...and we’ll publish this transcript.

Yes, that’s fine. Just to let you know, we’ll often record and make a transcript, and then what we do is we take excerpts and make it into kind of a question-and-answer session. It might not match exactly. We edit it.

Thank you for the editing work, because English is like my fifth language, so I would appreciate a lot of editing work.

I don’t have anything after this, so feel free to just ask me anything.

Let me get this going.

Sure.

Let me explain a little bit the project. Actually, Iris is the one who does research on what happens in China with journalists.

We don’t think we have a lot of influence -- we publish statements and criticize them -- but we’re very concerned about what China is trying to do to influence beyond its borders. We’re looking at Hong Kong and Taiwan, and eventually we wanted to look at other jurisdictions, as well.

They’re doing a lot of work in Australia, and so on.

Yes, Australia, New Zealand. Some in Africa. Even Canada and the United States.

My question here is Taiwan has a very open society and freedom of the press, which is one of the reasons we don’t come here very often, frankly, because we don’t have to worry about it too much. At the same time, China is making an effort to influence public opinion here through the media.

China is the opposite, in terms of the openness of the media. What we’re trying to figure out is how can Taiwan maintain that freedom of the press and the openness in the face of an adversary that is using many different means to try to influence you.

The PRC wasn’t always going the opposite direction. For a while it seemed like it would get better, but then comes a new regime and everything goes backwards.

So I’m not saying that PRC was always a opposite influence, but especially in the past four years or so, with the rapid closing of the media and speech freedoms, and censorship not only after the speech, but before the speech too.

You see a lot of Internet automated censorship. These were originally only deployed around October, or something like that, but now it’s years-round.

I do agree with your assessment that recently the PRC has been really narrowing down.

In Taiwan we essentially rely on the society itself to tell disinformation. That is to say intentional, harmful untruth, versus a journalistic work. It’s not always easy because just 30 or 35 years ago Taiwan was where the PRC is. [laughs]

Without the technology.

That’s right. A lot, especially the elderly, have a difficulty telling disinformation apart from truly journalistic work, simple because the state-run TV media at the time were the only permitted channels and there was, frankly speaking, lots of propaganda around, so it’s not very easy to tell.

For people who are born or educated after the lifting of the marital law, which is after the ’80s, they have a broad swathe of information sources to choose from. Our democracy, with the first presidential election in ’96, coincides with the World Wide Web, so people associate democracy with the democratization of information sources.

We have had, since ’96, a long time to have a educated civil society, so that people generally can take a more critical thinking attitude when it comes to media sources.

I’m the last generation that remembers martial law. If you ask anyone who is younger than me, then they say of course that you need a second opinion on every information sources. They don’t grow up blindly trusting the authority, or even their teachers. They learn to fact check, even on the lectures, using Wikipedia and whatever.

We do rely on people’s general access. We have broadband as human right in Taiwan, so no matter how rural, indigenous, or remote the places are you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second. If you don’t it’s my fault. Because of that, people generally have a handheld smartphone device that they can use for fact checking, essentially.

That is a long answer, but I think the immune system is in the civil society and in its broad selection of information sources.

In your recent visit to the United States, you did mention about measures to try to counteract disinformation.

That’s right.

Could you talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, of course. My slides is publicly available. Disinformation is a threat especially for urban societies. We do have a legal definition of disinformation, that is to say intentional harmful untruth, and most importantly, harmful is to the public, to the democratic system, not harmful to the image of a minister -- that’s just good journalism, right? [laughs]

It has to be harmful to the society as a whole for it to be qualified as disinformation. We have three -- broadly speaking -- strategy to counter disinformation, and all three has with its core value that we don’t sacrifice the freedom and openness of our society, especially because that’s our national identity.

Especially around Taiwan lots of jurisdictions, not just the PRC, now use disinformation as an excuse for state to do censorship, for the state to do general correction order, and things like that. We don’t want to go there, because we still remember the martial law.

