It’s interesting because we use actually a lot of the same words. We say transparency, but we mean the state transparent to the people. They also say transparency, but they mean the citizen transparent to the state. And so, it’s a perversion of words. We say public/private partnership, by which we mean that the private sector can propose new regulations to run in a sandbox.
If it’s a good idea, the society accept it, then we take it as the regulation that’s a social innovation I just talked about. When they say public/private partnership, they mean that they install party branches into all the private-sector, large enterprises. Then the head of the party can replace, like Ma Yun, the leader of any private-sector enterprise at any given time.
It’s a public/private partnership. [laughs] Basically, it’s a really different model of governance. What we have seen is that they rely not only on disinformation but rather on just downright propaganda to share, for example, such disinformation on social media to alienate the Taiwan voting population against the Hong Kong demonstrators.
Actually, this is a really good example. They have a photo. That says, “This 13-year-old thug bought new iPhones and game consoles and brand-name sport shoes by murdering police. He is recruiting his brothers.” Actually, they’re reusing a Reuters photo for that. Reuters said nothing about [laughs] murdering police or getting paid for it.
It’s obviously an infiltration and malinformation campaign. It originates actually from [Mandarin], the central political and legal unit of the PRC, its Weibo account. It’s still on their Weibo account. It’s just deliberate propaganda.
What we’ve done is to put it on public notice, meaning that an independent journalist check this, find the source, so that when everybody see this on Facebook, online, on other systems, they see a small footprint that says, “This is actually state propaganda by the PRC. Click here to learn more.”
Instead of by taking anything down, we make sure that there is a public notice attached to such social media activities. That is how we don’t encroach the media freedom but instead just expose the propaganda for what it is. We counter such rumor also with humor.
Each ministry has a team of comedians that can roll out within an hour funny memes, Internet memes I mean, whenever there is a trending rumor about their purview. For example, there was a rumor a few months ago that says, “Perming your hair will be subject to $1 million fine starting next week,” which is not true. Within an hour, the Prime Minister rolls out this memetic GEM.
A younger version of him says, “I may be bald now, but I will not punish people with hair.” Then a small friend says, “What we’ve done is introducing a labeling requirement for hair products starting 2021.” Then the Prime Minister as he looks now says, “However, if you keep perming your hair many time a week, it will not damage your pocket. It will damage your hair. It may look like this.”
It’s a good punchline. [laughs] It’s really humorous. It’s not making fun of other people. It’s making fun of himself. [laughs] This became viral. If you search for perming hair fine, you will find this picture and not the rumor. [laughs] Once you laughed about it, you cannot actually be susceptible to this provoking outrage from people who feel anger about an injustice.
Basically, once this helpless anger energy is channeled into humor, into laughter, they cannot channel it through pressing the share button into social outrage, revenge, and toxicity. Inoculation is what we use as a metaphor for these memetic payloads. The essence here is that you have to roll out really fast. The most they can take is two hour.
That ensures this virality of rumor above humor. I hope that answer your question a little bit.
I shared this idea, I think, March 2017, but the actual work is done by our spokesperson, Gulas Yudaka, all the spokespersons in the all the ministries and the comedians they hire.
I proposed on the Cabinet meeting, and so whichever ministry that has something to say to the citizen eventually adopted it. Of course, with varying speed.
It came from me in a Cabinet meeting, because I’ve been doing that for ages. This is essentially what I do. I’m not a very good comedian, but I respond within two hours.
Oh, yeah, it’s happening very often. You can easily see it in the crowdsourced fact-checking system. It’s called CoFacts. Everybody who see this, because for encrypted channels like WhatsApp, or in Taiwan’s case, Line, there’s no way to use search engine to have an insight into it.
It relies on people voluntarily flagging email as spam. It’s like flagging your message as spam, as virus, or as phishing attacks to Trend Micro, which is a leading antivirus company here, or to this CoFacts, which is a civil society tool. On the CoFacts website, you can see a lot of what’s going on. Here are the literally most-trending rumors at the moment.
You can see how many has been reported, 150K, which is uniquely 35K messages, and 1.5K of which, mostly trending ones, have received a clarification that went back to the people who share it. There are literally bots that are made by antivirus company like Trend Micro that you can invite into your family chatroom.
Whenever anyone shares a disinformation, that bot will magically say that this has been clarified, and, “Here is a funny picture. Look at that.” It’s been adopted by Thailand as well.
My proper title is the Digital Minister in Charge of Open Government, Social Innovation, and Youth Engagement.
Digital Minister is fine.
That’s already the case before the Internet. It’s not like it’s not like that before the Internet. The only thing that’s different is that, with the Internet, it’s easier to feel the people who are the other side as non-people, because they don’t have a face, or maybe they have a static avatar attached to it. It’s very easy to dehumanize people who feel unlike you.
Again, it’s very easy to build a swift trust of people who share the same hashtag, even though you haven’t met them before. It’s two sides of the same coin. What we are now doing is basically ensuring that you can very easily get access to ministerial people. For example, this is my office, my real office. This is just a meeting place. This is the Social Innovation Lab in Taiwan.
Every Wednesday, I’m there from 10:00 AM to the evening. Anybody can come and talk to me. We tore down the walls. It used to be a headquarter of Air Force. We tore down the walls. People can just walk in from the street and talk to me 40 minutes at a time. I’m super accessible.
