How digital innovation can fight pandemics and strengthen democracy Audrey Tang
Audrey Tang: Very happy to be joining you,
and good local time, everyone.
David Biello: So, tell us about –
Sorry to –
Tell us about digital tools and COVID.
AT: Sure.
Yeah, I’m really happy to share with you
how Taiwan successfully
countered the COVID
using the power
of digital democracy tools.
As we know, democracy improves
as more people participate.
And digital technology remains one
of the best ways to improve participation,
as long as the focus
is on finding common ground,
that is to say, prosocial media
instead of antisocial media.
And there’s three key ideas
that I would like to share today
about digital democracy
that is fast, fair and fun.
First about the fast part.
Whereas many jurisdictions began
countering coronavirus only this year,
Taiwan started last year.
Last December, when Dr. Li Wenliang,
the PRC whistleblower,
posted that there are new SARS cases,
he got inquiries
and eventually punishments
from PRC police institutions.
But at the same time,
the Taiwan equivalent
of Reddit, the Ptt board,
has someone called nomorepipe
reposting Dr. Li Wenliang’s
whistleblowing.
And our medical officers
immediately noticed this post
and issued an order that says
all passengers flying in
from Wuhan to Taiwan
need to start health inspections
the very next day,
which is the first day of January.
And this says to me two things.
First, the civil society
trusts the government enough
to talk about possible
new SARS outbreaks in the public forum.
And the government trusts citizens enough
to take it seriously and treat it
as if SARS has happened again,
something we’ve always
been preparing for, since 2003.
And because of this open civil society,
according to the CIVICUS Monitor
after the Sunflower Occupy,
Taiwan is now the most open society
in the whole of Asia.
We enjoy the same freedom
of speech, of assembly,
[unclear] as other liberal democracies,
but with the emphasis
on keeping an open mind
to novel ideas from the society.
And that is why our schools
and businesses still remain open today,
there was no lockdown,
it’s been a month
with no local confirmed cases.
So the fast part.
Every day, our Central Epidemic
Command Center, or CECC,
holds a press conference,
which is always livestreamed,
and we work with the journalists,
they answer all the questions
from the journalists,
and whenever there’s a new idea
coming in from the social sector,
anyone can pick up
their phone and call 1922
and tell that idea to the CECC.
For example, there was one day in April
where a young boy has said
he doesn’t want to go to school
because his school mates may laugh at him
because all he had is a pink medical mask.
The very next day,
everybody in the CECC press conference
started wearing pink medical masks,
making sure that everybody learns
about gender mainstreaming.
And so this kind of rapid response system
builds trust between the government
and the civil society.
And the second focus is fairness.
Making sure everybody can use
their national health insurance card
to collect masks from nearby pharmacies,
not only do we publish the stock level
of masks of all pharmacies,
6,000 of them,
we publish it every 30 seconds.
That’s why our civic hackers,
our civil engineers in the digital space,
built more than 100 tools
that enable people to view a map,
or people with blindness
who talk to chat bots, voice assistants,
all of them can get the same
inclusive access to information
about which pharmacies near them
still have masks.
And because the national
health insurance single payer
is more than 99.9 percent
of health coverage,
people who show any symptoms
will then be able to take
the medical mask,
go to a local clinic,
knowing fully that they will
get treated fairly
without incurring any financial burden.
And so people designed a dashboard
that lets everybody see
our supply is indeed growing,
and whether there’s over- or undersupply,
so that we codesign
this distribution system
with the pharmacies,
with the whole of society.
So based on this analysis,
we show that there was
a peak at 70 percent,
and that remaining 20 percent of people
were often young, work very long hours,
when they go off work,
the pharmacies also went off work,
and so we work with convenience stores
so that everybody can collect
their mask anytime,
24 hours a day.
So we ensure fairness of all kinds,
based on the digital democracy’s feedback.
And finally, I would like to acknowledge
that this is a very stressful time.
People feel anxious, outraged,
there’s a lot of panic buying,
a lot of conspiracy theories
in all economies.
And in Taiwan,
our counter-disinformation
strategy is very simple.
It’s called “humor over rumor.”
So when there was a panic buying
of tissue paper, for example,
there was a rumor that says,
“Oh, we’re ramping up mass production,
it’s the same material as tissue papers,
and so we’ll run out
of tissue paper soon.”
And our premier showed
a very memetic picture
that I simply have to share with you.
In very large print,
he shows his bottom,
wiggling it a little bit,
and then the large print says
“Each of us only have
one pair of buttocks.”
And of course, the serious table shows
that tissue paper came
from South American materials,
and medical masks
come from domestic materials,
and there’s no way that ramping up
production of one
will hurt the production of the other.
And so that went absolutely viral.
And because of that,
the panic buying died down
in a day or two.
