We can just start off talking about, obviously, there’s been a lot of media coverage on the epidemic, and Taiwan’s success during it. I want to ask you about some of the successes, and then we can move on to the challenges as well. Successes, I think one of the things that really struck me, stuck out at me, was the rumor over…what was it? Your humor over…

Humor over rumor.

Excuse me. [laughs]

It’s fine.

I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that idea, how that idea originated within the government, how often you guys are using it, aside from that, Premier Su wiggling his butt photo.

Also the cute spokesdog, the Zongchai, which is very humorous.

Tell me about those. Are those things still ongoing?

Of course.

Are we doing this every day?

Zongchai, of course, is alive and well.

It’s a real dog?

It’s a real dog that lives with the participation officer of the ministry of health and welfare. The PO lives just a few minutes’ walk from the MOHW. They can just walk back home after each CECC press conference, and take new pictures of the dog without paying Shutterstock or anything like that.

Then begin new memes about it. The idea of humor over rumor was introduced, I think, around 2017. I proposed that idea in a cabinet meeting saying that there needs to be a fast, a public, and a structural response that makes clarifications more viral than disinformation.

I drew this experience from my own participation in the 2014 Sunflower Movement where we did set up, for example, live-streaming to the streets so that the disinformation about the Occupy itself will not grow because everybody who walk by the street can check for themselves what’s actually going on in the Occupy the Parliament.

That’s a solution to an issue that often plagued Occupy movements, which is rampant disinformation and conspiracy theories. That has some personal experience in it. Also around that time, 2017, one colleague in my office, “a0kman”, he is very proficient in the use of memes and has actually quite following. Anyway, [laughs] he also shared with all the participation officers at the time about the idea of using memes to overcome rumors, and also shared many international counterparts doing similar things.

There’s a Better Reykjavik platform, literally built by the party in Iceland that’s called the Best Party. [laughs] There’s political movements all around the world that has this kind of comedic idea to it.

Even domestically in Taiwan, since last year, we also have a political party. The name is literally Can’t Stop This Party or 歡樂無法黨, the unstoppable happy party. They do have a Taipei City councilor, so it’s a real party.

Many of the party members are prominent YouTubers and so on, so they are also working on humor over rumor. It’s not just the state or the public sector. The people, the social sector is also working on pretty much the same idea.

To be frank, back in 2017, the participation officers’ uptake of these ideas were kind of lukewarm. There are some notable examples like the National Palace Museum, but by and large, people do not think that the rumors are that much a problem that we need to work with professional comedians to tackle.

Fast forward to the 2018 election where disinformation was really rampant, because the election was coupled with the referenda, and the referenda tend to travel on outrage, which makes the disinformation even more easy to spread, so that became a real problem. Then, of course, the new spokesperson at the time, Kolas Yotaka, really liked the idea.

It was her who actually implemented the triple-two system. When all the trending disinformation gets detected, the relevant competent authority, usually a ministry, need to come up with two pictures, each 200 words or less, that gets the clarification message viral within two hours. That’s the triple-two principle. The main implementer is Kolas Yotaka.

Two pictures, 200 words. What’s the other two?

Within two hours, the same news cycle, to be precise, 200 characters.

Because we’re talking Chinese.

Mm-hmm.

Since that minister…Sorry, was it a minister?

The spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka.

Since that spokesperson took it on, is that when you guys started hiring professional comedians within the…

Mm-hmm, because it’s delegated to the ministries, so the ministries did start working with professional comedians. Ministry of Health and Welfare is an interesting case, because the participation officer himself is actually quite a professional in making such interesting memes.

Instead of working with contractors or working with professionals, the PO himself can suggest, for example, the famous pink mask episode, it was them that suggested to Minister Chen Shih-chung, “You should put on a pink mask to show solidarity to the boy who called that says, ‘You’re rationing our mask. All I get is pink. I don’t want to go to school.’”

It was also the PO who suggested that the Minister Chen Shih say that his childhood idol was the Pink Panther. [laughs]

This is really humorous take on not only gender mainstreaming, but also making mask a fashionable item that people would not only wear it for health purposes, but also wear it for like if making a statement.

