Xifan Yang: The focus of my article is China’s efforts to force a reunification with Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: Sorry. Unification.

Xifan Yang: Force an “reunification.”

Audrey Tang: But there’s no “re” in unification.

Xifan Yang: OK.

Audrey Tang: It was not unified at any given point.

Xifan Yang: Understand. I’m just…

Audrey Tang: …I guess, if you put that in quotes…

Xifan Yang: …the official term…

Audrey Tang: …still it’s not a “re”-unification. It’s just unification.

Xifan Yang: OK. As China has been ramping up its military threats, I wonder, besides the danger of a forceful invasion, what kind of accompanying efforts has Beijing undertaken in the digital sphere? Have these efforts been noticeably stepped up recently?

Audrey Tang: Not particularly recently — specifically, during the anti-ELAB protest in Hong Kong, which coincides with our presidential election.

Audrey Tang: There’s been very well-studied efforts, including actually by the social media companies, of fake accounts, of disinformation campaigns, trying to paint the Hong Kong people who protest as violent mobs who gets paid to “murder police” and so on. These are all very well-documented cases, the height of which was around last October or November.

Xifan Yang: How sophisticated are these attacks? How do you and your team analyze these attacks? Where are they coming from? How big of a cyber army they have in Beijing? What departments are involved?

Audrey Tang: What’s important is that, for example, painting the anti-ELAB protest, it’s like a cognitive space disinformation campaign that’s not covert. It’s very overt. This disinformation package that I just mentioned is actually posted in the open on the Central Political and Law unit, the Zhongyang Zhengfawei’s Weibo account, the Chang’an Sword.

Audrey Tang: The allegation was that there was a picture, a very young person on the street of Hong Kong, with a caption that said, “This 13-year-old gets paid to go to the protest” and “buy new iPhones and sport shoes and so on.” The photo is actually from Reuters. The original Reuters caption says nothing about that.

Audrey Tang: It’s pretty clear to all involved that this is a deliberate disinformation campaign and posted on Zhongyang Zhengfawei’s own account. There’s nothing covert about this.

Xifan Yang: If there’s nothing covert about it but it has been out in the open, how dangerous are these infiltration efforts for Taiwan’s society at all?

Audrey Tang: It’s not infiltration per se, it’s just disinformation, intentionally spreading untrue ideas that harms the public. The main thing here in Taiwan is just we’re not seeing it as something that’s new as of this year or as of last year.

Audrey Tang: It’s been decades, literally, where the PRC tells the international community, for example, that they represent the health interests of Taiwan well at the WHO. That’s something that they keep saying for years now.

Audrey Tang: What’s important is just to make sure that in Taiwan, everyone understand that there is this kind of narrative going on, that when we see, we notice this kind of disinformation campaign, we work with the journalistic community, work with the social media companies and so on to make sure that there is a public notice.

Audrey Tang: Instead of taking anything down by the administration, we just put something up saying, “The Taiwan FactCheck Center has verified that actually come from Zhongyang Zhengfawei Chang’an Sword.”

Audrey Tang: This is just to make sure that people get inoculated in their mind, knowing when they’re sharing this piece of disinformation that it is actually sponsored by the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, from the PRC.

Xifan Yang: You say these efforts have been around for a while, decades. What make them dangerous still? Taiwan people are aware of Beijing’s propaganda.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. There’s a couple of things. In recent years, on social media, it’s easier for people, based on the incomplete context, to simply click share. Previously, if it’s on television or on radio or on newspaper, it’s harder to click share and reach hundreds of thousands of people. It’s less likely to go into an infodemic.

Audrey Tang: The ease of clicking share coupled with the form factor of a mobile device that simply cannot show a lot of context, that allow outrage to travel easier. For us, of course, it’s our goal to make the clarification travel even faster and easier than the disinformation. This is what we call the humor over rumor effort.

