Audrey Tang is Taiwan’s Digital Minister in charge of social innovation, open government, and youth engagement. She is Taiwan’s first transgender cabinet minister, and she became the youngest minister in the country’s history at the age of 35.

Audrey Tang is known for civic hacking and for strengthening democracy using technology. Audrey plays a key role in combating foreign disinformation campaigns and in formulating Taiwan’s COVID-19 response.

Audrey, it’s a pleasure to have you with us again at an Oslo Freedom Forum event. I’d like to start off by asking you. As digital minister, you work closely with civil society, and you encourage them to contribute to and to participate in Taiwan’s democracy.

Technologies played a very important role, and Taiwan’s digital democracy has grabbed the world’s attention, especially in the January 2020 elections in Taiwan. How does technology along with open governance, along with transparency, protect democracy and help push back against foreign influence campaigns?

Thank you for the great question. In Taiwan, we managed to counter the pandemic with no lockdown and the infodemic with no takedown. Thanks to digital democracy. In addition to social innovation, we have three pillars. That’s fast, fair, and fun.

On the fast part, we ensure that anybody who detect a disinformation online even on end-to-end encrypted channels, they can flag it, not to the authorities but rather to professional journalists, as well as civic technologists running a crowdsource fact-checking project that anyone can join.

Then once this gets detected, for example, last December when Li Wenliang whistleblowing gets up voted this way on the public forum PTT, we’d decided that it was not this information after all because it looks very legit.

The medical officers immediately took the “seven new SARS cases” too hard and then started the health inspection for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan the very next day, which is the first day of 2020.

The collective intelligence not only enables a fast response from the Central Epidemic Command Center that livestreams the responses every day but also through toll free lines like 1922 and chatbots.

Any new ideas coming in from civil society, for example, a boy who calls and says, “Oh, your rationing mask, but all I get his pink medical mask. I don’t want to wear it to school because I’m afraid my classmates may laugh at me,” the very next day in a live stream, everybody, the medical officers, and the minister wore pink medical masks to show solidarity and gender mainstreaming.

In this way, our counter infodemic response, the humor over rumor, emphasizes that for each disinformation campaign that travels outrage, we always push out a meme that travels on joy. Joy has a higher R-value than outrage.

We can ensure that people get vaccinated that is to say to see something hilarious before they see that this information package and therefore will not share it in an outrage. The foreign interference, for example, attacking our election systems is countered this way.

Also, through radical transparency of the YouTubers literally live streaming of the counting process in the ballot boxes and a disinformation about mask distribution is countered through a radical transparency effort done by civic technologists.

The people queuing in line in the pharmacies can swipe their national health insurance card and see that the map reflects every 30 seconds, the real-time availability in that pharmacy, and so on. By radically trust the citizens, we counter both the infodemic and the pandemic through building mutual trust.

That’s both inspiring. I just wish that this could be adopted pretty much everywhere. I think you are very advanced in comparison to where other democracies are.

I really hope that other governments look to your government as both a source of inspiration and support in the struggle against foreign influence campaigns that can be so damaging. We see this a lot with human rights defenders and what they have to deal with through either troll farms or bots.

I want to go to an article from the “Hong Kong Free Press” from June 2020. You mentioned that quote. You think the pandemic served as an amplifier of two different governing models. Clearly, you’re making a reference to the stark and dramatic contrast between authoritarian-dictatorship model and the free and open democratic society model.

Why do you think that Taiwan’s democratic system has not only flourished but has also strengthened during this COVID-19 pandemic?

In Taiwan, we do not make the false trade-off or dilemma between having to sacrifice economic growth in order to counter the pandemic or dance in order to make sure that everybody is still enjoys the freedom of doing business, movement, and so on. We have to make sacrifices in terms of public health.

The Taiwan’s record on both the counter pandemic and also recording GDP growth this year has been the top of the world. By showing people that instead of the government knows everything, we instead say, in mandarin, 你行你來 — “If you can do it, do it.”

The idea very simply put is that the economic sector as well as the social sector can call the shots when they see, for example, a better way of distributing a mosque first in the pharmacies, then in convenience stores through mobile apps, and then on kiosk, even vending machines and so on.

The government, far from dictating anything, takes actively the piloted ideas and then just amplifies it through the support of real-time open API and open data. This is what I refer to as reverse procurements.

That is to say, whenever a new idea gains legitimacy through democracy, the government, even though it may resist that at first, for example, using traditional rice cookers and do not add water. You can disinfect the mask and reuse it for three to five times. This is very counter intuitive.

