They did it with even more, let's say, resilience than the previous copyright violation, which was quite lax. Maybe because there was no popular demands, just industrial demand. For their sexually explicit images and videos, there's both industry and public demand.
That's right. Against sexual abuse. That's exactly right. I think we need to raise this abuse against journalism, crime against journalism, to the same degree. More than copyrights abuse and approaching sexual abuse. I think that that's a winning ticket.
That's right, because we're currently below copyright abuse.
That's right.
OK. Yeah. In Taiwan we've intentionally classified disinformation not as, say, fake news, but classifying it in the same category as spam or junk, as an intentionally false that does public harm, mostly because people and the advertisers especially, already has a distaste to scam and spam.
By classifying disinformation with spammer's scheme, they have a mental image that's a part of this integrity, of their browsing or customer experience that makes this convincing easier to do. The integrity of their brand, essentially.
It's a spam that grows at virus scam speed, but it's the same thing.
Sure.
As I mentioned, I do think that the existing ecosystem with the delivery mechanisms of chatbots and absence of one are already, I wouldn't say mature, but they're reasonably resilient. My suggestion, if you are to make an impact in Taiwan, is to first, of course, continue your work with Mobile Edge and others.
Taiwan has a very thriving Mozilla/Firefox developer advocacy base. Many of the Firefox popular functions, extensions, or even operating system used to be developed out of this Taiwan community.
What I would suggest is to engage with the Mozilla Taiwan Community, who can probably improve a lot on the extension based experience. They have a lot of experience to building alternate browsers.
In Taiwan, we have a lot of start ups, and so on, tackling this, as I mentioned, anti scam, anti spam browsing experience. For example, the Puffin Web Browser, which is actually Taiwan based, it's a US company, but all its employees are in Taiwan.
The idea of this kind of isolated browsing experience shields against computer virus because it runs on another manager machine, but also, it makes introducing far more sweeping changes to user experience much easier because in a sense, they're just transforming these middlewares into the final presentation layer.
The public library computers are just displaying the resulting transformation layer. This is much easier ASL than installing individual pieces of applets or JavaScript to run on a public library computer, which is always an uphill battle, as you probably know. Your natural allies are these already established middleware solutions.
By offering your service as part of the toolkit against scam and spam, you don't have to do the business development yourself, is my suggestion.
Yeah, and they have a QR code scanner as well. In Taiwan, when you check in a venue, you scan the QR code that redirects to SMS, but because of that, people gains a habit of scanning QR code, which can be dangerous for their phones.
Trend Micro rolls out its own QR code scanner and integrates with, as I mentioned, those notice and public notice anti scammer spam tools, so if they scan a QR code and see a red label saying this is a disinformation domain, that works too as part of their experience.
In that sense, they're like the Puffin browser. They're one step between any customer and the website, they're a semi browser.
Yes, right. I think what we've been discussing are just proof of concepts.
In order to make a real impact, what we did when we introduced a SMS based QR code, is to work with LINE itself. So that its main QR code scanner, the scanner that's used to add context, it's convince it's Japan headquarter to add a SMS specific module. So that people know this is the SMS sending kind of QR code, instead of blindly accepting each and every website.
A dedicated, tailor made middleware for counter pandemic, contact tracing purposes.
If some sort of labeling can be done at a domain level, at an embedded browser, within the LINE ecosystem, just like the embedded browser within Skype, or embedded browser within the Messenger, then we are talking. That's like 90 percent of people's actual dedicated time. What we've been discussing is 4 percent.
They use a very popular LINE Bot for that, and also is a website, it's the part of the g0v communities efforts called, CoFacts, for collaborative fact checking.
CoFacts is at an upstream of the identifying, trending disinformation. On the downstream there's the town fact checking center, the Trend Micro, Whoscall, and other folks. CoFacts is the main community that works on the upstream level.
You can also serve as a platform of which, these newer innovations out of Taiwan that has reasonable success in our jurisdiction and maybe you can introduce it to libraries in UK or something.
Whoscall is actually getting some adoption in Japan as well, which is the other Indo-Pacific jurisdiction that's very friendly to the press.
Whoscall seems to be enjoying reasonable success there. I believe that's because, in Japan, journalistic integrity is held even more on a different strata than commentaries and information on the web.
In Taiwan these two sometimes side each other, but in Japan, they rarely do. Whatever your prototype in Taiwan, if it works to a certain degree, then serves as a very convincing example for Japan to say, "We can then do better, because we have even more established journalistic integrity sector."
Exactly.
Certainly election integrity. There's a very special relationship between disinformation and a partisan dynamic during elections.
In Taiwan we've seen basically a resilience framework of the delivery mechanism we just talked about, works really well in the day to day operations. Even during COVID, I believe they've only strengthened itself.
Only in the days leading up to a major election or referendum, do the volume of disinformation actually exceed the capacity of the voluntary and professional, both fact checkers, as well as other automated mechanisms. So much so that everyone need to adjust their heuristics on the fly. That's because, of course, the payoff is high and it's really just these 72 hours.
Mostly, our integrity of the counting process itself, which is counting paper ballots and live streams and filmed by YouTubers from different party affiliations works quite well, so people don't question the result of the election itself. Still, the polarization and the other name calling and divisiveness and toxic behavior, that US as an advanced democracy, probably doesn't have, but in our kind of democracy we have plenty of those.
I'm mostly worried about that. We'll see if in our December referendum, which has four national referendum topics, whether these dynamics enter into play and whether the capacity of the social sector organizations, including CoFacts and everything we just mentioned, is up to the task of handling the incoming torrents. If you ask me what's on my mind, this is on my mind.
That's right. We need to leverage the election times to highlight the public health harm of hurting the...Call it public mental image. If the mental image of the public is filled with scam and spam, then people do not have a good democratic experience.
Maybe we'll, over time, think authoritarianism maybe isn't that bad after all. This integrity of the mental image is certainly, at this moment, not ranking as high as integrity of body image in the social media providers.
The election times really are the times when we see the Cambridge Analytica and many other incidents. These are the places where the public consciousness recognizes that. This is something that's worth protecting.
When I was a child it was the other way around. We need to smuggle our human right violations to the correspondents in Hong Kong so the international community learns about the Taiwanese martial law experience. Let's say that we're returning the favor but not in a very happy mood.
Thank you.
The anti scam/spam community is quite powerful in Internet governance. By labeling ourself as anti scam/spam solution, I believe that is, on the short term, the fastest way to get the social media companies to come to the table.
Awesome.
Thank you so much. Frances will provide you with the transcript. We co edit for 10 days and then we publish.
Cheers. Bye.
That's exactly right, but since the epidemic, the first wave in Taiwan in May, that has been temporarily suspended until we lift off the national-wide alert.
For the past couple of weeks, we've been in low single digits like zero or one local confirmed cases, but it's not formally lowered the alert level. We'll have to wait till the alert level is over.
There's not really much of a difference because we've never had a lockdown. We've never really had a restriction of movement.
I still go to the cabinet office. For example, the Thursday, which is today, is the cabinet meeting day. I wake up. I talk to international friends and see you, and then at 9:00 AM, I go to the cabinet for the cabinet meeting and then the Board of Science and Technology meeting and so on. It's all in all, pretty normal.
For conference hours. Yes, which is now partially resumed. I mean still, people prefer to meet through video communication more than before May, but there's still in-person visits and lectures, and seminars at the social innovation lab. That usually takes place on Wednesday, or Tuesday nowadays, since we're not touring anymore.
I did.
