Audrey Tang

They always stay on topic because each budget, basically, becomes a discussion board. Off-topic conversations are very rare. It actually saves public servants time because they don’t have to answer the same thing 15 times.

This is proactive. It is not FOIA requests. This is actually the government presenting the discussion boards. This is pioneered by the g0v, but now universally adopted by the municipal and the central government here in Taiwan. That’s just one example out of a hundred or so.

5 million out of 23 million. The same website is also our regulatory commentary website. It’s also our e-petition website. We have also the age, demographics of people who spend the most time on the platform to make e-petitions. They tend to be around 15 years old and 65 years old, so hardly people who engage in representative democracy.

15 years old doesn’t even have the voting rights. Actually, these two age groups care the most about public welfare instead of private matters. They have the most time on their hands, so they organize very well.

The most impactful e-petitions that we have received, for example, the one that caused the banning of the plastic straw for indoor bubble tea drinking, [laughs] is actually petitioned by a 15 years old. When asked, "Why are you petitioning this?" it’s like the Friday Strikes in Europe, why they can organize so well, they say, "Oh, it’s an assignment from the civics class of the senior high school."

The teacher just wanted the student to find something to petition, [laughs] and it just struck what people really want, and discover that, "Oh, it really resonates with everybody." This is not the traditional NPO or NGO organizers that you were thinking about. It’s, rather, just a 15-year-old student.

Recently we handled a petition, I think from a 16-years-old, about changing our referendum act so that it cannot interfere with any human right conventions because they are designed to protect minorities. If they’re put to referendum, by definition, the majority will overwhelm the minorities, so they should get protected.

In our original referendum act, they only protect the indigenous people. Now, they want to extend that to any human right convention members. That actually get adopted also by our administration. That’s, again, from a 16-years-old.

You get 5,000 people joining you, and then you can summon me.

They are, through the design of crowd moderation. For each petition, we have two columns, one supporting, one against or other opinions. Each column is crowd voted. You can down-vote or up-vote each other’s opinions. Again, there’s no reply button because if there is a reply button, trolls just dominate the discussion.

Then we can look at what is up-voted the most and start answering based on the people’s collective attention. I’ll just use one example. The shirt I’m wearing is called Presidential Hackathon. It’s another way of aggregating what people want.

Basically, anyone can propose how to use digital means to improve the public service in a way that it differs from the business as usual in the public service. Every year, we select five winning teams, and they all have to be trilingual in the sense that they have a technology expert, a domain expert, and a public servant, at least three roles in it.

These teams, after they deliver a proof of concept over three months that actually works better than the current public service, they get a trophy from the president. There’s no money, just trophy. The trophy is a projector. If you turn it on, it projects the image of the president handing the trophy to you.

This is like you can summon the presidential will at any time. It’s very useful in internal negotiations.

What it signifies is that after you win the Presidential Hackathon, five teams every year, we take the next year to make sure that whatever you propose become public service by the next fiscal year. This is the presidential guarantee.

Last year, one of the winners used machine learning to reduce the time it takes to detect leaks in the water pipes. They proved to be very popular. Because we use the Sustainable Development Goals to index those -- New Zealand just solved this -- we have a solution for target 6.4. Interesting number.

In any case, what they have seen is that it’s a common challenge. Because of climate change, they are now also facing water shortage for the first time. They invited the winning team to Wellington and shared their water pressure, water flow data to co-create solutions to detect water leakage more quickly. We formed a data collaborative this way.

This is yet another way without going through petition. There is still voting around because every year, we receive more than 100 cases, so which 20 teams to coach? Which 20 teams to focus our energy on is a matter of public vote.

Also on the e-petition platform, people can log in and get to vote on the Presidential Hackathon teams. Everybody has 99 points. You look at 100 or so teams. For each team you like, you can spend 1 point to cast one vote. If you want to cast two votes, that’s going to cost 4 points. Three votes would cost 9 points, and four points would cost 16 points.

The idea is that you then won’t just cast 99 points on a single issue. Rather, it only can cost 9 points, and you have something left. People would actually look at the synergies between the projects and strategically express their true preferences based on this way of so-called quadratic voting.

We have a much more wide swath of selection of the cohort of 20 teams. Then we coach them for three months, and then five of them receive the award from the president. That’s yet another way of public engagement.

Very quickly, in Taiwan, both news and journalism translates to the same word, 新聞. We try not to use the word "fake news" in Mandarin because then it alienates journalists. Both my parents are journalists. Filial piety dictates that I don’t use these words. I always say "disinformation" or "information manipulation."

There actually is a global threat, as you noted. The more society is open, the more harmful it becomes because it basically abuse the freedom of expression to sow discord. We actually have a legal definition of disinformation in Taiwan, not just a layperson’s definition.

It’s called intentional harmful untruth. Here, the harm is to the general public, to the democratic process, not to a minister’s image. That’s just good journalism. Harmful to the public, not to the government. These are like spam, like junk mail, like things that waste people’s attention on.