And finally, we found out the person
who spread the rumor in the first place
was the tissue paper reseller.
And this is not just
a single shock point in social media.
Every single day,
the daily press conference gets translated
by the spokesdog of the Ministry
of Health and Welfare,
that translated a lot of things.
For example, our physical distancing
is phrased as saying
“If you are outdoors,
you need to keep two dog-lengths away,
if you are indoor,
three dog-lengths away,” and so on.
And hand sanitation rules, and so on.
So because all this goes viral,
we make sure that the factual humor
spreads faster than rumor.
And they serve as a vaccine,
as inoculation,
so that when people see
the conspiracy theories,
the R0 value of that will be below one,
meaning that those ideas will not spread.
And so I only have
this five-minute briefing,
the rest of it will be driven
by your Q and A,
but please feel free to read more
about Taiwan’s
counter-coronavirus strategy,
at taiwancanhelp.us.
Thank you.
DB: That’s incredible.
And I love this “humor versus rumor.”
The problem here in the US, perhaps,
is that the rumors seem to travel
faster than any response,
whether humorous or not.
How do you defeat that aspect in Taiwan?
AT: Yeah, we found that, of course,
humor implicitly means
there is a sublimation
of upsetness, of outrage.
And so as you see, for example,
in our premier’s example,
he makes fun of himself.
He doesn’t make a joke
at the expense of other people.
And this was the key.
Because people think it hilarious,
they share it,
but with no malicious or toxic intentions.
People remember the actual payload,
that table about materials
used to produce masks,
much more easily.
If they make a joke
that excludes parts of the society,
of course, that part of society
will feel outraged
and we will end up
creating more divisiveness,
rather than prosocial behavior.
So the humor at no expense,
not excluding any part of society,
I think that was the key.
DB: It’s also incredible
because Taiwan has such close ties
to the origin point of this.
AT: PRC, yes.
DB: The mainland.
So given those close economic ties,
how do you survive
that kind of disruption?
AT: Yeah, I mean, at this moment,
it’s been almost a month now
with no local confirmed cases,
so we’re doing fine.
And what we are doing, essentially,
is just to respond faster
than pretty much anyone.
We started responding last year,
whereas pretty much everybody else
started responding this year.
We tried to warn the world
last year, but, anyway.
So in any case,
the point here is
that if you start early enough,
you get to make sure
that the border control
is the main point where you quarantine
all the returning residents and so on,
instead of waiting until
the community spread stage,
where even more human-right
invading techniques
would probably have to be deployed
one way or the other.
And so in Taiwan, we’ve not declared
an emergency situation.
We’re firmly under the constitutional law.
Because of that, every measure
the administration is taking
is also applicable
in non-coronavirus times.
And this forces us to innovate.
Much as the idea of
“we are an open liberal democracy”
prevented us from doing takedowns.
And therefore, we have to innovate
of humor versus rumor,
because the easy path,
the takedown of online speech,
is not accessible to us.
Our design criteria,
which is no lockdowns,
also prevented us
from doing any, you know,
very invasive privacy encroaching
response system.
So we have to innovate at the border,
and make sure that we have
a sufficient number of, for example,
quarantine hotels
or the so-called “digital fences,”
where your phone is basically connected
to the nearby telecoms,
and they make sure that if they go out
of the 15-meter or so radius,
an SMS is sent to the local
household managers or police and so on.
But because we focus
all these measures at the border,
the vast majority of people
live a normal life.
DB: Let’s talk about that a little bit.
So walk me through the digital tools
and how they were applied to COVID.
AT: Yes.
So there’s three parts
that I just outlined.
The first one is the collective
intelligence system.
Through online spaces
that we design to be devoid
of Reply buttons,
because we see that,
when there’s Reply buttons,
people focus on each other’s
face part, not the book part,
and without “Reply” buttons,
you can get collective intelligence
working out their rough consensus
of where the direction is going
with the response strategies.
So we use a lot of new technologies,
such as Polis,
which is essentially a forum
that lets you upvote and downvote
each other’s feelings,
but with real-time clustering,
so that if you go to cohack.tw,
you see six such conversations,
talking about how to protect
the most vulnerable people,
how to make a smooth transition,
how to make a fair
distribution of supplies and so on.
And people are free to voice their ideas,
and upvote and downvote
each other’s ideas.
But the trick is that we show people
the main divisive points,
and the main consensual points,
and we respond only to the ideas
that can convince
all the different opinion groups.
So people are encouraged
to post more eclectic, more nuanced ideas
and they discover,
at the end of this consultation,
that everybody, actually,
agrees with most things,
with most of their neighbors
on most of the issues.
And that is what we call
the social mandate,
or the democratic mandate,
that then informs our development
of the counter-coronavirus strategy
and helping the world with such tools.
And so this is the first part,
it’s called listening at scale
for rough consensus.