For the corona virus thing, every day, you can see this one-hour live stream from the Center of Disease Control, our Ministry of Health and Welfare, again, answering real-time questions about what people have to say. We also tour around Taiwan and hold meetings, with the 12 ministries telepresenting.
The questions and agenda are set by the local people, just as the ones convened by the reverse mentors. Basically, to increase the accessibility is the key to make people feel that we’re still in the same polity.
We also use AI-based conversation tools to gather people’s feelings about emerging issues, such as UberX back in 2015 so that everybody can see, after pressing agree or disagree a few times on each other’s sentiments, that we actually agree on most of the things with most of other people most of the time. There’s only this many divisive issues that tear the society apart.
That picture, again, is to reflect into these echo chambers – as you mentioned, the bubbles – to let people see, even if those five ideological issues can create bubbles on its own, and one can belong to any of the 32 bubbles, you don’t have to look at it that way. You can look at these consensus statements. We hold ourselves to account to take only these as agenda to push things forward.
People can feel everybody, no matter whether you identify as Party A or Party B, agree that the arts are important in the science, technology, engineering, and math education. Who would have disagreed with that? We can just implement the consensus parts without getting swamped into those filter bubbles.
Anyone who cares about this issue can vote for this. In total, there’s 10 million people in the Join platform who are visitors. Of course, no one participate in each and every vote. They only care about the things they care about. Yes?
Having fun. Yes, exactly.
We go to people. We’re not asking people to come to us. The whole point is that we cultivate the CSOs by raising awareness. It’s not like they have to come to our platform. Rather, we make sure that, if they run a local meeting, a local town hall, they just show up to whichever places they already show up. It’s just me joining them. With me, the 12 ministries through telepresence.
It’s augmenting existing local policy-making and local consensus-making, or in terms of indigenous lens, their local tribal assembly, indigenous national assembly. That is important, because then they won’t be limited by distance or by digital literacy. It’s literally just a face-to-face meeting. It’s just with me joining them.
Sure, go ahead.
Not really, because the reason why they can get 5,000 signatures is that there are CSOs that are really good at mobilization. There was 8,000 people that petitioned for changing Taiwan’s time zone to plus nine. I’m sure they have some may to mobilize people. I have no idea what these people are. There’s, again, 8,000 people petitioning for keeping Taiwan’s time zone at plus eight.
My office is just convening a meeting to get those two together into the same room to talk about time zones, [laughs] of all things. Get all the ministries to reply with facts, like how it will not save energy, how it will not increase tourism, unless we break labor laws, and so on.
Finally, getting people’s common feelings, despite of different positions, which is what they want, to make Taiwan seen as more unique. They want people traveling from Shanghai to have to change their watch. That was the original motivation. Then we’re like, “No, smartwatches correct themselves, so they won’t be aware of it.
If we’re going to spend this much budget anyway, there must be better ways to do it.” We then settled on a set of rough consensus around, for example, making films about Taiwan’s marriage equality, about advocating our human right status of open government partnership, and things like that.
Everybody get what they want, and this is as compared to the old, bad ways, in which the most compromise we can make it 8.5 hours GMT, which pleases nobody. [laughs] This is more about sharing feelings and less about we having thousand of things for people to participate.
It’s just people organizing themselves, but we make sure they talk to the right people and with the right context, instead of with ancient and dated information. Sorry, you had a question?
Oh, sorry. It will come back.
Yeah, there’s impact measurement. Yes, definitely. We have plenty of impact measurement. First of all, I would say that we share the raw materials for researchers. You don’t have to believe me. There are independent researchers looking into all my 1,000 meetings with 5,000 people, with 200,000 speeches.
It’s important to note that this is not only about internal meetings. This is also about lobbyists’ and journalists’ visits. This is important, because without radical transparency, the lobbyists tend to argue for their own benefit, sometime at expense of other groups of people.
With radical transparency and independent auditing, all the lobbyists talk only about the global goals, because they know that if they don’t make a public benefit argument, they will be subject to social sanction very easily.
For example, when David Plouffe, speaking for Uber at the time, all the argument he makes is around Climate Change mitigation, more effective allocation of transportation resources, instead of other bottom line. That’s the first thing. It’s about independent auditing. The second, sorry, you had a follow-up?
We look at a few things. We look at how many people are actually participating. That’s where the 10 million visitors figure out. We look at the age groups, like that’s how the 15 and 65 years old being the most active come out.
We look at the participation ideas from the Presidential Hackathon, whether there’s more groups joining every year, and the implementation quality of these people’s ideas.
We look at the quadratic voting, which is a new voting method that we invite everybody with a join.gov.tw account, authenticated by their SMS numbers, to spend 99 tokens to vote on more than 100 Presidential Hackathon ideas, to select the top 20.
We look at their voting records to see, for example, if they really like the idea of water resource management through automated boxes that are very cheap – less than €100 – that can report water pollution if you just install it in the pathways, and that’s a really good idea.
Maybe you want to vote it one vote, which will cost you one point, or you vote two votes, costs you four points. Three costs nine. Basically, with 99 points, you can only vote 9, not 10, votes, because it’s quadratic.