We look at it through a metaphor of epidemics of how we can vaccinate and inoculate people so that they don’t waste attention on these things. Taiwan is unique in nearby jurisdictions to take this approach. Many our neighboring jurisdictions -- I would not name names -- use disinformation as an excuse to basically do state censorship and encroach the freedom of journalism.

Democratic overseers, I’m not naming names. [laughs] In any case, what we are doing is...

It is very worrying trends in our nearby jurisdictions. What we are doing is the opposite. We basically make sure that people become more immune to disinformation by getting our piece of the puzzle, real-time clarifications out to people.

Whenever we detect there is a disinformation that is rising in popularity, within one hour, on average, we publish a more funny video, film, or things like that. Our president goes on a stand-up comedy show. Our premier post a very funny photo of himself when he was young and have hair to clarify a rumor regarding hairdress companies.

Our deputy premier goes to live stream and play video games and things like that. [laughs] They all use very engaging memes to make sure that the clarification actually gets shared more and reach more people than the rumors and the disinformation.

What we have witnessed is that if we can produce such videos, films, or graphics within 60 minutes, then it actually reaches more people first than the rumor. People become inoculated already, thinking, "Oh, actually, it’s a popular rumor. And it’s not what it may seem like," so the rumor stop provoking outrage.

Of course, we don’t have the entirety of truth. Maybe the rumors do have some sliver of truth in it. People can have a rational debate. We’re not taking this down. We still allow a reasonable debate, but the outrage, the provocation part of the rumor is taken out.

We’re working specifically, just like in junk mail and spam, back in early 2000. Around the turn of the century, people thought that email is over, because people receive more junk mail than actual mail. People see that people from a random country -- I will not name countries -- they have a prince, they have $10 million, and they want your account for safe deposit.

Or things like, you just won a lottery, and things like that. This tend to clutter the inbox. A fix is in not in Taiwan passing any laws to allow the state to look into people’s emails, because that will actually encroach freedom of expression and secure communication.

What we have done instead is working with all the email providers so that they add a button called "flag as spam" to their interface. If you receive a junk mail, you can donate that mail out into a public repository, so everybody can see.

If sufficient people flag something as junk mail, then that system looks at the signature of the sender. By the next time the sender want to send to somebody else, that goes into a special folder called junk mail.

It’s not censorship, per se, because it’s still delivered. We’re not infringing on the communication, but it by definition goes into a place where people spend less time on. If you have too much time, of course, you can look into your spam folder.

By definition, it doesn’t really worth your attention in general. That’s the system that we’re working on also for countering disinformation. It’s called notice and public notice. We have strong support from the leading end-to-end messenger system called Line here.

It’s like WhatsApp. It’s encrypted, and so we don’t look into the messages. Line works very closely with civil society -- actually, g0v teams -- to make sure that anyone can very quickly flag something as possible disinformation.

Then the civil society has a public repository where you can very quickly -- it’s called Cofacts -- and it looks like a government website, but it’s not. You can see it’s cofacts.g0v.tw. You can very quickly see what are the trending rumors, and whether they are clarified as true or not.

It’s fact-checking, but it’s crowdsourced fact-checking. People can very easily join the fact-checking effort to make sure that they provide useful service to their fellow citizens. We also have independent journalists to do fact-checking in a way that is fully conformant to the international fact-checking standards.

They just make sure that they look at one trending rumor, and they, for example...Our new curriculum has removed the five lines in teaching music and whatever it is. Then before it reaches more people, it can actually get clarified very quickly as false.

Then Line agrees by July to have real-time publication of these clarifications in a dedicated area in their app. People again see the clarifications before they see those spreading rumors. We have observed that Facebook is also working with the international fact-checking network.

So that when it’s fact-checked as false, then they stopped sharing this to people’s walls. If you have only one friend, of course, they still have to share it, but if you have other friends, then you see other people’s posts instead of this particular one.

It’s not, again, takedown, because if you look at it, it’s still there. It’s just with a public notice here saying, "Oh, it’s been fact-checked." We’re looking forward very soon to partner with also Facebook, basically reducing the virality of the fact-checked as false information, so that it reaches less people.

The international figures say that it would be reduced to under 20 percent of the population, while our clarification messages then reaches more people. As you can see, we look at it in a very epidemic kind of view.

That’s in normal days, but in elections, there’s a different set of law. The campaign finance law in Taiwan basically says the Corrective Yuan as a separate branch publishes the individual records of campaign donations. It’s very transparent.

We see people actually circumventing that by throwing money at precision targeting, advertisements, and all sort of public relationship firms. We’re now introducing the equivalent of the US Honest Advertisement Act, and we will get it passed faster than the US...

...to make sure that all the advertisement during elections, or any message bought in any medium, is to be treated the same as campaign donation. They can only be spent by nationals in Taiwan.

They must disclose each transaction, and they have to, like money laundering, disclose who is the actual person behind that’s paying it. If we can track the money to anything that is outside Taiwan, including Hong Kong, Macau, PRC, and other foreign nations, then it’s actually a crime.

We make sure that money will not unduly influence elections, but that is a special act just for the election period. In the normal times, we use the notice and public notice system to make sure that people actually get more immune over time. This is the metaphor that we’re working with.