…and instead of dictating anything.
That’s essential to me.
I want to show possibilities without taking them away from people in the name of progress.
I want to conserve all the different cultures so that they show different futures, different possibilities. I don’t want to take away their different possibilities in the name of progress for a particular culture.
In Taiwan, we say disinformation.
Which means intentional untruth that harm the public.
That harm the public. Not a minister’s image.
That harm the public, because it’s not about the government minister’s image. If you harm a government minister’s image, you are just doing good journalism.
Harming the public health and harming democracy, that is another matter.
That’s another matter. It’s…
You’re right. What we have found is that if we make humor a fun response…
…like there was a rumor that says…
We counter rumor with humor.
There was a rumor that says, “Perming your hair many times a week will be subject to a $1 million fine.”
Within an hour, our prime minister spread this image.
This image says, “This rumor is not true.”
A young photo of the prime minister says, “I may be bald now, but I will not punish people with hair.”
In a small fine print that says, “What we’ve done is introducing a label requirement for hair products starting 2021.”
The prime minister now says, “If you keep perming your hair many times a week, it will not damage your pocket, but it will damage your hair.”
It’s serious. In serious cases, you can look like me. You can look at me to see what will happen to your hair.
This is very funny. Actually, most people see this before they see the rumor.
They become vaccinated.
Yes.
Every ministry have a team of comedians.
Whenever we see a trending rumor…
…we just make it even more trending humor.
Yeah. I call this mimetic engineering.
Memetic engineering, like genetic engineering. [laughs] I proposed this early 2017 to the cabinet meeting.
The real work is done by the comedians. I’m not a comedian. [laughs]
Yeah. Sure.
Thank you.
Interference.
For example, we have rumor that says, “Hong Kong people, young people, are paying 20 million to murder a police.”
From Hong Kong.
At November last year, they were trying to spread this rumor to interfere with the Hong Kong local election and then the Taiwan presidential election.
At that time, the people in Hong Kong were protesting in the street. There was a rumor that says that they are paying young people large amount of money to kill police and, in a way, to discredit the protesters for people in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The rumor actually have a photo next to a caption that says, “This 13 years old thug bought iPhones by recruiting people to do violence or something.” Taiwan FactCheck Center actually found out the photo was from Reuters, but the Reuters said nothing about paying people.
The photo is from Reuters. It’s a real photo.
The caption is disinformation.
We attributed this to the central political and legal unit of the Chinese Communist Party. This actually originates from the PRC state propaganda unit.
What we did, instead of taking this down, we make sure that every time you see this disinformation on Facebook or on other places, you see a public notice telling you that this is state propaganda from China.
The PRC propaganda is not taken down because that will create more social tension…
…and infringe on media freedom.
Facebook and other large Internet platforms agreed to put a public notice so people know where the source of that disinformation is.
This is mostly within Taiwan.
They are trying to make Taiwan people not sympathize with people in Hong Kong.
It’s to make Taiwanese people see Hong Kong protesters not as people who are for democracy.
Because the end game of the PRC interference of the propaganda is to make people in the democratic society lose confidence in democracy itself.
If people look at democracy activists and they think only about violence, then their propaganda works.