I see your rainbow mask. [laughs]

That’s right. Yes, that’s a rainbow mask.

I saw a lot of rainbow masks during pride, as well. What are some of the other successes that you are really proud of during this pandemic that Taiwan has achieved, especially in the digital realm?

Sure. The digital realm is the assistive role. The most important technologies are chemical, that’s to say, soap and hand sanitizers, and physical, which is masks, respectively, and so digital may be a third assistive technology.

One of the main things that I want to stress is that during the pandemic, we limited the centralization of data collection, although, by the authorizing act, the CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center, has the lawful authorization to collect new data.

By and large, we work with the heuristic that says we do not collect new data in the name of the pandemic that we were not already collecting before the pandemic.

This is very important, because for each new data collection, there’s a set of privacy and cybersecurity evaluation and impact assessment that must be done. If this is genuinely new, like the Bluetooth dongles for contract tracing that Singapore has rolled out, then of course people will take time to familiarize themselves with those cybersecurity and privacy parameters.

By essentially not doing that and piggybacking on existing data collection methods, for example, the National Health card and the refillable prescription, we use the same method to dispense the mask at the pharmacies. For the digital fence, we use the earthquake advance warning or flood advance warning, which builds on the cellphone tower signal strength triangulation.

That’s an existing data collection endpoint, so I think we avoid the needless invention of new data collection methods in the name of pandemic.

Therefore, the cybersecurity and privacy parameters, although of course it’s still debated and still controversial, at least people are talking apple to apple, or orange to orange, because we’re not working with Apple on that, orange versus orange for these data collection methods.

Thank you for bringing that up, because that was one of the main questions that I wanted to ask you. I have been reading a little bit about the data collection, or trying to read about it, but the people that I spoke with, I spoke with a g0v person, and then I also spoke with a tech policy person. I think you probably know both. [laughs]

Yeah, of course I know both, because you have the policy of no anonymity. [laughs]

Exactly.

I read of course the collaborative document.

Talk to me a bit more, because their criticisms were interesting. They were saying…Sure, from one perspective, from a technical perspective, you’re saying, what you’re doing is piggybacking. I wasn’t in Taiwan before, but I’m not sure that, say, the telecoms who are collecting all this data, that in the past, they weren’t necessarily sending it to CECC, right?

They were not sending to CECC, but they were sending out earthquake warnings and flood warnings, depending on your phone’s whereabouts. The CECC basically told them that they need to add one more disaster type to their SMS sending.

It is true that the earthquake warnings and flood warnings were only sent to people in the vicinity, whereas for the digital fence it’s also sent to the medical officer, because otherwise the medical officer cannot check your whereabouts. That is true.

The data processing is done, still, by the telecoms. The data collection is the same, which is the phone signal data. The only difference is on the data application.

You mean the application’s actually being used by CECC?

By the CECC-mandated norms. That is to say, “Send an SMS to the local medical officers if somebody breaks quarantine, or send it to a police officer is somebody who is already a confirmed case breaks the perimeter.”

Another question that arose, I don’t know which databases are being combined, but I understand that CECC also gain access to, say, immigration databases. One of the other people I spoke with, what he told me was that it wasn’t publicly stated how this data is being used, the data operators – what else? – how long the data’s going to be in use for.

There’s a whole bevy of things that you can start worrying about once you start thinking about privacy. I would love to…

That’s the deficiency in our privacy act, a structural one, the only deficiency that prevents us from getting the GDPR adequacy with the European Union, to be precise.

The reason is that Taiwan does not, at this moment, a single data protection authority, a single DPA. There’s no independence for the institution, for example, like a French CNIL, which is an independent body that plays the role of the DPA. They get public funding, but they don’t report to any minister.

At the moment the Taiwan privacy act says that each competent authority, each ministry is their own DPA, as well as for the businesses that operates it. For example, that require a license, a permit to operate under some ministry, then that minister also becomes a DPA of those particular businesses.

In Taiwan, we’re a liberal democracy most of the time, other than the health system, which is social democracy. We’re a liberal democracy most of the time, and so many businesses doesn’t need any license for the competent authority. That also means that there is no enforcement if they violate the privacy perimeters.