Nobody who remember the martial law would want to go back. It’s really bad old days. That’s the premise...

I lived here, by the way, under martial law.

It was really bad.

Both of my parents were professional journalists, and they were operating at the brink of the martial law. Their boss, the head of "China Times" at the time, Yu Chi-Chong, had to constantly navigate the KMT censorship versus the press freedom, and it’s not pretty. Nobody really want to go back there.

In disclaimer, my father resigned before China Times got bought by pro-PRC owners.

Important clarification. [laughs]

In any case, what we’re rolling out is threefold. First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited testing or A/B testing, and that’s before it became really popular. It’s just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so to speak.

Each of our ministry now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they’re in charge to make within 60 minutes a equally or more convincing narrative.

That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standout comedy show. [laughs] It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.

There’s a large selection of modalities, [laughs] but within 60 minutes there’s something that is viral, that could go viral. Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like a inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.

That protects them against the onslaught of disinformation. This is particularly useful during the pomelos incident, where during the last MP election for Tainan or something, there was a disinformation campaign about the fruits, pomelos, being dumped into a water reservoir, and it is entirely fabricated.

The Council of Agriculture responded within 60 minutes, and with a really convincing way, and so I think...

How did they respond?

They did multiple ways of responding to various events. The COA, I think they initially got someone speaking Taiwanese Holo, and livestreamed on their Facebook page. They also, of course, rolled out a press release, and we have a dedicated press release section, dedicated to clarification right in the front page of our Executive Yuan, our administration.

At once glance, you can see each and every clarification in real time, and we measure how long each ministry takes to respond, kind of like a scoreboard. They do compete with each other in that kind of friendly rivalry, and so they all respond faster and faster until they reach the 60 minutes mark. They also pass through their LINE, Facebook, and other social media accounts of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our President, of our Premier, our Deputy Premier, and so on.

Each of them has a large number of followers, and so they basically ask their followers to spread the clarification so that it reaches their friend and families before the disinformation does.

The mainstream media, of course, then picks up this counter-narratives and then do a balanced report. What we have witnessed is that if we don’t come up with this counter-narratives and ready videos or films, or at least picture cards, then after six hours, that’s after a news cycle, it’s hopeless now.

Then each and every media will already frame the narrative so that any clarification will look like a very weak attempt, but if we respond within the same news cycle, then it is actually a pretty fair coverage. That’s our first line of defense. Truth to be told, it is actually very cing. [laughs]

I would think so. I would think it would be very difficult to train people to respond in that kind of time frame.

What we’re doing is a few things. First, that each ministry, some of them have the budget to contract out to professional communication firms. Also, we try to get the ministers to pre-approve frequently asked questions so that they can use these material in real time, without going back to approval.

Even with that, deputy ministers, as well as director generals, they do have a 24/7 channel for this kind of real clarifications. If something escalates really quickly, then they can approve really quickly.

It is very time consuming because this is not part of the public service training. We do have to get this kind of cross-discipline team assembled within each ministry to do that.

It took a while. We started assembling this since Kolas Yotaka became our spokesperson. They only become really pervasive by last month or so, so it really took a while, but now if you look at our real-time clarification it’s really quick. That’s the first line of defense.

Some of them do get viral without our notice. Usually it takes place on end-to-end encrypted channels, like WhatsApp, but in Taiwan it’s called LINE. It’s the same thing.

What end-to-end encryption means, unlike Facebook, Twitter, or something that’s google-able, these channels you cannot use search engine to discover them. It’s like a closed room, an echo chamber, and so it’s really easy for them to mutate into a more potent meme before they release this out in the wild, so to speak.

We have developed, in conjunction with LINE and various on Facebook and friends, a system, what we call Notice and Public Notice. This system is akin to the anti-spam system.

Akin to what?

If you receive an email and you think it’s spam or junk mail, theoretically it’s personal communication. The state should have nothing to inspect your email. If you think this email is from a random country that has a princess that has $5 million that ask for your account or whatever, then you can flag that as spam.

Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag that as spam you’re essentially donating the signature of this message. It’s not involuntary. It’s a voluntary donation to a global system called the Spamhaus, the Domain Block List, and so on.

There’s a whole system for that. It’s like the email’s immune system so that after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach the recipient, it’s not censorship, but it goes to the junk mail folder so it doesn’t waste people’s time by default.

If we have too much time we’d go through the junk mail folder. If you do look at a junk mail folder, you’ll still see a warning bot that says, "This is probably junk mail. Think twice before responding."

We’re developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation.

When sufficient people flag it, it goes into a public database where you can see all the trending disinformation, propaganda. That, by itself, inoculates people because it becomes a social object in the open, google-able, that people can talk about.

Even more than that, we have professional fact checkers in the Taiwan FactCheck Center that looks at the trending disinformation as reported by this mechanism and do a real reporter fact-checking public audit to that by checking to the sources, and so on, and publishing the report. The TFC, or the Taiwan FactCheck Center, is entirely nonpartisan and only accepts small donations, and so it’s generally well trusted.

Here are all the reports that they just published. For example, there was a really popular rumor that says whenever a earthquake is larger than degree 7.0 then other nearby jurisdictions can send its rescue teams without the approval of the country that suffers the earthquake. A excuse for invasion, you see?

God knows why they spread this message. In any case, it is a popular message, and so the Taiwan FactCheck Center go into the conventions, the actual treaties that our Minister of Foreign Affairs signs, and things like that, cites, or its sources, and finally say this is false.

Once they do that, we expect that this would inform the Facebook’s algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people’s newsfeed, but it’s not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it’s already fact-checked as false.

If you click here, you can learn more, but if you have any other friend, then Facebook prefers to show you the post from other friend instead of this one. They say that it can decrease the virality to maybe less than one fifth of the original reach, which is pretty significant.

We are reaching very similar agreements with other social media as well. And so LINE, Facebook, and so on, they are all on board to implement this "Notice and Public Notice" system, which is definitely not a notice and takedown system. We’re not taking anything down, you see.

Finally, during election, we have a special set of rules -- it’s the same as the US-proposed rule called Honest Advertisement Act -- that says because in our campaign donation, everyone who donates has a cap, and the auditing, the Corrective Yuan publishes down to each detail in a machine-readable format like a spreadsheet, each and every donation.

I think it’s the most transparent in the world, one of the most. Because of that, we do witness that foreign money prefers not to enter through this route, because it will get revealed, you see. They prefer to buy precision target advertisement on social media or even on regular media. They do also news placement or 業配. That’s also very popular.

In any case, they can just infuse money to influence the election in this way without declaring them as campaign donation. So We’re basically saying no, it’s the same as campaign donation. You have to reveal it in exactly the same way, and only domestic people get to spend money and sponsor political advertisements.

Each advertising agency, each middle person, need to reveal where their funding sources come from, just like anti money laundering. By the end of the chain, if it points to a foreign national, or to a PRC, or Macau, or Hong Kong source, then that is actually a crime.

What we’re saying is that elections are special, and we’re protecting elections in a way that is much higher than the usual notice and public notice system. At the end of the day, I think the most useful education tool is media literacy.

We also use special budget and public money to fund a very popular TV series that’s 95% on IMDb, and I think even more popular domestically, that talks about how news is manufactured, how newsrooms work, how people use a divisive social issue to drive the wedge, those different social media parts and things like that.

It’s called "The World Between Us." It’s really, really popular here. I think HBO Asia is going to license it. This is paid by taxpayer money out of our public TV. This kind of lifelong education is, at the end of the day, I think the most useful, as my first answer.

When governments are putting out this kind of... Governments put out information all the time. Is there any potential down the road for abuse of this system, when governments have this capability of creating messages and trying to make them go viral very quickly?