The second part I already covered
is the distribute ledger,
where everybody can go
to a nearby pharmacy,
present their NHI card,
buy nine masks, or 10 if you’re a child,
and see the stock level
of that pharmacy on their phone
actually decreasing by nine or 10
in a couple of minutes.
And if they grow by nine or 10,
of course, you call the 1922,
and report something fishy is going on.
But this is participatory accountability.
This is published every 30 seconds.
So everybody holds each other accountable,
and that massively increases trust.
And finally, the third one,
the humor versus rumor,
I think the important thing to see here
is that wherever there’s a trending
disinformation or conspiracy theory,
you respond to it with a humorous package
within two hours.
We have discovered,
if we respond within two hours,
then more people see the vaccination
than the conspiracy theory.
But if you respond four hours
or a day afterwards,
then that’s a lost cause.
You can’t really counter that
using humor anymore,
you have to invite the person
who spread those messages
into cocreation workshops.
But we’re OK with that, too.
DB: Your speed is incredible.
I see Whitney has joined us
with some questions.
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: That’s right,
we have a few coming in already
from the audience.
Hi there, Audrey.
And we’ll start with one
from our community member Michael Backes.
He asks how long has humor
versus rumor been a strategy
that you’ve implemented.
Excuse me.
“How long has humor versus rumor
strategy been implemented?
Were comedians consulted
to make the humor?”
AT: Yes, definitely.
Comedians are our most
cherished colleagues.
And each and every ministry has a team
of what we call participation officers
in charge of engaging
with trending topics.
And it’s a more than 100
people-strong team now.
We meet every month
and also every couple of weeks
on specific topics.
It’s been like that since late 2016,
but it’s not until our previous
spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka,
joined about a year and a half ago,
do the professional comedians
get to the team.
Previously, this was more about inviting
the people who post, you know,
quotes like “Our tax filing system
is explosively hostile,”
and gets trending,
and previously, the POs
just invited those people.
Everybody who complains
about the finance minister’s
tax-filing experience
gets invited to the cocreation
of that tax filing experience.
So previously, it was that.
But Kolas Yotaka and the premier
Su Tseng-chang said,
wouldn’t it be much better
and reach more people
if we add some dogs to it
or cat’s pictures to it?
And that’s been around
for a year and a half.
WPR: Definitely, I think it makes
a lot of difference, just even seeing them
without being part
of the thought process behind that.
And we have another question here
from G. Ryan Ansin.
He asks, “What would you rank
the level of trust
your community had before the pandemic,
in order for the government
to have a chance
at properly controlling this crisis?”
AT: I would say that a community
trusts each other.
And that is the main point
of digital democracy.
This is not about people
trusting the government more.
This is about the government
trusting the citizens more,
making the state transparent
to the citizen,
not the citizen transparent to the state,
which would be some other regime.
So making the state
transparent to the citizens
doesn’t always elicit more trust,
because you may see something wrong,
something missing,
something exclusively hostile
to its user experience,
an so on, of the state.
So it doesn’t necessarily lead
to more trust from the government.
Sorry, from the citizen to the government.
But it always leads to more trust
between the social sector stakeholders.
So I would say the level of trust
between the people
who are working on, for example,
medical officers,
and people who are working
with the pandemic responses,
people who manufacture medical masks,
and so on,
all these people,
the trust level between them is very high.
And not necessarily
they trust the government.
But we don’t need that
for a successful response.
If you ask a random person on the street,
they will say Taiwan is performing so well
because of the people.
When the CECC tells us to wear the mask,
we wear the mask.
When the CECC tells us not to wear a mask,
like, if you are keeping
physical distance,
we wear a mask anyway.
And so because of that,
I think it’s the social sector’s trust
between those different stakeholders
that’s the key to the response.
WPR: I will come back shortly
with more questions,
but I’ll leave you guys
to continue your conversation.
AT: Awesome.
DB: Well, clearly,
part of that trust in government
was maybe not there in 2014
during the Sunflower Movement.
So talk to me about that
and how that led to this,
kind of, digital transformation.
AT: Indeed.
Before March 2014, if you asked
a random person on the street in Taiwan,
like, whether it’s possible
for a minister – that’s me –
to have their office in a park,
literally a park,
anyone can walk in and talk to me
for 40 minutes at a time,
I’m currently in that park,
the Social Innovation Lab,
they would say that this is crazy, right?
No public officials work like that.
But that was because on March 18, 2014,
hundreds of young activists,
most of them college students,
occupied the legislature
to express their profound opposition
to a trade pact with Beijing
under consideration,
and the secretive manner in which
it was pushed through the parliament
by Kuomintang,
the ruling party at the time.
And so the protesters
demanded, very simply,
that the pact be scraped,
and the government to institute
a more transparent ratification process.