Currently the interpreting agency for the data protection is the NDC, specifically the Data Protection Office within the National Development Council. They are in charge for interpreting the law, but not enforcing the law.

Each ministry is in charge of enforcing the law. This federated architecture essentially mean we have maybe 12 DPAs, but we don’t get 12 more seats at international table. [laughs]

That also means that each DPA, each ministry is free to enforce it however they want, and even for the same set of data, as you said, when the databases are being joined together. If you ask one side or the other side, they may give different enforcement interpretations, and definitely doesn’t have the same, for example, data retention rules.

It is a problem. The criticism is valid.

Can you tell me, are you guys taking measures to address this…?

Within the next couple weeks. We are going to propose to the legislature in a cabinet meeting sometime this month that we’re going to establish an independent privacy protection agency, probably called a council or a commission.

This commission reports only to the head of the cabinet. It doesn’t report to any ministry. Its budget won’t come from any ministry, either. That avoids the classic situation of a minister really wanting to do something, and then the person reporting that they cannot stop them.

You will be truly independent. It’s a little bit like the aviation security council. It’s been renamed to Transportation Safety Council in Taiwan in that it’s an independent agency.

We will propose that to the legislature. With luck the legislature will approve it sometime next year. Soon as this centralized DPA starts we’ll probably get GDPR adequacy.

Also, this new DPA will be able to not only review – the NDC can already review, they’re already reviewing – but if they review and find something wrong they don’t have the enforcement power. A new DPA will have enforcement power.

You mean this new council will have…?

This new council. Something like that.

When you said DPA you mean…?

Data Protection Authority. That is a European Union term.

Two questions. One, is that a personal proposal, first, or is that something that a lot of people around you, civic hackers, or something that you guys have had exchanges on and something that you think the community wants?

Two, are you guys going to be able to retroactively look back at some of the stuff that CECC has been doing with data since the pandemic has begun?

To your first question, it’s being deliberated on the vTaiwan platform. It’s also in 2017 from November. There’s a draft of that as early as July 2018 from the NDC. It has been consulted with stakeholders.

I wouldn’t say it’s my personal proposal. Everybody see it as a shortcoming. It’s just we need a politically opportune moment to set up new agencies.

Such an opportune moment came when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen promised that there will be a new digital competent authority as her second presidential term campaign promise. The vice president candidate of the KMT proposed pretty much the same thing. It’s by definition bipartisan.

If you look at the legislature records the KMT also worked on a data protection authority. Once we have our version from the Executive Yuan, that will be one of the versions that legislature will deliberate, alongside the KMT version.

I would say that this is the moment where the two parties, at least their presidential and vice presidential candidates respectively, see this as a political priority, to have a digital competent authority, before which there’s no wide bipartisan priority on this.

Are you guys planning for it to be mostly informed by GDPR and Europe’s model?

Of course, and also the new data competence act being deliberated by the EU. That’s the first question.

The second question, yeah, of course. Right after SARS 1.0, actually, in 2004, not only the administration but the Constitutional Court did a review of the actions taken during SARS 1.0 in 2003, and found that this lockdown, this barricading of entire hospital, to be barely constitutional. That is to say, it would have been constitutional if people had thought it out.

Because we did not have any experience with SARS, so the Constitutional Court said that “It’s barely constitutional. Let’s not do that again.” and charged the legislature to make new rules and new legislation that will enable a constitutional, well in advance, a fixed 14 day and so on instead of just limiting people’s freedom of movement with no definite day.

We need to restrict this still very narrow and deep privacy and freedom of movement violations, but with due process preapproved by the legislature. People understand that after the 14 days, of course, there’s no stigma. They can just freely move about.

This is a joint review by not just the administrative branch but also the legislative and the judiciary.

You think…will there be one for, after COVID-19 is over?

Assuming that there is a pause between SARS 2.0 and SARS 3.0, then we’ll probably have time for this kind of review, hopefully.

Are you predicting [laughs] a SARS 3.0?

I’m not predicting anything, but many people said that it is possible it becomes something like the seasonal flu, because the base number is high enough for mutations to occur. Maybe not 3.0, but 2.1, 2.2 beta, [laughs] or something like that.