Well, everybody has that capability now. What we are saying is that let us add our piece of puzzle, so to speak, to this information market. It really is a trolling-for-attention campaign. The people who are spreading this information, they’re really not interested in having a rational discourse. What they’re doing is that they turn off people’s appetite for rational discourse.

What we’re saying is that we always package our narrative in a way that contributes to rational discourse. Of course, the opposition party, or anyone really, can oppose our view. That is entirely fine as long as we keep it in a way that makes engagement to rational discourse fun. That, I think, is the end goal.

We’re not saying we’re the ministry of truth. We’re saying people could find it enjoyable to participate in rational discourse.

What’s been the experience so far in producing these messages in terms of...How’s it going? Have there been mistakes made? Obviously, there have been mistakes made. [laughs]

Of course. A few things. For these media literacy productions, I think we’re really fortunate that we found really good scriptwriters for "The World Between Us".

The only mistake is that at one point, they confused the Judicial Yuan with the Ministry of Justice. [laughs] Out of the entire 10 TV series, I think that is the only mistake they made, and they did publicly apologize about that. This is really rare, and it’s of really high quality.

As for the president and premier, and deputy premier, and minister produced videos. So far, they are really highly acclaimed. We haven’t seen any significant backlash so far. I think the most the opposition party has complained about is that the ministries spend too much money on it.

It really is a sizeable chunk of the budget for communication, but if that’s the most that they can argue, it means that we did something well.

How serious has been the problem of disinformation?

Depends on who you ask. If people spend a lot of time on social media, people generally report that they get awash in their Facebook feeds with things that are divisive. I think that really is a problem.

It may or may not be exclusively a disinformation problem; it may just be a bad interface design of social media. They encourage people to focus on the divisive part because they gather people’s attention and they spend more time on it. That is a general problem. It’s not just a Taiwan problem.

If people get their sources of information from Internet rather from the television channels and traditional printed press, then we do get another set of feedback that says that there are some TV channels that dedicates more than 60 percent or sometimes 70 percent into coverage of one particular political figure or one particular issue without any constraint on the balance of reporting and things like that.

Our NCC has already corrected some of the most controversial part of it that is clearly not journalistic work anymore. That is a separate set of problems.

I would add that in Taiwan, these two problems feed into each other. Sometimes, people have a divisive issue, a meme going on on social media, whereas in Japan, because it’s not fact-checked, it is nothing to investigate. The press will just ignore that, and so it’s just social media.

In Taiwan, many media, and that includes the pan green and pan blue camps, will actually source these social media memes into their regular news and adding very little value to it.

Once they do that, then they of course get quoted again by the social media, because each of those mainstream news has its own YouTube channel, and Facebook page, and so on, and so it’s very easy to get recirculated back and creating more division.

That is why we have to respond within 60 minutes, because one iteration of this is essentially just one hour, and we cannot wait until the news that is fact checking, which takes a day, and we respond to their fact-checking calls, and so on. There really is no room for that. We think an hour, this cycle would have already run one iteration.

One of the...it’s not a criticism so much as a critique of the NCC, is that the fines against the broadcasting companies are quite small compared to their revenue size and therefore don’t present much of a deterrent.

Indeed it’s not much of a deterrent. At this point, it’s mostly saying that this is not the norm. This is beyond the norm. This is not journalism anymore. Basically, this is telling the public that this is not journalism.

I do agree that it’s not a real deterrent, which is why, during the election, we are going to have a separate set of rules, a separate set of laws. Many of them are now in draft stage awaiting the parliamentary review probably in June.

Because it’s in the parliament, I cannot talk too much, because the MPs will have to decide. Basically the draft bill says during the election, all the media coverage that intends to influence the result of the election is escalated in both the fines, the penalties, the offences, the timeliness of the judges to intervene.

We learned from the French laws that says during the election campaign period, there’s a special court that looks at the media’s propaganda and so on, and do an injunction within 72 hours. Usually, it takes longer, but in an election, it doesn’t really work like that.