And that drew widespread public support.
It ended a little more
than three weeks later,
after the government promised and agreed
on the four demands [unclear]
of legislative oversight.
A poll released after the occupation
showed that more than 75 percent
remained dissatisfied
with the ruling government,
illustrating the crisis of trust
that was caused by a trade deal dispute.
And to heal this rift
and communicate better
with everyday citizens,
the administration reached out
to the people who supported the occupiers,
for example, the g0v community,
which has been seeking
to improve government transparency
through the creation of open-source tools.
And so, Jaclyn Tsai,
a government minister at the time,
attended our hackathon
and proposed the establishment
of novel platforms
with the online community
to exchange policy ideas.
And an experiment was born called vTaiwan,
that pioneerly used tools such as Polis,
that allows for “agree” or “disagree”
with no Reply button,
that gets people’s rough consensus
on issues such as crowdfunding,
equity-based crowdfunding, to be precise,
teleworking and many other
cyber-related legislation,
of which there is no existing
unions or associations.
And it proved to be very successful.
They solved the Uber problem, for example,
and by now, you can call an Uber –
I just called an Uber this week –
but in any case,
they are operating as taxis.
They set up a local
taxi company called Q Taxi,
and that was because on the platform,
people cared about insurance,
they care about registration,
they care about all the sort of,
protection of the passengers, and so on.
So we changed the taxi regulations,
and now Uber is just another taxi company
along with the other co-ops.
DB: So you’re actually, in a way,
crowdsourcing laws
that, well, then become laws.
AT: Yeah, learn more at crowd.law.
It’s a real website.
DB: So, some might say
that this seems easier,
because Taiwan is an island,
that maybe helps you control COVID,
helps promote social cohesion,
maybe it’s a smaller country than some.
Do you think that this could be
scaled beyond Taiwan?
AT: Well, first of all,
23 million people
is still quite some people.
It’s not a city,
as some usually say, you know,
“Taiwan is a city-state.”
Well, 23 million people,
not quite a city-state.
And what I’m trying to get at,
is that the high population density
and a variety of cultures –
we have more than 20 national languages –
doesn’t necessarily lead
to social cohesion, as you said.
Rather, I think, this is the humbleness
of all the ministers
in the counter-coronavirus response.
They all took on an attitude
of “So we learned about SARS” –
many of them were in charge
of the SARS back then,
but that was classical epidemiology.
This is SARS 2.0,
it has different characteristics.
And the tools that we use
are very different,
because of the digital transformation.
And so we are in it to learn
together with the citizens.
Our vice president at the time,
Dr. Chen Chien-jen, an academician,
literally wrote the textbook
on epidemiology.
However, he still says,
“You know, what I’m going to do
is record an online MOOC,
a crash course on epidemiology,
that shares with,
I think, more than 20,00 people
enrolled the first day,
I was among them,
to learn about important ideas,
like the R0 and the basic transmission
and how the various
different measures work,
and then they asked people to innovate.
If you think of a new way
that the vice president did not think of,
just call 1922,
and your idea will become
the next day’s press conference.
And this is this colearning strategy,
I think, that more than anything
enabled the social cohesion,
as you speak.
But this is more of a robust
civil society than the uniformity.
There’s no uniformity at all in Taiwan,
everybody is entitled to their ideas,
and all the social innovations,
ranging from using
a traditional rice cooker
to revitalize, to disinfect the mask,
to pink medical mask, and so on,
there’s all variety
of very interesting ideas
that get amplified
by the daily press conference.
DB: That’s beautiful.
Now – oh, Whitney is back,
so I will let her ask the next question.
WPR: Sure, we’re having
some more questions come in.
One from our community member Aria Bendix.
Aria asked, “How do you ensure
that digital campaigns act quickly
without sacrificing accuracy?
In the US, there was a fear
of inciting panic about COVID-19
in early January.”
AT: This is a great question.
So most of the scientific ideas
about the COVID are evolving, right?
The efficacy of masks, for example,
is a very good example,
because the different characteristics
of previous respiratory diseases
respond differently to the facial mask.
And so, our digital campaigns
focus on the idea of getting
the rough consensus through.
So basically, it’s a reflection
of the society,
through Polis, through Slido,
through the joint platform,
the various tools
that vTaiwan has prototyped,
we know that people are feeling
a rough consensus about things
and we’re responding
to the society, saying,
“This is what you all feel
and this is what we’re doing
to respond to your feelings.
And the scientific consensus
is still developing,
but we know, for example,
people feel that wearing a mask
mostly protects you,
because it reminds you
to not touch your face
and wash your hands properly.”
And these, regardless of everything else,
are the two things
that everybody agrees with.
So we just capitalize on that and say,
“OK, wash your hands properly,
and don’t touch your face,
and wearing a mask reminds you of that.”