If that happens, then the vaccination strategy, everything, needs to adapt as well and we’ll probably better off with the face masks all the time just to be sure, because think about the possibility of SARS 2.0 mutating so that the 14 days is no longer sufficient.

That will change pretty much everything related to quarantine. Assuming that no such mutations occur, we’ll probably have some breathing room, literally, to have a retrospective, just as we did in 2004.

Let’s go back a little bit to…it seems like there’s a bipartisan push for a data protection authority. Is that arising, do you think, from the general public, like both political parties or something? Or, the general public has this desire for privacy? Do you think that’s happening in Taiwan?

I ask that question because working in Asia, a lot of times if you’re running data privacy stories, data protection stories, the western mindset, and what scholars would say to you is this serial type, that Asians don’t have…

Yeah, a whole Confucianism thing, yeah. [laughs]

I don’t know if it’s Confucius. I’m not up to date on Confucius, as I’ve never studied it. You’re a digital minister, so I wanted to get your take on this. Especially because, if we go to talking about the data collection, the narrative that has emerged from the media is that in East Asian countries, citizens are willing to put up with a greater degree of surveillance.

Yeah, Confucianism, yes. [laughs]

Yeah, South Korean contact tracing methods, Japan too. I don’t know. What is your take on that?

OK, so first of all, I’m a Daoist. I’m not a competent authority on Confucianism. With that said, I do think Taiwan has something different here, because we made sure that the data collection is piggybacking on existing data collection methodologies.

Also, we rely on what the media called “participatory self-surveillance,” meaning that instead of concentrating the data and the overall power to the CECC, independent business owners, for example, the hostess bars and the host bars, the nightlife, the street, basically, collect their own data on the patrons.

They can do so under, for example, a pseudonym-first basis or a throwaway SIM card or a throwaway email account, in order for any reported case to be able to contact the patrons in the past couple of weeks. They do not need to hand over that data to the municipal or to the central government.

In fact, these are shredded after a few weeks if there’s no local cases, which has been like that for the past half a year. The idea is that data collection, if it is balanced with the desire of pseudonymity, or anonymity, does actually get more people participating.

Otherwise, we’re essentially driving the nightlife district and the workers there into underground, like the US prohibition era. Then no good data [laughs] will come out of it.

Actually, some nearby jurisdictions suffered from the second or third wave precisely because of this configuration. They forced the nightlife district to comply using very top-down methods. Here, it is an administrative recommendation, 行政指導 in Mandarin. Then they figure out their own way of retaining the data, but without the obligation to give the data to the CECC.

I think this means that they act out of rational self-interest, but keep the business going and not wanting to be stigmatized. Also, like our mask communication strategies, another example, we say, “Wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands.” This is a rational self-interest narrative.

During the pandemic, the narratives that comes out from Taiwan, especially from the CECC, is a balance between collectivism and individualism, but it’s mostly about rational self-interest.

Do you think it’s generally true? A lot of the privacy criticisms I presented to you, these are from people who care about data privacy and are not…

Of course, and I care too.

…every day.

I’m squarely in the six percent that wasn’t happy the way the digital fence is being communicated. There were 94 percent of approval, but the 6 percent, including probably the two people you have spoken to, eventually worked with the member of our parliament who set up a public hearing, essentially interpolation.

Then the department of cybersecurity, the minister of justice, and so on published for the first time how exactly this thing works, to the members of parliament, also, because it’s live-streamed, to the public. I don’t know whether it’s live-streamed or recorded. In any case, it’s published to the public afterwards.

The 94 percent, most of the island’s residents actually didn’t care. When I came here in quarantine, I was looking on Twitter. People like to Tweet when they’re in quarantine.

There’s a lot of people who were all praise. No one thought about…I think there was one critical article written by a Taiwanese-American perhaps where he was freaking out about the electronic fence. I think his phone had [laughs] shut off, so then the police called.

I’ve read that article.

The BBC article.

We probably need to communicate it better. The fact that there is no opting out really is a different norm. Of course, you can opt out by saying, “You know, I’m going to a hotel for quarantine. I don’t have a phone.” That’s a way of opting out, but it’s kind of extreme.