Xifan Yang: How closely do cyber departments in China work with their proxies maybe based in Taiwan, local allies, local helpers?

Audrey Tang: I have no idea. It’s a question for the PRC authorities?

Xifan Yang: They would never answer that, so [laughs] I thought maybe you…

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s their responsibility to answer to people.

Audrey Tang: As a government, we think that anything that we do is within our constitutional limit.

Audrey Tang: If we do make, for example, new digital endeavors such as the clarification, the humor over rumor, the digital quarantine efforts and so on, we need to answer to the journalistic community and to the parliamentary interpolations, but I’m not sure that we are responsible for other government’s digital efforts, that we need to explain for them. I’m not sure that it’s our job to do so.

Xifan Yang: What do you know about the resources Beijing has put in place specifically targeted at Taiwan?

Audrey Tang: Of course, if you read the Graphika report, the Doublethink Lab report, the Taiwan FactCheck Center’s efforts and so on, it’s significant resource. Then again, if you’re asking in terms of HR, like how many full-timers are there, I have no idea. Again, that is something the PRC should answer for.

Xifan Yang: China has a lot of money, a lot of manpower, a lot of resources for cyber warfare. What kind of advantage does a small democracy like Taiwan have to combat these efforts?

Audrey Tang: First of all, in a democracy, we’re used to all sorts of different ideas. It’s harder for a single disinformation to get everybody enraged given a diverse and people who are competent in critical and creative thinking. It’s just like biodiversity. It’s harder for a virus to take hold if there is biodiversity. The same idea holds for democracy.

Audrey Tang: The other thing is that in Taiwan, people understand no matter what their party affiliation, the deepening of democracy and collaboration with international community is very important. Any one-sided attacks on the democracy itself is less likely to succeed.

Audrey Tang: That is partly why the pre-presidential election disinformation campaign focused so much on Hong Kong. It’s because they are also showing that democracy is worth fighting for.

Audrey Tang: This is a dangerous message to the PRC people if the message resonates with people within the PRC as well. In a sense, their interferences show a insecurity. It’s not a projection of power. It’s a projection of the insecurity.

Xifan Yang: Would you say the Chinese efforts have been successful in at least parts, maybe some parts of the population more susceptible to their messages, maybe older people who don’t know how to use social media, who are more easily influenced?

Audrey Tang: I think of age in terms of media competence. Even if you’re a 70-year-old, if you only had five years of experience working with online community, to me you are five-year-old.

Audrey Tang: Nowadays in Taiwan, because we have broadband as a human right and the lifelong learning includes media competence, in the past, I would say, five years or so, everybody have matured and understood that there are this kind of disinformation going on. We’re in a pretty good shape now and specifically compared to five years ago.

Xifan Yang: Do you have a certain task force or department in your ministry specifically targeted at China’s information war?

Audrey Tang: There’s, of course, in each and every ministry a team, what we call participation officers, that engages trending hashtags and trending thoughts, including outrage, in the population.

Audrey Tang: This is important in a day-to-day practice of democracy, is just if the government trust the citizens and answers all the journalistic questions in live-streamed press conferences, as the Central Epidemic Command Center does, then that leaves very little room for doubt for the disinformation to travel.

Audrey Tang: In a sense, disinformation is just a symptom. It shows a lack of trust between citizens to citizens and also between the government to its citizens. If we get the trust working well based on open government principles, then there’s far less ground on which the disinformation can travel.

Xifan Yang: You say that pace is a decisive factor. How fast do you and your participation officers aim at combating this disinformation?

Audrey Tang: There’s, of course, the triple-two rule. Within two hours, there’s at least two pictures, each 200 characters or less, rolled out to counter any disinformation.

Audrey Tang: It has been very effective, precisely because if you see the clarification, which is almost guaranteed to be very funny or at least memorable, as well as the disinformation on the same day, then chances are that when you wake up, you’ll remember the clarification more.

