Let us begin with a rant. Yeah, I’ve been working on information manipulation defense since 2017. Back at the time, we were struggling because the main english word at the time was fake news, which is affront to journalists, and my parents are both journalists. Out of filial piety, I cannot use that word. So it took some time for us to find the Mandarin word for that, which is 爭議訊息, or literally disputed information. And this is important because it speaks not about the content layer of things in the active/behavior/content model, but rather talks about how it incites. 爭議, polarizing, means a conflict causing behavior in the actors, right? So the idea is to shift toward the actor and behavior layers. You can talk about foreign interference, foreign is actor interference of behavior without speaking to whether the content is true or false, because in that particular place resides the journalists, the fact checkers, the professional media institutions, and so on. And it’s really not a government minister’s business to talk in the content layer. And so I think that is quite strategic and resulted in us adopting a very different model to defend against foreign information manipulation and interference.

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