I saw in the news that Taiwan is going to have a good news for a digital system for vaccines for going abroad. Were you involved in that? Can you tell me about it?

Yes, we’ve finished implementing initially the European Union’s DCC standard, which is a electronically signed QR code based system to track the COVID tests as well as the COVID vaccination records.

The current situation is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is negotiating bilaterally with other jurisdiction that have implemented same standard, so we can facilitate international travel and the roll-out schedule is probably by the end of this year.

Will that system be used in Taiwan, because I was in Singapore and they were they had everything on their phone?

Yeah, we’re not planning to roll out any special app though. Because of digital inclusion, right? We’re working with this idea that there’s this simple website that you can download a yellow card, basically, print it yourself, or just show it on your phone.

You were very involved in their contact tracing system, is that correct? Can you talk about that? I imagine you developed it fairly quickly, and it must have been really stressful? How do you work on that?

Sure. It’s not my idea. It’s from the g0v (gov-zero) community, which is tens of thousands of people looking at digital services and forking the government services to make better versions, better alternatives in a way that’s free of copyright restrictions for public use.

After the g0v community proposed as standard 1922 SMS-based contact tracing system, we adopted it and implemented it. It’s like a reverse procurements, right? The specification comes from the community, from the social sector, and we just implemented it. Of course, it’s rather fast. I think the entire implementation took less than three days.

Again, this is free of apps, nobody need to download any app. As long as your phone has a QR code scanning function. You can point the camera edit, and just click send and it takes like two seconds. Even on feature phones that doesn’t have a camera or QR code scanning functions, you can manually text the 15-digit random codes to 1922, the toll-free number, to complete a check-in.

It does not actually entirely replace paper-based registration forms at venues. If you trust the venue owner more than you trust your own telecom operator, then, of course, you can continue to use paper-based registration.

I asked do you prefer not to use apps or do you have concerns with app-based government system?

Well, it’s out of digital inclusion reasons.

Although everyone in Taiwan enjoys broadband as a human right – most people, even the senior elderly people have smartphones – around 20 percent of them do not have the capacity to download, install and maintain applications, so because of that, our most popular counter-COVID app, the National Health Insurance administration’s NHI Express app, only has about one-third of the entire population downloading. That’s already the most popular one.

To take care of the other two-thirds of people who do not habitually use an app, or the 20 percent of people who do not have any experience downloading an app, a app redesign based on everyone’s favorite QR code and SMS like a trusted format is very important.

OK, that’s really interesting. I didn’t consider that. Has COVID been your greatest challenge? Can you talk about your hardest project taking off?

The virus of the body, of course, is very challenging, but most of the strategies are from the CECC, the Central Epidemic Command Center. The digital is just a assistive instrument in assisting the contact tracers and so on.

My greatest challenge a digital minister is actually the virus of the mind. That’s to say this information, the infodemic, as people can share those polarized, like outrage-based messages on the more antisocial corner of social media. How to prevent that. It’s natural progression into hatred, vengefulness, and discrimination. That has been the biggest challenge.

When you work, like your example, what topics are people talking about in Taiwan?

I’m sorry. What topics?

Yes. You said “outrage,” are you seeing anything specific in Taiwan? Or are you just talking about?

We’re talking about pre-COVID days. I have in my mind around November 2019 leading up to our 2020 January presidential election there was a trending viral disinformation that talks about, and I quote, “The young people in Hong Kong are being paid $20 million to kill the police.”

This is obviously not true. It’s not trending in anywhere else, not in Hong Kong, just in Taiwan. We see that this kind of messages try to provoke outrage, and change the public discourse, vis-à-vis the Hong Kong Anti ELAB protests and demonstrations in a attempt to influence our presidential election campaigns.

Where do you think that rumor came from? Was it from inside Taiwan or was it from outside Taiwan?

The picture that accompanied this piece of disinformation come from Reuters, but the Reuters journalists did not say anything about being paid or whatever. The original caption simply say that there were teenage protesters, and that’s it. Somebody else supplied the misleading caption.

Within a day or so, the Tower Effect Check Center, independently operated fact checking service traced that message back to the Central Political and Law Units, Zhongyang Zhengfawei of the PRC regime on their Weibo account, no less.

The local people in Taiwan who took the message from the Weibo account of the PRC regime then remixed it and sent derivative messages on various, more antisocial corners of social media.

This is just like fighting spam. As long as people are willing to flag incoming emails as spam. There’s a way for Spamhaus and other international organizations to trace back its origins but not to take anything down, but rather notice and put a public notice so that when people share this piece of disinformation on social media there’s a clear label that says, “Well, according to the TFCC. This is sponsored by the 长安剑.”

I wanted to ask you more about misinformation, but one big question first. Did you notice any spike in misinformation during the recent flights over Taiwan or near Taiwan from China?

Not particularly. We’re seeing a lot of inoculation. Vaccines of the mind. When people become aware of the factual situation, like the actual flight path, and so on, which Ministry of Defense publish on social media literally every day, then people are more willing to have a conversation around the matter itself instead of buying in into any piece of disinformation.

So, Taiwan’s transparency evolved?

Yes, because we trust the people. To give no trust is to get no trust. To trust people with the information that we have actually fosters a social object, like foreign topics so that people can have a real conversation around it like today’s weather or something.