After we confirm it in our Food and Drug Administration, our CECC Commander Minister Chen Shih-chung demonstrated this procedure on the livestream conference and later on from the international academic journals that it works for N95 too .

This essentially tripled our mass availability just by showing this simple social innovation and all this imbues into the civil society. This idea that innovation does not need to originate from top down, it can come from grassroots. That’s the core of democracy.

Again, incredibly inspiring. Rice cookers, that’s awesome. I’d heard about using an oven and doing a low temperature. Rice cooker, that’s terrific. I’m going to start looking into that. You played a key role in leading the effort of your country’s government in combating COVID-19. As you keep mentioning technology was a key component of this.

What were some of your primary concerns when leading this effort, and how did you incorporate protections for privacy and individual freedoms into this plan? Has there been any tension between citizens’ concern over, say, surveillance or contact tracing or just general rights concerns and the government’s use of big data to fight the pandemic?

In Taiwan, because we never declared either a lockdown or a state of emergency, our administrative actions need to go through the oversight from the parliamentarians, including interpolations, public hearings, and such.

Because of this constitutional restriction, we only make use of the data collection method already in place before the pandemic. We do not, as a rule, collect new data in the name of the counter-pandemic effort.

This serves a very good bridge into the civil society, human rights organizations understanding because if we repurpose something that’s already in place before the pandemic, its privacy properties are more well understood.

For example, when we do the mask rationing, it’s essentially the same procedure as receiving recurring prescriptions from the pharmacies. When we collect those in the kiosk, it’s essentially the same experience as filing your income or local taxes in the convenience store.

The digital quarantine where the phone, instead of asking people to install anything that communicates over Bluetooth or collects GPS data, or Wi Fi, or anything like that, we use a very rough estimate of the position of the phone using cell phone tower signal strengths that we are already using for early earthquake and flood warnings anyway.

By reusing mechanisms that’s already in place, we make sure that the human rights organizations can better communicate with the CECC, the Command Center. The approval rate about this CECC’S digital quarantine measures was at 91 percent.

We think the nine percent for asking the MPs for us to have to do a interpolation and explanation session after which the posts show approval rate grows to 94 percent. Of course, we thank the six percent for keeping us honest and accountable.

It’s wonderful to hear someone in government say, “Keep us honest and accountable.” It’s very inspiring. In past Oslo Freedom Forums and actually already in this one, we’ve had several speakers discuss how Chinese tech companies could threaten the digital rights and human rights of users.

I’m going to quote again from an article in the “Nikkei Asian Review” where you were quoted as saying, “Putting Chinese equipment in a country’s core telecom infrastructure is akin to inviting a Trojan horse into the network.” Would you kindly elaborate a little bit more on this? What are some of the recommendations that you would provide to governments and to private citizens around the subject?

The Trojan horse metaphor, I did not create that. I was merely relaying the consensus on the street when we occupied the parliament back in 2014. It’s called the Sunflower Movement.

At that time, the students and people were concerned about the so-called Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement occupied the parliament for three weeks. Each NPO in one corner of the occupied parliament deliberated on a street one particular aspect each of the CSSTA.

One of the deliberations there was about core communication infrastructure components made in the PRC – that’s People’s Republic of China regime – in the 4G communication network.

That Trojan horse metaphor was not coined because of 5G. Rather, it was coined six years ago for the 4G deployment. The consensus on the street was that the overall total cost of ownership of having to reevaluate whether a supplier has been taken over by the thumb, the Chinese Communist Party, through one of its embedded party branches in every large enterprises in the PRC jurisdiction is too hot.

If you choose any particular component for your 4G network, it’s likely that for 5G and other extended long-time evolution networks, you will be using components from the same suppliers as well. For each and every upgrade, you have to do another systematic risk assessment of whether it has been de facto taken over by the Chinese Communist Party.

A motorized is more expensive than using, say, Nokia or Ericsson components. That decision on the street and also international communication commission was made back then, six years ago. We’ve been enjoying so-called Clean Path in our 4G network and now 5G this year with no PRC components. We’re thriving. Obviously, this is a consensus regardless of party affiliations in the Taiwan public.

That’s spectacular. You mentioned the Sunflower Movement. This is the – correct me if I’m wrong – March 2014 Sunflower Movement. This was when hundreds of people demonstrated against a trade deal with the CCP in China due to concerns of increasing China’s authoritarian influence in a young, democratic, sovereign, free nation like Taiwan.

Given your activist roots, what advice or what tips, suggestions do you have for activists specifically those activists that are pushing back against authoritarianism?

