contemporary Culture Lab, the C-Lab.

Audrey Tang: This is at heart of Taipei, but we dedicate it for participatory design and co-creation of culture rather than for finance or trading of stuff. This, by itself, shows that have a public space that belongs to people and people can trust is important, and in a physical way, as a physical manifestation of the Minister of Culture’s belief in that.

Audrey Tang: I think they’re working on a few laws at the moment that’s waiting to be second and third read that will give the Ministry of Culture the sufficient legal structures to set up such arms-length organizations and funding programs. I wish them luck.

Audrey Tang: I’m not [laughs] supervising them, but I generally empathize and do agree with this idea of a public, not state, cultural co-creation process. That would be well-funded if those legislations pass.

Nick Aspinwall: It does seem like having a public broadcast or public media outlet with, of course, full editorial independence and a strong, robust system of doing very quality project work...

Audrey Tang: And an open license to empower the civil society to reuse the materials in even better ways.

Nick Aspinwall: Of course. How does that currently work? I’m not quite sure how that works with PTS.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we have the Forward-Looking Infrastructure budget. We partner with PTS to do a few large, like 4K films.

Audrey Tang: I’m trying to find the word in English, which is not that easy.

Audrey Tang: This is the super-high quality and...It’s something about a flower.

Audrey Tang: Here we go. These are the two initial efforts that the Minister of Culture is partnering with PTS to make a culturally and historically important...It’s not quite a documentary. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It is a history film, and in a way that is using the cutting-edge technologies pipeline, with a lot of budget, and gets the standard operation procedure of getting these assets and these processes in the open, so that everybody can know how to make things.

Audrey Tang: As part of this work, they scanned a lot of historical buildings in high-quality point clouds, so that people can put on virtual reality glasses. If you want to film something, you can very easily walk around these virtualized buildings. If anything like fire [laughs] happen to any of these...

Audrey Tang: ...at least we can restore it using the high-quality scans. That enables me, for example, to be telepresent in other countries, such as the Germany Virtual Reality Fair or whatever, and speak in front of a temple cluster, and have people immerse themself into Taiwanese culture while having a conversation with me.

Audrey Tang: It’s of multi-use. It’s not like those one-shot props in making a movie. This is mostly about getting a generation of filmmakers the language, the tools, the assets, to do public co-creation, and with the artifacts of their work, including the scans, the SOPs, and the code and everything in the public, openly licensed.

Audrey Tang: Then it also enables a accretive ecosystem not just for that one report or that one film. That’s the basic idea. They’re already getting some funding, but mostly just to get the technical know-how to a cutting-edge, competitive layer. We already talk about it. If truth is boring and disinformation is lots of fun, of course, that would never work.

Nick Aspinwall: That brings me back to what you had said before about how you had a conversation with Ko Wen-je about how he said clickbait can be characterized as fake news. At the same time, and you mentioned this too, a lot of media organizations try and use those very attractive, clickbait-y headlines.

Nick Aspinwall: I’m an editor, as well as a writer. When you’re writing a headline, you want eyeballs.

Audrey Tang: It’s poetic work, right?

Audrey Tang: There’s some poetic creativity in doing this.

Nick Aspinwall: Right, and you want to...

Audrey Tang: You want to do the reporter poetic justice, but you also want clicks. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: You’re right. There’s always a balance. You want eyeballs while you’re also...

Nick Aspinwall: The cabinet’s website, for example, I’m not sure, and I don’t read Chinese well enough to know how those headlines...

Audrey Tang: Are click-worthy? [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: ...or how the text in the articles avoids being too technical.

Audrey Tang: That’s a constant problem. We are improving on that by having visual assets next to each major policy.

Audrey Tang: The Social Innovation Plan, when we roll it out, we actually engaged designers who work with people with Down syndrome [laughs] to explain the idea of social enterprise, of sustainable development goals, in a way that seems fun and makes it easier for people who are not that textually inclined to still have a impression of what Social Innovation Plan is really about.

Audrey Tang: The Ministry of Health and Welfare, the Council of Agriculture, they all have engaged dedicated visual communication teams to do that. Their Facebook pages or their films tend to be the best among various ministries. Of course, we can improve other ministries’ know-how as well. This is a ongoing process.

Audrey Tang: I totally agree. The poetic and also visual capability of engaging people using few words and a few iconic pictures is very important. We must not let content form dominate that art.

Nick Aspinwall: When people instantly say, "This is from the government, so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt,"...

Audrey Tang: [laughs] That’s great.

Nick Aspinwall: That’s great?

Audrey Tang: Healthy skepticism, yeah.

Audrey Tang: The government need to trust the people. The people trust back however they want.

Nick Aspinwall: When you see that, is that a target for someone you’d want to engage, you’d want to start a conversation with?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, it’s a invitation.

