Audrey Tang

You can see that even with, not even 200 people, this faction has more area than this one. If you have 5,000 people all voting the same way, the numbers may change but area will not. It doesn’t have any effect on the perceived sound or amplification. I guess it’s part of interface design.

In the Presidential Hackathon, we also used voting. You have to join through a e-participation to vote. First of all, we used quadratic voting, which is a new system designed by Glen Weyl and friends at RadicalxChange. The QV says you’d look at 100 projects. You have 99 points each and you can vote 99 votes to 99 projects or you can vote into one single project.

Two votes is going to cost 4 points and four votes, 16 points. Even if you vote everything into one case, that’s going to be only 9 votes and you still have 18 left. You can find something else to vote 4 votes that’s going to cost 16 and you still have two points and you can find some other two.

Many people discovered that these two have synergy. Maybe nine votes is too much. I’ll check something and vote accordingly. Mathematically, this means that each new vote, the marginal cost is the same as its marginal utility.

People will vote according to their true preference. While they’re voting, we’re not revealing in a scoreboard of each project. We get a variable balance outcome out of these kind of voting by, first, not revealing during the voting period and, second, using a quadratic voting to make sure that people don’t vote blindly but rather consider the synergies of their votes.

All of this can be boiled down to mechanism design. If you do the mechanism design well enough, then you can prevent much of the fake amplification issue.

Internet knows no borders. What we have done during the election is revealing where the funding came from. The real amplification method on Facebook is cash. [laughs] It’s not fake accounts. Fake accounts gets detected in no time. If you have sufficient amount of dollars you can precisely target whomever. That’s your business model. [laughs]

What we have asked is essentially asking Facebook to treat these as campaign donations during elections. I’m very happy that I’ve heard positive commitments from Facebook so that we can reveal. In our campaign donation law, it’s extremely transparent.

You can get a spreadsheet of individual records of donation. Every media can independently analyze these. If any political campaign donation came from a foreign source that is to say someone with no voting right, it is subject to a very large fine. Only people who vote can do campaign donation.

What we’re asking during election is that Facebook review both the precision targeting criteria, as well as who is ultimately the provider of the funding, and that we can use the same laws as anti-money-laundering to then ask those operators who their funding came from. Then recursively until we know who ultimately is paying for that.

If they are all citizens, then it’s reveal campaign donation. If they are non-citizens, then we find the closest hop, I don’t know, NT$50 million or something like that because they are meddling in an election.

Honest advertisement is consensus across jurisdictions. I’m very happy that Facebook is willing to try in the next election for this kind of transparency. In election, it will help a lot.

That’s a great question. A lot of it are still along party lines. Especially, the next election is a single winner in each district or presidential. We’re not going to elect two presidents, right? [laughs] It’s a very zero-sum thing. Usually, in this kind of elections, most of the rhetoric will be along party lines.

People who are affiliated with one party will be motivated, incentivized to paint people from the other party as essentially outside of the polity. This is particularly easy in Taiwan because of that single divisive issue with PRC.

That’s gradually changing. If anything, it’s not on the rise. After Hong Kong, people are generally not saying that anyone likes one country, two systems anymore. It used to be a real side that people can take. I don’t think anyone is taking that side now.

Even the leading KMT, Mayor Han Kuo-yu, his main campaign policy thinker, ex-Premier Simon Chang, is now publicly saying the ’92 consensus is out of date and we shouldn’t hold to it.

That rhetoric is on the decline. It’s not on the rise. I don’t see any divisiveness on the rise at the moment. If you asked me a few months ago, I would say it could tie into the referendum. Because we witnessed that if we tie referendum into the voting day, then everybody votes in the referendum with a very binary thinking, which is not good for the deliberation of referendum agenda.

Now we’re on alternating years. It’s an election year, then a referendum year, election year, referendum year, so they won’t polarize each other anymore.

Referendum seems to be along referendum lines as we saw last election/referendum where we have mayoral candidates proposing referendums. That obviously ties the two together.

We are probably not seeing that in the next election. I’m cautiously optimistic is what I’m saying.

As in photoshopped?

We do but they so far are not making a lot of impact mostly because the ministerial memetic engineering is so good now that...For example, the ocean council being a very new agency, a new council that’s just set up this year.

They posted -- there was supposedly a typhoon that narrowly missed Taiwan -- that if you do dangerous activities when there is a typhoon warning already posted, we may not save you. "We May Not Save You" is a title of a popular TV series. I don’t know how long ago.

In any case, that one went absolutely viral. That Facebook page from almost nobody following grow to be, I don’t know, 100,000 now. It’s by one viral post. They’re now very good at this thing. It’s very hard for a photoshopped version to get that kind of virality.

Max is always around.

Feel free. I have nothing after this but you two have a plane to catch. It’s you who have the deadline.

It’s fine. You’ll have a transcript... but I understand that note-taking aids long-term memory. [laughs]

No. Excluding them from the polity, portraying them as non-citizens.

I wouldn’t think it’s a party-platform thing. In Taiwan, we have this, I don’t know how to translate 側翼, something like a radical wing. Flank?

It refers to popular social media presence, like Facebook pages that everybody knows supports a particular party or political candidate. However, that candidate always disclaims any responsibility or authority over that particular Facebook page.

That, I would say, is the majority of where those exclusionary rhetoric came from, especially the top three parties. They would not do something as blatant as portraying half of the population as non-citizens. It’s not to their benefit to do so. Their flanks are very happy to do so.

If worse come to worse, they can disclaim responsibility. Those flanks are the most vocal ones during the election. There was a foreign policy article that says a few of those flanks were operated by two employees at Tencent.

I’m sure that they did any number of VPN to manipulate a Facebook page. I’m sure that you haven’t been operating there. Sometimes with foreign help. The candidate in question always disclaim any responsibility or indeed any link between their own campaign and those flanks, which is why this radical transparency on political advertisement is so important.

Then it let us know whether they’re actually funded by some extra-judicial force or whether they’re funded by the candidate themself. This is a very important thing to know. We didn’t have that data in the previous election.

Awesome. We’re good.

No problem.

We get to co-edit for 10 days, and then we publish the whole thing to the Commons, if that’s OK with you.

Let’s get started.

Like adapters?

Elderly care.

That’s right. I check out the website. It’s very interesting.

I did look.

It’s the Sustainable Development Goals, the global goals.

We dropped the phase five. It’s just Smart Government now.

It’s fairly new, the dropping of the fifth phase. It’s really an addition to the fifth phase with a much more ambitious goal. It’s called SmartGov or Smart Government project. As you said, it’s led by the NDC, and it contain pretty much all the relevant ministries in it.

Mostly, there are five new scopes. You already mentioned something about the integrated digital services, digital.gov. The counterpart here will be what’s called the T-Road, which takes its name after the Estonian X-Road. That handles both the data exchange as well as the people-facing portal.

At the moment, www.gov.tw is very much just an index of links. There’s no coherent service or coherent experience across different ministries. That’s the experience part, and this is the data part. There’s, of course, a national plan on open government, protecting private data, the new eID, and things like that.

These were not items originally written as such on the phase five. This is an extension of the phase five scope while encompassing all the original to-do items in the phase five.

Sure.

Which is another NDC flagship.