Audrey Tang: If we take too long, like 24 or 48 hours, then after a couple nights’ sleep, already a long-term association will be made between the disinformation and the topic at hand, which would make it much harder to engage in a reasonable conversation. Indeed, as you said, speed is of utmost importance.

Xifan Yang: Is this two-hour rule something you have set up?

Audrey Tang: No. It’s set up by Kolas Yotaka.

Xifan Yang: How do I imagine the people in your ministry dealing with this two-hour rule on a day-to-day basis? There’s big teams of people just scanning the Internet content, and they’re getting certain alerts for certain keywords?

Audrey Tang: This work is a collaboration with the fact checkers, of course. I mentioned Taiwan FactCheck Center. There’s also MyGoPen. Also, anyone on the end-to-end encrypted channels such as LINE can long-press a message, just like flagging an email as spam, to flag something as potentially disinformation.

Audrey Tang: Also, even more importantly I would argue, is the social sector and private sector communities, such as, for example, the Cofacts from g0v community, which is a bot that you can forward to flag disinformation, or the Dr. Message, which is a chatbot from Trend Micro, Taiwan’s leading antivirus company, which does the same but also for scam. You can also invite the bot to your chat group and so on.

Audrey Tang: All in all, this enables us to have a advanced understanding of the disinformation landscape long before it goes into the public social networks such as Facebook, when it’s already in circulation but only in end-to-end encrypted channels. As long as people are willing to donate to dedicated to public study, then we can detect it before it goes viral, so to speak.

Xifan Yang: This fact-checking center that you mentioned, is it affiliated to your ministry directly?

Audrey Tang: Not at all. They are a independent organization. They, as a matter of fact, do not accept donations from political parties or politicians.

Xifan Yang: Can you explain the concept of nerd immunity?

Audrey Tang: Sure. It’s just a easy-to-remember idea of basically if people have understood the context in a more fun fashion, in a more lighthearted fashion, if they experience joy, then one is less likely to feel outrage about the same topic.

Audrey Tang: If we can get our clarifications to be very funny and reaches a lot of people with a higher R-value, the basic transmission rate, than the disinformation, then within a day or two, most people will feel that there’s nothing outrageous and so won’t spread the disinformation. They will understand that there is disinformation going on, but they don’t feel particularly enraged or anxious about it.

Audrey Tang: When they receive a related disinformation message from their friends on social media, it’s far less likely for them to then click share to quell their own anxiety. This will inhibit the R-value of the disinformation, in a sense, actually, exactly in the same way as how herd immunity works in a biological virus.

Xifan Yang: Is there any way for you to assess how successful you have been to combat Chinese disinformation?

Audrey Tang: First of all, one can only look into the speed upon which not only our ministries have responded but the fact-checkers have responded, the platforms that have signed on for the counter-disinformation, self-regulation campaign have responded.

Audrey Tang: You can see very easily that there’s more people aware of it, more people participating it in fact-checking, and also that there are more and more disinformation or potential disinformation that gets flagged and so on. If you want something quantitative, you can just check, for example, the fact-checking dashboard at LINE, which I just pasted you the link.

Xifan Yang: Thank you so much. When you see how Western countries deal with Chinese cyber disinformation, do you see any particular blind spot? Is there anything that Western countries can learn from Taiwan’s example?

Audrey Tang: One of the main ideas I keep sharing, especially in the case of the counter pandemic, is to trust the citizens. If people trust the citizens and empower them to be competent, essentially, part-time journalists, then one can collectively figure out new ways to respond to emerging crisis in a all-of-society fashion.

Audrey Tang: On the other hand, if we rely on top-down, shutdown, takedown, lockdown measures, then the creativity of the population will be inhibited. This is called a Pygmalion effect. I wrote at length in this blog that I just pasted you. You’re welcome to quote from it.