And that lets us cut through
the kind of, very ideologically
charged debates
and focus on what people
generally resonate with one another.
And that’s how we act quickly
without sacrificing scientific accuracy.
WPR: And this next question
sort of feels connected to this as well.
It’s a question from an anonymous
community member.
“Pragmatically, do you think
any of your policies
could be applied in the United States
under the current Trump administration?”
AT: Quite a few, actually.
We work with many states
in the US and abroad
on what we call “epicenter
to epicenter diplomacy.” (Laughs)
So what we’re doing essentially is,
for example,
there was a chat bot in Taiwan
that lets you, but especially
people under home quarantine,
to ask the chat bot anything.
And if there is a scientific adviser
who already wrote
a frequently asked question,
the chat bot just responds with that,
but otherwise, they will call
the science advisory board
and write an accessible response to that,
and the spokesdog would translate that
into a cute dog meme.
And so this feedback cycle
of people very easily accessing,
finding, and asking a scientist,
and an open API
that allows for voice assistance
and other third-party developers
to get through it,
resonates with many US states,
and I think many of them
are implementing it.
And before the World Health Assembly,
I think three days before,
we held a 14 countries
[unclear] lateral meeting,
kind of, pre-WHA,
where we shared many small,
like, quick wins like this.
And I think many jurisdictions
took some of that,
including the humor versus rumor.
Many of them said
that they’re going to recruit
comedians now.
WPR: (Laughs) I love that.
DB: I hope so.
WPR: I hope so too.
And we have one more question,
which is actually a follow-up,
from Michael Backes,
who asked a question earlier.
“Does the Ministry plan
to publish their plans in a white paper?”
Sounds like you’re already sharing
your plans with folks,
but do you have a plan
to put it out on paper?
AT: Of course.
Yeah, and multiple white papers.
So if you go to taiwancanhelp.us,
that is where most of our strategy is,
and that website is actually
crowdsourced as well,
and it shows that more
than five million now, I think,
medical masks donated
to the humanitarian aid.
It’s also crowdsourced.
People who have some masks in their homes,
who did not collect the rationed masks,
they can use an app, say,
“I want to dedicate this
to international humanitarian aid,”
and half of them choose
to publish their names,
so you can also see the names
of people who participated in this.
And there’s also
an “Ask Taiwan Anything” website,
(Laughs)
at fightcovid.edu.tw,
that outlines, in white paper form,
all the response strategies,
so check those out.
WPR: Great.
Well, I will disappear and be back
later with some other questions.
DB: A blizzard
of white papers, if you will.
I’d like to turn the focus
on you a little bit.
How does a conservative anarchist
become a digital minister?
AT: Yeah, by occupying
the parliament, and through that.
(Laughs)
More interestingly,
I would say that I go
working with the government,
but never for the government.
And I work with the people,
not for the people.
I’m like this Lagrange point
between the people’s
movements on one side
and the government on the other side.
Sometimes right in the middle,
trying to do some coach
or translation work.
Sometimes in a kind of triangle point,
trying to supply both sides with tools
for prosocial communication.
But always with this idea
of getting the shared values
out of different positions,
out of varied positions.
Because all too often,
democracy is built as a showdown
between opposing values.
But in the pandemic, in the infodemic,
in climate change,
in many of those structural issues,
the virus or carbon dioxide
doesn’t sit down and negotiate with you.
It’s a structural issue
that requires common values
built out of different positions.
And so that is why my working principle
is radical transparency.
Every conversation, including this one,
is on the record,
including the internal
meetings that I hold.
So you can see all the different
meeting transcripts
in my YouTube channel,
in the SayIt platform,
where people can see,
after I became digital minister,
I held 1,300 meetings
with more than 5,000 speakers,
with more than 260,000 utterances.
And every one of them has a URL
that becomes a social object
that people can have a conversation on.
And because of that,
for example, when Uber’s David Plouffe
visited me to lobby for Uber,
because of radical transparency,
he is very much aware of that,
and so he made all the arguments
based on public good,
based on sustainability,
and things like that,
because he knows that the other sides
would see his positions
very clearly and transparently.
So that encourages people
to add on each other’s argument,
instead of attacking each other’s person,
you know, credits and things like that.
And so I think that, more than anything,
is the main principle of conserving
the anarchism of the internet,
which is about, you know,
nobody can force anyone
to hook to the internet,
or to adhere to a new internet protocol.
Everything has to be done
using rough consensus and running code.
DB: I wish you had more counterparts
all around the world.
Maybe you wish you had more
counterparts all around the world.
AT: That’s why these ideas
are worth spreading.
DB: There you go.
So one of the challenges that might arise
with some of these digital tools
is access.
How do you approach that part of it
for folks maybe who don’t have
the best broadband connection
or the latest mobile phone
or whatever it might be that’s required?