Also, it doesn’t really help the legitimacy of the government if we simply say, “This works perfectly. No need to worry about it.” The fact is that the digital fence, like the mask dispensing system, is under a lot of co-creation via the report of frontline people.

The frontline health workers and the people in quarantine informed the algorithm a lot so that it started being quite imprecise, but eventually it became quite precise. For example, initially in the quarantine places, some of the places didn’t have good 4G cellphone tower reception. The signal would just float, so there’s a lot of false alarms and so on.

Of course, we just installed new equipment around all the quarantine places, making sure that especially like near the Yang Ming Mountain and things like that, we set up new 4G cellphone tower just so the signal will not just float all around. It’s a continuous improving process.

In the mask availability case, the map, which is a great social innovation, definitely not a state innovation, conflicted with the pharmacists’ take-a-number system, which is, again, a social innovation. The pharmacists were handing out those numbers at the beginning of the day in exchange of the National Health Card and then telling them to go back in the evening to collect the masks.

What happened then is that the mask map will show that this pharmacist is full of availability. Only during lunch when they’re processing those ID cards, you’ll see this drop. This doesn’t look natural, so people would accuse the pharmacists of hoarding masks or something. These two social innovations were initially at odds with each other.

Of course, eventually – the next week, actually – after we wrote our system, we set up the data schema so that the opening hours have divided into three columns. One is for the dispensing of the numbers, and one is for the dispensing of the mask.

That solved some of the problem, but still, some pharmacists told me that even if they announce the take-a-number hours from – maybe by 8:30 – they already hand out all the numbers, so they still have this 30-minute window where people will call them, saying, “I see you have plenty of masks on the map. Are you saying you’ve all sold out?”

They wished for a button that they can click and disappear from the map, which I personally took that suggestion and worked with NHIA to implement that button.

Once that button gets implemented, they didn’t complain much anymore. [laughs] This is a co-creation process. If we started saying “This is all perfect,” it’s not like that. We are always saying, “Yeah, sorry, we made some mistakes, and please tell us so we can co-create.”

I brought up the case of the BBC article – I just wanted you to respond on that, whether it’s true that most people in Asia do not care about their privacy.

I don’t think that’s the case. I think people do care about privacy, and especially Taiwanese people. It’s just that we have certain norms that were already there before the pandemic. As long as the counter-pandemic effort do not violate those norms, then these are tolerated. I’m not saying that these norms are very privacy preserving.

For example, handing out your ID card to park a car or something, that actually compromise the privacy because the current generation of ID cards prints the name of both parents on the back of the card, and even the name of your spouse if you have one.

People can easily figure your sexual orientation just by flipping [laughs] your ID card [laughs] to the back. That’s, of course, a privacy encroaching norm, which we are fixing, which is the reason why I just handed out this card to you. [laughs]

At the back of the card of the seventh generation, there’s no name anymore.

No names of family members, spouses.

Yeah, or spouses. It does say that this person is single, though. This is by popular demand.

At least no sexual orientation discrimination [laughs] based on the name of the spouse. We are working on improving those privacy norms, but the existing norms, some privacy preserving, some not, are what they are, and the most we can do during the fight of the pandemic is not to make the norm even more destructive for privacy purposes.

Fair enough. I ask these questions because I think…especially I’m American, I’m representing American media, and we’ve all seen how the pandemic has…

I think in American English, so that’s something.

That’s great. That makes my job so much easier. I don’t want to translate. I remember reading the “Wired” article and trying to remember, think of “Do I have to research the ‘Tao Te Ching’?”

Exactly.

I’ve never read that. I ask this because I think a lot of societies, like the US in particular, a democracy in name, has been struggling really, and a lot of the struggle, especially if you look at the messaging around masks, where people say, “This violates my freedom if you tell me to wear a mask.”

Yeah, of course. That’s why the cute spokesdog say, “Wear a mask to protect you against your own unwashed hands.” [laughs]

I know everyone’s asked you this question, but what are some of the lessons that can be taken away for democracy, democratic nations, where you are balancing truly an increase in…I’m only thinking of this in Chinese for something. Increase in 權力 for…

In coercive power.