Nick Aspinwall: How do I want to put this? I know that a lot of mis- and disinformation originates domestically. When we talk about China, there’s no way to really know.

Audrey Tang: Certainly, it’s not a territorial description. It’s more like a ideological description. People who identify with the authoritarian regimes, sometimes they truly identify with the PRC’s way of treating people domestically. There are people who believe in that in Taiwan as well.

Nick Aspinwall: Of course.

Audrey Tang: Of course, they organically spread messages. It’s not necessarily about reunification. It’s mostly about thinking back to the authoritarian martial law days and how glorious those days are.

Nick Aspinwall: I know that you’ve mentioned when there are messages from content farms, you’ll generally ignore them because there’s not really a way for you to engage. As we know, a lot of the content army, like the 50 Cent Party as they’ve been called in the PRC, a lot of that is becoming automated now.

Audrey Tang: It’s all being automated.

Nick Aspinwall: As you are generally looking to engage...

Audrey Tang: People.

Nick Aspinwall: ...people, do you ever engage people in the PRC?

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Nick Aspinwall: Do you ever really do?

Audrey Tang: Of course. Right after I become digital minister, I taught classes in Hangzhou about how to deliberate in a virtual reality. I send my virtual avatars there. [laughs] I’m physically in Taipei, but I’m lecturing with people in Hangzhou and in Kaohsiung. I think it’s the Hangzhou Academy of Art and Kaohsiung Academy of Art as well.

Audrey Tang: They 3D-scanned their classes, upload it together, and we kind of merged the two classrooms together. All the models are placed in the Google data center in Changhua, which is not great firewalled. They just directly connect it to the open-source, virtual reality space called High Fidelity. I put on my goggles, and I can see students from both sites. It’s a pretty good experience.

Audrey Tang: I had just became digital minister at the time. I’m sure they checked with their political parties as well. They’re like, "It’s not really visiting. We’re just watching a movie." They’re OK with that. I talk about how to form discussion groups, to set agenda, to do ideation and so on, in virtual reality.

Audrey Tang: That’s my first holographic visit since I become the digital minister. Of course, I did many other things in Geneva and in other places as well, but Hangzhou was one of the first visits. I talk about that experience in the Open Government Partnership in Paris as well and shared that conversation.

Nick Aspinwall: Through that experience, when you were engaging with Chinese...

Audrey Tang: The students in Hangzhou.

Nick Aspinwall: ...students, could you describe how productive they were, like the attitudes of the students towards wanting to learn...

Audrey Tang: Of course, we won’t use the word "civic hacking" then because it tend to get them arrested.

Audrey Tang: Of course, the thing I do, like social innovation, social enterprise, impact-oriented thinking, these are OK thoughts there as well. I mostly just talk about the tools and how to apply those tools to facilitate group consensus if you are working on a social innovation project together.

Audrey Tang: This is completely neutral. This doesn’t talk about centralized democracy [laughs] versus representative democracy. This is just about people listening to each other with the help of tools.

Audrey Tang: The hope, of course, is that if they want to extend that to responsive decision-making, to fundamental freedoms, to transparent institutions, they now know how is it like to have the feeling in a smaller scale, and that there are sufficient technological tools should they wish to fight for freedom on a larger scale.

Nick Aspinwall: It gives them a framework to do what they may want to do.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

Nick Aspinwall: Do you ever worry that these engagements could be limited as the climate, at least between governments here and in China, is changing?

Audrey Tang: It doesn’t affect me, personally.

Nick Aspinwall: I wonder what you would think, though, when there starts to be accusations. This is personal, but also it goes into a bit of how I think you do your job when you prioritize engaging with everyone, including people in China. When accusations are being made, like, "Are Chinese students being sent here to spy?"

Audrey Tang: No. All the interactions are in the open. If you go to YouTube, it’s the entire curriculum and even the recording of our interactions. I talked about it in Paris. Everything is radically open and transparent. If they are spies, they certainly don’t look like it.

Audrey Tang: That’s the extent of our interaction because it’s entirely intermediated. There’s no backroom dealings because it’s literally just calls via High Fidelity and over Zoom. Everything is recorded, so everybody can see and make their own conclusions. Certainly, it doesn’t look like a clandestine operation to me.

Audrey Tang: This is my methodology because I’m working with people. I’m not working for a state. Any innovation that I do, I just post it online. As I said, the domain that I set up in the Google data center, anybody can connect to.

Audrey Tang: If people connect to Hangzhou and Kaohsiung -- I think there’s some people connecting from Europe as well -- I don’t really ask them to declare their passport or something before connecting to my classroom. All I did was, "In this hour, I’m going to appear here and talk about collective decision-making," and that’s it.

Audrey Tang: It’s like a seminar, a webinar, and I don’t think people generally find it’s a problem of people dialing in anywhere in the world.