AT: Well, anywhere in Taiwan,
even on the top of Taiwan,
almost 4,000 meters high,
the Saviah, or the Jade Mountain,
you’re guaranteed to have
10 megabits per second
over 4G or fiber or cable,
with just 16 US dollars
a month, an unlimited plan.
And actually, on the top
of the mountain, it’s faster,
fewer people use that bandwidth.
And if you don’t, it’s my fault.
It’s personally my fault.
In Taiwan, we have broadband
as a human right.
And so when we’re deploying 5G,
we’re looking at places
where the 4G has the weakest signal,
and we begin with those places
in our 5G deployment.
And only by deploying broadband
as a human right
can we say that this is for everybody.
That digital democracy
actually strengthens democracy.
Otherwise, we would be excluding
parts of the society.
And this also applies to, for example,
you can go to a local
digital opportunity center
to rent a tablet that’s guaranteed
to be manufactured
in the past three years,
and things like that,
to enable, also,
the different digital access
by the digital opportunity centers,
universities and schools,
and public libraries, very important.
And if people who prefer to talk
in their town hall,
I personally go to that town hall
with a 360 recorder,
and livestream that to Taipei
and to other municipalities,
where the central government’s
public servants can join
in a connected room style,
but listening to the local people
who set the agenda.
So people still do face-to-face meetings,
we’re not doing this
to replace face-to-face meetings.
We’re bringing more stakeholders
from central government
in the local town halls,
and we’re amplifying their voices
by making sure the transcripts,
the mind maps, and things like that
are spread through
the internet in real time,
but we don’t ever ask the elderly to, say,
“Oh, you have to learn typing,
otherwise you don’t do democracy.”
It’s not our style.
But that requires broadband.
Because if you don’t have broadband,
but only a very limited bandwidth,
you are forced to use
text-based communication.
DB: That’s right.
Well, with access, of course,
comes access for folks
who maybe will misuse the platform.
You talked a little bit
about disinformation
and using humor to beat rumor.
But sometimes, disinformation
is more weaponized.
How do you combat those kinds
of attacks, really?
AT: Right, so you mean
malinformation, then.
So essentially, information designed
to cause intentional public harm.
And that’s no laughing matter.
So for that, we have an idea called
“notice and public notice.”
So this is a Reuters photo,
and I will read the original caption.
The original caption says
“A teenage extradition bill
protester in Hong Kong
is seen during a march to demand democracy
and political reform in Hong Kong.”
OK, a very neutral title by the Reuters.
But there was a spreading
of malinformation
back last November,
just leading to our presidential election,
that shows something else entirely.
This is the same photo – that says
“This 13-year-old thug bought new iPhones,
game consoles and brand-name sports shoes,
and recruiting his brothers
to murder police
and collect 200,000 dollars.”
And this, of course, is a weapon
designed to sow discord,
and to elicit in Taiwan’s voters
a kind of distaste for Hong Kong.
And because they know
that this is the main issue.
And had we resorted to takedowns,
that will not work,
because that would only
evoke more outrage.
So we didn’t do a takedown.
Instead, we worked with the fact checkers
and professional journalists
to attribute this original message
back to the first day that it was posted.
And it came from Zhongyang Zhengfawei.
That is the main political and legal unit
of the central party,
in the Central Communist Party, in CCP.
And we know that it’s their Weibo account
that first did this new caption.
So we sent out a public notice
and with the partners
in social media companies,
pretty much all of them,
they just put this very small reminder
next to each time that this is shared
with the wrong caption,
that says “This actually came
from the central propaganda unit
of the CCP.
Click here to learn more.
To learn about the whole story.”
And that, we found, that has worked,
because people understand
this is then not a news material.
This is rather an appropriation
of Reuters' news material
and a copyright infringement
and I think that’s part of the [unclear].
In any case, the point
is that when people understand
that this is an intentional narrative,
they won’t just randomly share it.
They may share it,
but with a comment that says
“This is what the Zhongyang Zhengfawei
is trying to do to our democracy.”
DB: Seems like some
of the global social media companies
could learn something
from notice and public notice.
AT: Public notice, that’s right.
DB: What advice would you have
for the Twitters and Facebooks
and LINEs and WhatsApps,
and you name it, of the world?
AT: Yeah.
So, just before our election,
we said to all of them
that we’re not making a law
to kind of punish them.
However, we’re sharing
this very simple fact
that there is this norm in Taiwan
that we even have a separate branch
of the government,
the control branch,
that published the campaign
donation and expense.
And it just so occurred to us
that in the previous election,
the mayoral one,
there was a lot of candidates
that did not include
any social media advertisements
in their expense to the Control Yuan.
And so essentially, that means
that there is a separate amount
of political donation and expense
that evades public scrutiny.