Yeah, for centralized organizations like the CDC, so you have a pandemic task force.

That’s right.

How are you balancing that with saving lives?

By substituting the coercive power to the social sector’s communication power. There’s this well-established theory by Manuel Castells among others of what is in the book called, “The Communication Power.”

In it, the main takeaway that I have read the book is the idea that the coercive power or top-down or lockdown or, I don’t know, shutdown, takedown, whatever, these kind of powers – they are, of course, effective, but the return is diminishing. You can see this in action around the world. Lockdown fatigue is a thing.

Even if you could theoretically get more coercive power by the design of something like CECC, or in countries that didn’t have a CECC by the emergency power during the crisis that they can exercise to essentially bypass the parliament, you could, of course, constitutionally do that.

The return is diminishing because people get tired following the rules that they did not know why was there in the first place.

On the other hand, if we focus on the communication power to make sure that the cute spokesdog speaks in many languages, explains that it is in your own best individual interest, even if you have no one nearby, it’s still possible that you will touch a surface that has the virus on it.

It’s still possible that you will just literally put your hand to your mouth, and in Mandarin, 吃手手 is a thing. If you do that, you still get infected, even with nobody nearby.

A mask is not about protecting other people. It’s about protecting yourself against your own hand. That links mask use to hand sanitation. That message isn’t a top-down message. Everyone who hear this message can remind each other in whatever way they deem reasonable.

In fact, if you ask people around February, “Why are you wearing a mask?” many of them will tell you that they wear a mask even once CECC tells us it’s OK to not wear a mask on metros, which they did for a couple days, fearing a mask shortage.

We very quickly changed course, did a U-turn, and said you have to wear a mask after all. Those 48 hours, people still wore a mask because they understood the importance of it and actually criticized CECC [laughs] for saying that. Fortunately, it’s just 48 hours and not, say, 48 days. [laughs]

The message, then, was they were thinking about saving themselves.

Exactly.

When you look at the US, do you think there was just a science communication failure, in some ways? [laughs]

I don’t know. By Taiwanese standards, at the time of the pandemic, when our top epidemiologic authority want to talk to the vice president, he just look into the mirror. [laughs] Literally, VP Chen is the author on epidemiology textbook, and also let the SARS 1.0 counter the SARS effort.

By that standard, [laughs] it’s not a reasonable standard [laughs] if you expect other jurisdictions. It’s also because we had a societal inoculation thanks to the 2003 SARS 1.0, that experience about lockdown and all that panic buying in ‘95, the central government saying completely different thing from the municipal government.

We had it quite bad [laughs] in 2003. We know what, say, the US is going through because it’s not unlike what Taiwan went through in 2003. We learned from it. In 2004, did this across all the three branches, joint work, designing the CDC, say. Assuming that, of course, the vaccines work.

I think all the democratic countries will probably do what we did in 2004, which is to set up new rules and designs and mechanism and so on so that people will not panic when SARS 3.0 came, and it will. It’s just a matter of time now.

You’ve talked a lot about open governance. You’ve talked a lot about using digital tools to build up democracy and trust. You sent a Twitter message to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris recently…

Yes.

…saying that – what did you say, exactly?

“Come and visit. You can share the Taiwan model.”

Trust of the government is very important and that trust of the citizens is also important, very important.

The government trusting citizens is very important, yes.

Are there any lessons that you think Taiwan can offer in terms of trust between citizens and government to a lot of – it’s also because I think in the current environment, the Internet has become this place that is very different from its original vision. Originally, the vision of the Internet is this place where you could share knowledge.

Is to survive a nuclear holocaust. That was the original vision. [laughs]

I didn’t know that, but the utopian vision of the Internet that I think was quite there in the early 2000s – we’re talking about sharing, meeting friends, making connections, but these days the Internet is filled with disinformation, and I think probably leading to more polarization as opposed to less.

We saw that really with the US election this time – so much disinformation. What lessons, what tools – what can they use? What are some solutions?

I think there’s a couple things – literally two things. One is about the government trusting citizens. We use this approach that we call people-public-private partnership, which is not unlike the slogans other jurisdictions use, but we put people first. That is to say, the social sector come up with the norm.