In many ways, this augments the NCC’s existing rules and regulations, in the sense that it’s much more broad. It covers any digital platform, any printed platform, anything, whereas the NCC currently only do radio and television bands.

I think this is where we’re going to see the first try in the next election, and we’ll also amend the rules accordingly.

What’s the standard deployed here? Is it accuracy? Is it fairness? Is it balance?

On disinformation?

For the election time.

It’s the same. It’s intentional harmful untruth. That’s a legal definition.

That’s quite interesting. Where has the inspiration for this approach come from? You’ve mentioned France. Are there other inspirations that have come? Obviously, you have some domestic ones also.

The Honest Advertisement Act I think is from the US. I think they are now still debating it. Maybe it will pass before the US does. There is also some inspirations from how this the spam was handled in the early 2000s. It’s structurally very similar.

There was a round of discussion that this inspired by the NetzDG in Germany, where the large platforms are in charge of doing its own regulation of hateful content and so on. We ultimately didn’t quite go that way, mostly because, first, what we care about is intentional harmful untruth, but what the NetzDG model cares about is hate speech. It’s substantially not the same.

Also, we feel that it would lead to a chilling effect, because the large platforms will tend to over-censor. That is why we developed instead a notice and public notice model.

Eventually, the courts will have the jurisdiction to decide whether it’s intentional, and intentional and harmful.

Sure, but it’s the same, digital or otherwise. The court has always had a say on that, and you can appeal the usual way by the rule of law.

It’s very interesting. As you mentioned, many other governments in the region are taking quite a different path of...

Singapore, I think, is a recent example.

Singapore, Malaysia, the law is still on the books.

The general correction order of Singapore is really innovative in the sense that even unrelated social media platforms, they can also issue a general correction order, and these social media will have to put on those clarifications, even if those disinformation did not touch that media.

How to technically enforce it is really challenging, actually. I don’t really quite see how that could technically be implemented without banning Telegram outright. [laughs] But we’ll see. The Singapore people are also very innovative. Maybe they’ll figure out some technical way.

Iris, do you have a question you want to add?

We were talking about the legal framework in terms of fake news.

Disinformation. [laughs]

Disinformation, yeah. Do you think that Minister Lo’s approach could potentially be somehow, how do you say it, somehow harmful in the future for press freedom?

Do you mean like backfire?

Mm-hmm.

You do understand that Minister Lo Ping-cheng is a human rights lawyer, right? From all our meetings, I think not harming human rights, including the right to expression, is on the foremost of his thoughts.

Of course, any laws may have unintended consequences. I’m not saying that during the election those 72-hours rule may or may not have an adverse effect. For example, I can easily imagine like two competing media companies each flagging each other’s paid advertisements. That may be a possibility, because they can afford to pay it, even if each case would cost them 3,000 NT dollars. Maybe they would do that, maybe.

On the other hand, they have to do it only in the name of the person who run, so the candidate’s name is on the stake, and they can only target paid advertisement or paid reporting or things like that.

There need to be a kind of sponsored money trail on this part. The harm need to be to the public, and they need to be initiated by a candidate that runs.

This, I think, is a really narrow criteria, whereas most of the press’s work if you are not sponsored by any campaign, is actually not touched by Minister Lo’s legislation.

I can easily think of a lot of corner cases. But in the general case, where the media serves their subscribers, or just the journalistic community, then they’re not actually classified as a political advertisement, and so not part of this spot, or not part of the 72 hours.

A number of people have said to us, talking about Taiwan’s democracy being relatively young, it’s been 30 years, and yet this is quite an innovative system. I’m wondering what your own assessment is about the depth of the democratic values among the population. You mentioned once the revoltion against the martial law.

That’s right.

How do you assess that? Some people will say, "Well, people don’t necessarily value the freedom of speech." I have no way of knowing if that’s true.