And our Control Yuan
published their numbers
in raw data form,
that is to say,
they’re not statistics,
but individual records
of who donated for what cause,
when, where,
and investigative journalists
are very happy,
because they can then make
investigative reports
about the connections
between the candidates
and the people who fund them.
But they cannot work
with the same material
from the global social media companies.
So I said, “Look, this is very simple.
This is the social norm here,
I don’t really care
about other jurisdictions.
You either adhere to the social norm
that is set by the Control Yuan
and the investigative journalists,
or maybe you will face social sanctions.
And this is not the government mandate,
but it’s the people fed up with,
you know, black box,
and that’s part of the Sunflower
Occupy’s demands, also.
And so Facebook actually published
in the Ad Library,
I think at that time,
one of the fastest response strategies,
where everybody who has
basically any dark pattern advertisement
will get revealed very quickly,
and investigative journalists
work with the local civic technologists
to make sure that if anybody dare to use
social media in such a divisive way,
within an hour, there will be
a report out condemning that.
So nobody tried that during
the previous presidential election season.
DB: So change is possible.
AT: Mhm.
WPR: Hey there, we have
some more questions from the community.
There is an anonymous one
that says, “I believe Taiwan
is outside WHO entirely
and has a 130-part preparation program –
developed entirely on its own –
to what extent does it credit
its preparation
to building its own system?”
AT: Well, a little bit, I guess.
We tried to warn the WHO,
but at that point –
we are not totally outside,
we have limited scientific access.
But we do not have any ministerial access.
And this is very different, right?
If you only have limited
scientific access,
unless the other side’s top epidemiologist
happens to be the vice president,
like in Taiwan’s case,
they don’t always do
the storytelling well enough
to translate that into political action
as our vice president did, right?
So the lack of ministerial
access, I think,
is to the detriment
of the global community,
because otherwise,
people could have responded as we did
in the first day of January,
instead of having to wait for weeks
before the WHO declared
that this is something,
that there’s definitely
human to human transmission,
that you should inspect people
coming in from Wuhan,
which they eventually did,
but that’s already two weeks
or three weeks after what we did.
WPR: Makes a lot of sense.
DB: More scientists
and technologists in politics.
That sounds like that’s the answer.
AT: Yeah.
WPR: And then we have another
question here from Kamal Srinivasan
about your reopening strategy.
“How are you enabling restaurants
and retailers to open safely in Taiwan?”
AT: Oh, they never closed, so … (Laughs)
WPR: Oh!
AT: Yeah, they never closed,
there was no lockdown,
there was no closure.
We just said a very simple thing
in the CECC press conference,
that there’s going to be
physical distancing.
You maintain one and a half meters indoors
or wear a mask.
And that’s it.
And so there are some restaurants
that put up, I guess, red curtains,
some put very cute teddy bears
and so on, on the chairs,
to make sure that people spread evenly,
some installed see-through
glass or plastic walls
between the seats.
There’s various social
innovations happening around.
And I think the only shops
that got closed for a while,
because they could not innovate
quick enough to respond to these rules,
was the intimate escort bars.
But eventually,
even they invented new ways,
by handing out these caps
that are plastic shielding,
but still leaves room
for drinking behind it.
And so they opened
with that social innovation.
DB: That’s amazing.
WPR: It is, yeah, it’s a lot to learn
from your strategies there.
Thank you, I’ll be back towards the end
with some final questions.
DB: I’m very happy to hear
that the restaurants were not closed down,
because I think Taipei
has some of the best food in the world
of any city that I’ve visited,
so, you know, kudos to you for that.
So the big concern when it comes
to using digital tools for COVID
or using digital tools for democracy
is always privacy.
You’ve talked about that a little bit,
but I’m sure the citizens of Taiwan
are perhaps equally concerned
about their privacy,
especially given the geopolitical context.
AT: Definitely.
DB: So how do you cope with those demands?
AT: Yeah, we design
with not only defensive strategy,
like minimization of data collection,
but also proactive measures,
such as privacy-enhancing technologies.
One of the top teams
that emerged out of our cohack,
the TW response from the Polis,
how to make contact tracing easier,
focused not on the contact tracers,
not on the medical officers,
but on the person.
So they basically said,
“OK, you have a phone,
you can record your temperatures,
you can record your whereabouts
and things like that,
but that is strictly in your phone.
It doesn’t even use Bluetooth.
So there’s no transmission.
Technology uses open-source,
you can check it,
you can use it in airplane mode.
And when the contact tracer
eventually tells you
that you are part of a high-risk group,
and they really want your contact history,
this tool can then generate
a single-use URL
that only contains
the precise information,
anonymized,
that the contact tracers want.
But it will not,
like in a traditional interview,
let you ask –
they ask a question, they only want
to know your whereabouts,
but you answer with such accuracy
that you end up compromising
other people’s privacy.