For example, during election campaigns, it’s essential for the campaign donation expenditure to be published not only as information but as open data, so that investigative journalists can work with data scientists to develop models that will then find out the link between the vested interests and the people who campaign, for example.

Publishing as PDF files makes their life harder. Publishing as just paper copies makes it even harder.

People in the g0v movement did this interesting intervention where they went straight to the Control Yuan, the 監察院, and took out those 84 photocopied campaign donation records and expenditure records and scanned them and published it for everybody to do a capture-style OCR, so that people can collectively rebuild the structural data that was hoarded by the Control Yuan.

That was so successful that the Control Yuan said, “Even if each number have three people looking at it, you can’t be sure it’s 100 percent true, so you’re probably publishing some misinformed information.” The response from the g0v movement is that, “Yeah, which is why you should publish the structural data as your duty.” I also participated in drafting that response.

Anyway, at the end of the day, the Control Yuan and the legislature agreed on it. By 2018 election, that’s the first time the Control Yuan actually published the structural open data for a campaign donation expenditure. Then we have a new social norm set by the social sector, no less. It’s a people-public partnership now.

Then we talked to Facebook, saying, “Look. There’s a norm. You can either refrain from publishing your ads library or you publish in a very obscure way, but in which case people will see and say that a lot of campaigns evaded this radical transparency by telling their supporters to buy them Facebook advertisements bypassing the radical transparency here. You may face social sanction if you keep doing this.”

I told Facebook that very clearly. Even if we don’t have true jurisdiction over Facebook, social sanction in Taiwan is a very strong thing. Facebook eventually worked.

I think Taiwan is among the first jurisdiction if not the first where they just published everything in the ads library as open data, and banned foreign people from buying advertisements during our presidential election this year.

This is a negotiation with a mandate from the social sector and the public sector and eventually with the agreement, reluctant or not, by the private sector of this new norm.

This is the whole thing about trusting the social-sectored people to set a norm, and then work with the business sector only after the social sector and the public sector reached consensus and then can pressure the private sector to get on.

This is the first lesson I would like to share. The second one is working with journalists, not against journalists. In Taiwan, news, 新聞, literally is the same word as journalism, 新聞業 and 新聞工作. Journalism is literally just news work, and journalists, news workers.

There’s no way in Taiwan to say the f-word, fake news, without offending journalists, because if you say 假新聞, it sounds like you’re accusing journalists of not doing their job correctly.

It has the same sting in English. I would say that. [laughs]

Oh really. It’s two different words in English. [laughs]

People will just lobby that at you in interviews these days.

Oh really.

“Oh, you’re fake news.” It’s been happening since Trump became president.

I see. OK.

That’s news to me. [laughs] Both my parents are journalists, so out of filial piety, [laughs] a Confucian concept, I can’t say the f-word. I can’t say 假新聞.

In Taiwan, we say 假訊息危害, the disinformation crisis. Disinformation has a legal definition as intentional untruths that cause public harm. If it only harms, say, the image of a ministry, it’s just good journalism. [laughs]

It has to cause public harm for it to be classified as disinformation. I think I have a clear delineation between journalistic work that is sometimes mistaken – journalists, like everyone, makes mistakes – versus the intentional untruths that cause public harm.

This part, the journalistic part – we need to democratize it and make sure that in the K-to-12 curriculum, for example, the students can become part-time fact-checkers, and essentially participating in fact-checking the presidential candidates. That actually happened during this election.

That together is a much stronger counterpoint to this intentional disinformation. If you classify the journalists doing their honest work along with the people who intentionally spread information operations and things like that, then you lose the most important ally you have, which is the journalistic norm.

Then you might as well start calling journalists text workers or text collectors or the editors text processors.

Content workers.

Content workers, right, which is devoid of the meaning. It’s just like when you call journalists as just content producers, and so on. It removes the journalistic norm and ethics and standard that defines journalism, but that is actually the safeguard of the community against disinformation.

Reinforcing that, that journalistic standard, making sure that everybody can be an amateur journalist, and participate in journalistic ethics and norms and also in the schools, teach not media literacy

But media competence for a lot of those childrens maybe have more Instagram followers than I do. In a sense, they are media, and so be a competent media, and adhere to the journalistic standards.