Audrey Tang: After the climate change, as you mentioned, I’m going to speak on something like this in the Sustainable Development courses. I think it’s Columbia. It will also circulate to over 50 different universities in the world. I’m going to speak to them at once, and they can ask me questions directly.

Audrey Tang: I think there’s one in Shanghai, as well, but I don’t really care where. [laughs] The point is that people think about these things collectively, and post their questions and go further than I am on thinking about these issues.

Nick Aspinwall: It’s interesting. Just from my personal observations, seeing the dynamics of fear play out in different ways has been something to observe with a level of healthy skepticism, at least for me, how you will see, as tensions rise between the world powers, and not just Taiwan and China, but as Taiwan becomes a part of a big narrative.

Audrey Tang: The plate tectonics. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: Right, like the plates of power moving around, whoever they may be, how that goes down to a people-to-people level. My interest in what’s happening with mis- and disinformation here in Taiwan is that it goes to that individual level where it can impact someone, drag someone to a polar end or into a herd.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Nick Aspinwall: Summarizing everything we’ve talked about, I think that my first takeaway is using engagement and transparency as more preventative methods rather than just reacting to what happens. Could you speak a bit to the importance of what an individual person can do, both by themselves and as a member of a larger online community?

Audrey Tang: The very first thing somebody can do is to engage with social media on larger screens. A larger screen gives more ideas in one glance. It makes it less likely for people to jump to conclusions.

Audrey Tang: If you read the same piece of social media on a tablet or desktop, it’s far more likely that you will actually get to the point where you can have critical thinking rather than if you are walking and scrolling on your phone, which is very small and it only gives you 50 words or less.

Audrey Tang: It just ignites some outrage, and you’re compelled to share it, only to find out that it’s perhaps not what it seems like later. It’s more viral if it’s mobile and you’re in a distracted psychological state to engage with it. The part of the emotional brain is more likely to just log in and being provoked into adding fire to the fuel.

Audrey Tang: If it’s a larger screen or you’re more a meditating poster, [laughs] or at least a more calm poster, then it’s far less likely that these things will affect you in a gut-feeling kind of way. My first suggestion would be engage social media as you would any other media, to engage it with full engagement, not in a distracted state. Preferably, use a larger screen. That’s my first suggestion.

Audrey Tang: The second one is if you find the urge to like something or to [laughs] spread something, at least one can be opinionated about how and when to engage in this way. What we found when I work in Socialtext before joining the cabinet is that if you have more than three instant message systems installed on the same phone, then people get into the state of attention deficiency.

Audrey Tang: They have to constantly context-switch without fully contemplating any messages. It’s like a cocktail of attention deficiency. Pick a trustworthy, end-to-end encrypted instant messaging system and stick with it, [laughs] no matter what your other friends are doing. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Personally, I choose email as my instant message system. Any email, I can just respond within minutes. I do have a instant message account on other instant message systems, but I only check them once in the morning and once in the night. I use them like other people use email and I use email like other people use instant message. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: I feel more psychologically healthy [laughs] because email is self-contained. It contains more contemplated messages. It has a set of tools, the PGP and every other tool, designed to enhance its reliability. It’s been around for much longer. We solved junk mail, [laughs] so basically, it’s less susceptible to all the psychological attacks. It’s a more reliable, older form of communication.

Audrey Tang: My third suggestion would be use email as instant message and use instant message sparingly, as other people use email.

Nick Aspinwall: Do you ever have any sort of public service campaigns? Do you ever publicly encourage people to do this, for example, to do things like these healthy habits, engaging on larger screens or using email?

Audrey Tang: It’s part of the media literacy curriculum. I think it’s going to run next September. I don’t have the final details yet because I’m no longer part of the K to 12 Committee. I did put a lot of those thoughts in when I still work on the K to 12 Committee.

Nick Aspinwall: It may be in there?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Nick Aspinwall: That’s a very important thing for everyone to learn to do.

Audrey Tang: Basic hygiene, [laughs] mental hygiene.

Nick Aspinwall: Right, absolutely, and certainly helps us with being able to engage with something that may be false. That’s really interesting. I think when I absentmindedly use my phone is something that I haven’t quite thought about the impact of, being on my laptop versus that. That’s very interesting.

Nick Aspinwall: Is there anything else that you would want to add? I definitely don’t want to keep you for too long. I’m really grateful that you’ve spent so much time.

Audrey Tang: The final suggestion is don’t drunk email. It’s not as dangerous as drunk driving, but it really amplifies things.

Audrey Tang: If you really want to consume substance, allocate a time and place for it and don’t mix that with electronic communication. That’s your public service announcement. [laughs]

Nick Aspinwall: That’s always a good bit of advice.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.

Nick Aspinwall: Thank you so much.

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Nick Aspinwall: Thanks a lot.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I’ll send you the transcript.

Nick Aspinwall: OK. Thanks so much.