Xifan Yang: Thank you so much. Some countries, including Germany, are still hesitant to ban Huawei completely from its 5G networks. Looking at the whole 5G debate, what do you think about Europe’s approach? Are governments in Europe still too naïve?

Audrey Tang: The point of this debate is on building the data norm in a society which we fortunately had the debate before we even deploy our 4G network. We started in 2013, because of the CSSTA, to have this deliberation.

Audrey Tang: By March 2014, thanks to the Sunflower Movement, people already has a pretty strong rough consensus on there is no pure-play private sector vendors in the PRC that the dang, the state or the party – actually, that means the party but also the state – can pretty much take over any leadership positions in any so-called private sector companies.

Audrey Tang: The ongoing risk assessment that one must do when we use PRC components in the 4G network, amortized, is actually much more expensive than had we went to Ericsson, Nokia, or develop our own. That’s a pretty strong consensus of the whole society, not just a few people in the government.

Audrey Tang: A whole-of-society conversation is always beneficial because then it makes the legitimacy of whatever endeavor that you are making a exercise in democracy and not only in trade, in negotiation, or in diplomacy.

Audrey Tang: I also found another blog that I wrote about the disinformation part in general. I just pasted you the one on pandemic. This one is on infodemic, but they essentially make the same argument.

Xifan Yang: Thank you so much. Going back to military threats, how imminent do you personally think is the risk of military escalation anytime soon? People are speculating when China will make its threats come through.

Audrey Tang: As the Digital Minister in charge of Open Government, I cannot access the state secrets, so I have no idea. My information sources are all open source intelligence, that is to say anything everybody can see. Your question is toward the Minister of Defense or the National Security Council. I don’t have the information to answer you.

Xifan Yang: At least looking at the cyber disinformation, do you feel like in Taiwan there is a very strong sense of urgency that society has to counter Chinese efforts?

Audrey Tang: Of course, people used to talk about a “mango” doomed feeling [laughs] around the election time last year. That is something that was there.

Audrey Tang: However, instead of being paralyzed by it or instead of helplessness, what’s important is that people mobilize and found out something that they can do, either participating in the fact-checking, participating in their civic media and things like that.

Audrey Tang: This is very important to say, that each of us in Taiwan, no matter our political inclinations and so on, we all understood that if we don’t participate in the creation of the democracy, then of course the fear of losing freedom is very paralyzing.

Audrey Tang: During the presidential campaign, no matter which political party people supported, they all mobilized and a lot. I have another blog that talks about this. I just pasted you that.

Xifan Yang: Thank you. When I was in Taiwan two years ago, I felt like the overall atmosphere was quite pessimistic. People were talking about either there’s going to be a quick death by invasion or maybe a long, slow strangulation by economic infiltration and so on. The events in the past two years, have they created a more optimistic outlook for Taiwan’s democracy?

Audrey Tang: I’m always optimistic. I guess it depends on which kinds of people you hang out with. [laughs] What’s real and true is that more and more people around the world are waking up to the fact that the kind of authoritarian norm that PRC impose domestically, they’re also bringing it to other places. They are exporting it.

Audrey Tang: I’m not only talking about the Belt and Road initiative and so on but about the way they conduct their conversations. Actually, the “re” in the so-called “re”-unification is a really good example at that. The more people they can influence to say “re”-unification — as if there was a time when PRC controlled Taiwan! — but there was not. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: It’s actually just projecting their insecurity to everyone and asking people to unconsciously join in their insecurity toward Taiwan’s democracy. Now more and more people around the world are calling it out. It’s a great development.

Xifan Yang: Thank you, Minister. One last question. Is this your office?

Audrey Tang: Mm-hmm.

Xifan Yang: Can I have a quick look?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, sure. Of course. This is more like a studio. This is when I make video conversations. My real office is at the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei.

Xifan Yang: That is an open space, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s a park.

Xifan Yang: Thank you so much, Minister. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Cheers. Bye.

Xifan Yang: Bye.