I think this is, again, very important and really, the reason why even though we do have our own share of disinformation – during our presidential election, there was a trending rumor that says the CIA printed invisible ink so that no matter who votes, your ink would disappear and President Tsai will get a vote.

That get dispelled because people were encouraged to participate in media competence, and during our counting process, people who are literally YouTubers can be there and film the counting process and use their own apps. It could be called 穿雲箭 or 英眼部隊 or whatever – to do the counting themselves in a decentralized fashion.

That means that even though the disinformation did spread for a few hours, these YouTubers in all the different political affiliations confirmed jointly that the counting process was indeed free and fair.

Speaking of the misinformation, the media literacy education, thinking of your last interview with AP, you talked about trying to bring into education…

Yeah, media competence. We now have a, I think it’s at mLearn is a website that we are now sharing those curriculum of not just K through 12 but lifelong education, as well.

That’s a public resource that teachers can access.

Yes.

To go back to the Facebook point – sorry, I know we’re going over time.

Sure, it’s fine.

Let me know if you need to run.

Maybe five minutes.

OK. Did that work? Do you feel like Facebook publishing that data, the ads data – I think it’s limiting also foreign buyers – do you feel like that had an impact?

It did because if any candidate tried a dark pattern, it would get discovered and might induce sensational reporting, [laughs] which is why during the presidential election, I don’t think anyone in the legislation or the presidential race tried any dark patterns on Facebook.

They might have tried through other…

Other channels. On the other hand, of course, Facebook was the dominant channel during that election. Facebook’s participation means a lot. Of course, the same accord that Facebook agreed on is also agreed by LINE and also by I think Yahoo and also Google/YouTube. It’s a pretty good round up.

Let me just see if there’s anything else.

One final question about disinformation, which is — it’s also a question of volume because if Taiwan’s supposedly the source of the most — you guys are the target of the most disinformation.

We probably are not starting them. [laughs]

Sorry. I misspoke. There’s some paper from an institute in Sweden or something…

Yeah, yeah. I’ve read that.

Because of Chinese…

It’s a qualitative survey, yes.

I’ve heard of Cofacts. I know you guys have multiple fact checking centers.

Michael Penn, Taiwan FactCheck Center, and so on. Even Trend Micro and Whoscall all offer their services.

I guess the question is, though, are they just drops in the bucket fighting against this volume of — there’s a lot of money being poured into disinformation.

Also, I feel like sometimes listening to these facts, using things like a LINE bot to check a fact requires a certain degree of tech savviness that may not be present in the populations that are actually getting — like older people…

Yeah, which is why cute spokesdog posters are also very effective, preventative medicine, like vaccine of the mind.

I wonder if the government has any thoughts about volume, if you have any thoughts about just volume, combatting the sheer volume.

Not all of those volumes of disinformation actually turns viral. If the R value is under 1, meaning that each person on average doesn’t share it to at least one other person, we don’t even need to counter that. It’s the same as epidemiology. [laughs] You only work on the sort of virus that has a R value above 1. That is actually quite few.

I guess that’s why it’s called going viral.

Uh huh.

I don’t think I have any more questions. [laughs]

OK, awesome.

Is there anything you want to add?

I think the great American experiment, is about just publicly tackling those structural issues that affect democracy and sharing the experience of how to tackle it with the entire world. That’s what I said during my interview with, I think, Tyler Cowen.

Yeah, that’s my message. [laughs] Taiwan is following in that idea in that, of course, we face a lot of threats, as you put it.

Our way of countering, say, the disinformation without a takedown or our way of countering the pandemic without, say, a lockdown I think is of broad applicability to democracies, whether social democracies or liberal democracies worldwide for — I think at the end of the day, a democratic system is self healing, is resilient.

Each onslaught of whether the virus of the mind or the virus of the body, strengthens the democracy and produces novel antibodies, to overextend the metaphor, [laughs] which may be shared in a kind of COVAX arrangement.

Thank you. That’s a good ending metaphor.

Thank you. Cheers.