As Buckminster Fuller have said, the best way when you see a broken system is not exactly to try to repair the system. Instead, innovate, think of a new system that renders the old one obsolete.

Indeed, in the Sunflower Movement, we have seen a poly-centered, maybe 20 different NGO. Each have their own center. With horizontal connection enabled by the Internet, later on, we will see a very similar configuration in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong.

Fast forward a few years in the Anti-ELAB protest, instead of 20 centers, we’re now seeing maybe 2,000 centers. Each and every single person can start a flashmob or to compose “May Glory to Hong Kong” together with essentially adhocracy, LIHKG and other connected places.

These give people a taste of what it feels like to live democracy day to day. It’s not just uploading three bits every four years to a ballot box, which is called voting. It’s still very important, but far more interesting and important is to co-create reasonable things, solutions, decisions that we can all live with.

People who participate in this kind of co-creation, their minds gets changed, that whenever people feel anger, they no longer turn the anger into helplessness but rather into social outrage, which is an impulse for co-creation. My main suggestion is to not take this personal but take it social.

I think one word we could add to that is hope, which is the opposite of helplessness. You just mentioned Hong Kong.

The people of Hong Kong look to Taiwan as an inspiration to the Taiwan’s own history of transitioning to democracy after having been an authoritarian country, which is often a reminder to people who have this silly idea that country like, for instance, China under the CCP must remain a dictatorship because they’re built that way.

Yet, in fact, Taiwan proves that you can make that shift. Hong Kong is in a precarious situation. What do you think are some of the other lessons especially regarding digital democracy and innovation that Hongkongers can learn from the Taiwanese and vice versa, maybe by the same token in terms of hope and helplessness? What have the Taiwanese learned from Hongkongers?

In terms of the “be water,” – well more than 2,000 leaders, so it’s not very countable anyway – might as well be leaderless form of social organization. I think anywhere from Taiwan to Barcelona to everywhere in the world is learning from Hong Kong.

They are definitely at the forefront of this be water form of activism compared to which the sunflower is but a seed, a prototype. We’re all learning from Hong Kong.

Also, in the early days of Taiwan’s young democracy, as you mentioned, when we just lifted the martial law in the ‘80s, we rely in large part on the freedom of the press, especially international correspondence, journalist, and so on in Hong Kong to help working out what we have not learned because of systemic authoritarianism in a dictatorship era in Taiwan.

That’s greatly sped up Taiwan’s democratic activists outreach to the world through the help from the journalists and activists in Hong Kong. We have been, I guess, returning the favor in the past few years when Reporter Without Borders moved their headquarters to Taipei, when the Oslo Freedom Forum [laughs] that sets up physically in Taipei and many other events such as these as well.

We made sure that the Hong Kong people can safely in Taiwan, not only share their experience but also as you mentioned, radiate a message of hope that if the liberal democratic countries all keep our eyes a watchful coalition on the Hong Kong situation, then it will not deteriorate. It will not suffer because of neglect.

That role Taiwan’s very much willing to play in addition to offering, for example, student exchange, and safety programs, and so on. We have a special office for this.

If we can take up a view, if we can scope out from Hong Kong and Taiwan and talk about other liberal democracies, how do you think they can better adapt to the rise of authoritarianism?

We need not only to play defensive here but also aggressively make sure that the innovations – what we call the Taiwan Model – that you can take care of the economic growth without restricting essential freedoms. That is a very powerful message to share and exchange with the world.

Recently, the Czech Republic’s Head of the Senate visited Taiwan and declare that “I am Taiwanese,” paying homage to the “Ich bin ein Berliner” quote a few decades ago because they also agree with this message. The message starts with the proper co-creation across sectors in a society.

We do not have to polarize or divide among ourselves just because we’re a liberal democracy. Rather, we can ensure that everybody plays a role in the social mobilization against the pandemic and also the infodemic. That is the main message that we want to send. For more, consult TaiwanCanHelp.us.

Wow. Audrey, this has been superb. We packed so much into this fireside chat. I hope that the next time we meet, it’ll be next to a real fire somewhere in Norway or when we do the next regional Oslo Freedom Forum in Taiwan.

Thank you so much, Audrey Tang. Thank you so much. We are great admirers of the role you play. We will continue to sing the praises of a government that truly understands individual rights, not only stands for human rights in Taiwan and fundamental freedoms but for these throughout the world. Thank you.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Love it. Love it. Thank you.

Cool. Wonderful.

That was just the rehearsal. We’re going to do it again. We’re going to do it again, right?

That was dress rehearsal. [laughs]