So basically, this is about designing
with an aim to enhance
other people’s privacy,
because personal data
is never truly personal.
It’s always social,
it’s always intersectional.
If I take a selfie at a party,
I inadvertently also take
pretty much everybody else’s
who are in the picture, the surroundings,
the ambiance, and so on,
and if I upload it to a cloud service,
then I actually decimate
the bargaining power,
the negotiation power
of everybody around me,
because then their data
is part of the cloud,
and the cloud doesn’t have to
compensate them
or get their agreement for it.
And so only by designing the tools
with privacy enhancing
as a positive value,
and not enhancing only
the person’s own privacy,
just like a medical mask, it protects you,
but mostly it also protects others, right?
So if we design tools using that idea,
and always open-source
and with an open API,
then we’re in a much better shape
than in centralized or so-called
cloud-based services.
DB: Well, you’re clearly
living in the future,
and I guess that’s quite literal,
in the sense of,
it’s tomorrow morning there.
AT: Twelve hours.
DB: Yes.
Tell me, what do you see in the future?
What comes next?
AT: Yes, so I see the coronavirus
as a great amplifier.
If you start with
an authoritarian society,
the coronavirus,
with all its lockdowns and so on,
has the potential of making it
even a more totalitarian society.
If people place their trust, however,
on the social sector,
on the ingenuity of social innovators,
then the pandemic, as in Taiwan,
actually strengthens our democracy,
so that people feel, truly,
that everybody can think of something
that improves the welfare
of not just Taiwan,
but pretty much everybody
else in the world.
And so, my point here
is that the great amplifier
comes if no matter you want it or not,
but the society, what they can do,
is do what Taiwan did after SARS.
In 2003, when SARS came,
we had to shut down an entire hospital,
barricading it with no definite
termination date.
It was very traumatic,
everybody above the age of 30
remembers how traumatic it was.
The municipalities
and the central government
were saying very different things,
and that is why after SARS,
the constitutional courts
charged the legislature
to set up the system as you see today,
and also that is why,
when people responding
to that crisis back in 2003
built this very robust response system
that there’s early drills.
So just as the Sunflower Occupy,
because of the crisis in trust
let us build new tools
that put trust first,
I think the coronavirus is the chance
for everybody who have survived
through the first wave
to settle on a new set of norms
that will reinforce your founding values,
instead of taking on alien values
in the name of survival.
DB: Yeah, let’s hope so,
and let’s hope the rest of the world
is as prepared as Taiwan
the next time around.
When it comes to digital
democracy, though,
and digital citizenship,
where do you see that going,
both in Taiwan and maybe
in the rest of the world?
AT: Well, I have my job description here,
which I will read to you.
It’s literally my job description
and the answer to that question.
And so, here goes.
When we see the internet of things,
let’s make it the internet of beings.
When we see virtual reality,
let’s make it a shared reality.
When we see machine learning,
let’s make it collaborative learning.
When we see user experience,
let’s make it about human experience.
And whenever we hear
the singularity is near,
let us always remember
the plurality is here.
Thank you for listening.
DB: Wow.
I have to give that a little clap,
that was beautiful.
(Laughs)
Quite a job description too.
So, conservative anarchist,
digital minister,
and with that job description –
that’s pretty impressive.
AT: A poetician, yes.
DB: (Laughs)
So I struggle to imagine
an adoption of these techniques in the US,
and that may be my pessimism weighing in.
But what words of hope do you have
for the US, as we cope with COVID?
AT: Well, as I mentioned,
during SARS in Taiwan,
nobody imagined we could have
CECC and a cute spokesdog.
Before the Sunflower movement,
during a large protest,
there was, I think, half a million
people on the street, and many more.
Nobody thought that we could have
a collective intelligence system
that puts open government data
as a way to rebuild citizen participation.
And so, never lose hope.
As my favorite singer, Leonard Cohen –
a poet, also – is fond of saying,
“Ring the bells that still can ring
and forget any perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
and that is how the light gets in.”
WPR: Wow.
That’s so beautiful,
and it feels like such a great message
to, sort of, leave the audience with,
and sharing the sentiment
that everyone seems to be so grateful
for what you’ve shared, Audrey,
and all the great information
and insight into Taiwan’s strategies.
AT: Thank you.
WPR: And David –
DB: I was just going to say,
thank you so much for that,
thank you for that beautiful
job description,
and for all the wisdom you shared
in rapid-fire fashion.
I think it wasn’t just one idea
that you shared,
but maybe, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40?
I lost count at some point.
AT: Well, it’s called
Ideas Worth Spreading,
it’s a plural form.
(Laughter)
DB: Very true.
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
WPR: Thank you, Audrey.
DB: And I wish you luck with everything.
AT: Thank you, and have a good local time.
Stay safe.