You can look at it in several ways, right? If you’re talking about the right to vote, then our voter turnout is pretty good. The public interest on referendum is at all-time high. We do have people participate even between votes, e-petition, participatory budgeting, you name it. It is actually a really high participation rate. I don’t think anyone disputes that.

As for whether people really value freedom of expression, I think each and every time when the members of the Parliament even start consulting or even talking about any measures that could potentially block Internet access, or that could potentially... for example, the notice and take-down system is not invented by spam or disinformation encountering communities. It’s invented by copyright enforcement communities.

For copyright reasons, all this conversation we just had, we had that before. There was people who petitioned in the MPs, saying if there is a oversea copyright of a violation pirate website, then we should hold the ultimate button to basically close it down and block any Internet communication to that website.

Even in this very narrowly defined case, people flooded the MPs telephones and office, and there is a lot of blackouts by popular websites, my website included, [laughs] and things like that. People show it very clearly that they don’t want any kind of censorship even in the name of protecting intellectual property, because it is a slippery slope.

Generally, in Taiwan, it’s extremely unpopular and would be borderline political suicide to propose anything that blocks the freedom of expression, especially on the Internet.

All right. These are the main questions I had. This is very interesting, and I’m really intrigued by what you’re trying here.

It’s really a very innovative system that’s born out of necessity. I usually say that Taiwan is caught between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, and that’s why we have lots of earthquakes, but that’s also how the Jade Mountain grows by five centimeters every year.

All this pressure results in us having to think higher and propose a more innovative system that’s more universally applicable instead of regressing.

Before I heard you explain this, my initial reaction is how do you avoid the trap of censorship or governments deciding what is truth or not truth.

Exactly.

It seems to me you thought of a way around that.

It may or may not work, but it certainly beats going back to martial law days.

I have one last question.

Yes?

When you were countering this disinformation, do you trace their origin?

Yes and no. We look at it as a kind of epidemic and virus of the mind. Just like -- I don’t know virus, [laughs] or whatever -- influenza, you do trace its origin. Again, it’s very hard to pinpoint at which point did it start to mutate into this particular form that goes viral. These are two very different things.

It’s easy to trace who posts that particular message. It’s very hard to say at which point this message becomes virus so that everybody posts it. It’s two different questions.

Just like with a biological virus, you can’t really interrogate a virus. [laughs] It’s not the same category of things. We do keep an eye on the general trend of where it comes from, whether it looks like a composition that is domestic, whether it looks like a mission translated oversea message, whether it carries a fingerprint of a amateur, or whether it looks like a professionally-done thing.

On the other hand, at some point when it goes viral, everybody actually does its own second or third level recreation on it. Once those remix enter the memetic marketplace, all hope is lost. You really cannot trace anything about it anymore, because it just becomes a meme.

Once it becomes a meme, what we can only do is that we make our own counter narrative and we make those reach more people than those memes reach the same people.

It is, on the question of source of funding for political advertisements. That can be much harder to trace, can’t it...?

They have to file taxes somehow, right?

Eventually.

Well, those media outlets, they have to file taxes somehow...

Eventually, but to do it in real time, or within 72 hours, as you say, that could be quite difficult.

Right, but that’s exactly the same as anti-money laundering, right? Theoretically, you can catch money laundering by the flow of bank accounts -- or by bitcoin flows, in principle. What we’re really doing is that we put a really high kind of criminal penalty on it. We encourage whistleblowing, all these usual things.

So for this case, we make sure that it really becomes a social norm that says political sponsored advertisement, it’s the same as campaign donation. We rely on people who are intermediaries and their conscience to flag this as wrong, essentially.

In the previous election, there’s a lot of that happening. But it was not clearly illegal -- or it is questionably legal -- but it was not very clearly illegal. People generally thought, "Yeah, maybe it’s just earning a few bucks."

Now we’re flagging this to send a very clear message that this is the same as a political donation. Essentially saying this is campaign money, and if you accept that from a foreign national without disclosing the fact, it’s just like money laundering.

Very good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.