In the spring, I remember, that’s when I first contacted your office, there had been a recorded spike in disinformation. I think that was around the time that COVID got out. Has that continued or has that gone down at all?

I think it’s going down, because we’re certainly not entirely post-pandemic, but with weeks of essentially no local cases, then we’ve postponed that pandemic again.

People are feeling much more relaxed and our vaccination, I think by tomorrow, there will be 70 percent of people vaccinated. Around 30 percent of people fully vaccinated, and we’re progressing at more than one percent each day, which is doing really well.

Since taking your position, how have you seen the misinformation?

The disinformation?

Misinformation campaigns.

Sure.

When I first start to tackle the misinformation issue back in early 2017, at that time, there’s no clear norms against what is the kind of disinformation pieces that need this notice and public notice countermeasure and which pieces are just a normal part of conversation around people in a liberal democracy and, therefore, need no intervention from either the state or the multinational companies.

As I mentioned, the natural progression only seem natural because we allowed the public issues, public matters to be discussed primarily private sector places. It’s like holding a town hall discussion but in the local night club with smoke-filled rooms, and loud music, and addictive drinks, private bouncers.

I have nothing against the entertainment sector, but these are not the places to hold town hall discussions. Since 2017, we’ve doubled down on investing the digital equivalent of public infrastructures and also working with existing forums like the PTT which has been around for more than 25 years, free of advertisers and shareholders.

By promoting the public infrastructure in a digital realm, the natural progression in those prosocial forms are toward actual decision-making, are toward early warnings. For example, when Dr. Li Wenliang revealed that there were seven SARS cases in Wuhan by the end of 2019, PTT is the early forum that I’m aware of that resulted in decisive action on the very next day, beginning of 2020.

We started health inspections for all flight passengers coming in from Wuhan to Taiwan. That’s because people contributed their collective intelligence rather that polarizing into hate or something.

You brought up PTT. I just wanted to ask you, did you notice any differences of how information is shared on PTT than with Dcard, Facebook and others? Do you see any big differences in how people are talking about things?

Yes, because as I mentioned, PTT is free of advertisers or shareholders. It’s squarely in the social sector. It prioritizes co-governance, which is to say maximal participation by the people who are in PTT in its governance rather than trying to maximize advertisement revenue, or click-throughs, or time spent on the platform, so it leads to very different natures of conversations and very different algorithmic preferences in PTT.

People’s attention is drawn to word, the upvoted conversations or the most downloaded conversations. It’s entirely crowd-moderated. There’s no machine learning in the middle. It’s always posted sequentially, chronologically, and never prioritized by your interaction with particular piece of posts and so on.

Do you see any similar thing on Dcard? Do you think that will have the same dynamic in Taiwan?

I think the important thing is the norm around such conversations and the PTT because it’s part of the academic network, carries this culture of a debate on a university campus. Dcard is shaped less like that. It’s more like a more personal venue where people talk about their personal experiences without trying to start social movements and things like that.

It still carries a prosocial tone, but it’s less focused on public issues.

You have seen less misinformation as compared to Facebook?

Truth to be told, ever since PTT started to implement the counter disinformation, self-regulation norms – it’s a norm package. It’s not a law or something.

Other social media companies, including Facebook, have also adopted it, at least in our jurisdiction. For example, in 2019, as I mentioned, leading up to the 2020 presidential election, Taiwan was among the first jurisdictions where Facebook also published like our National Auditing Office.

The campaign donation and finance got spent on sponsored social and political advertisement in real time as open data for investigative journalists to look at. They also banned foreign-sponsored political and social advertisement during the election period, again, according to the norm package.

I believe a strong enough social sector and strong enough alternatives can motivate both domestic private sector companies like Dcard or international ones like Facebook to conform to the norm that’s already set by the social sector because there is the real threat of social sanction if they did not do so.

OK.We’re running out of time. Could you tell me, how has your portfolio changed a lot since you started? You talked about how your responsibilities have evolved.

Sure. As the digital minister in charge of open government, social innovation, and youth engagement, my main portfolio have not changed much.

I would also say that social innovation, that’s to say everyone’s business but with everyone’s help, has been applied more and more to more pressing issues, to more urgent issues like counter-disinformation and counter-COVID that previously were thought may be better for more professional or centralized solutions in Taiwan.

I think there’s essentially a more democratic take on democracy itself. Previously in Taiwan people, of course, voted a lot. We have a very high voter turn out rates, but between those, now we have the referenda, the citizens’ initiatives, the presidential hackathon projects, sandbox applications, so on and so forth, participatory budget.

More and more parts of our democratic institutions are being applied in a way that’s inspired or directly implemented with social innovators. While my portfolio of social innovation did not change per se, it’s applied to more and more parts of our democratic institutions.

Is there anything new that we can expect coming up or anything new that you’re ready to roll out?

In addition to the EU DCC compliant vaccine certificates?

All the other things that you’ve done this year.

Certainly. Certainly. Taiwan just published this year, the National Action Plan for, not just open government, but, also, open parliament. If you look into the OG and OP reports, it clearly outlines the systems that we’re going to roll out to facilitate even more participation, transparency and inclusive accountability and so on in the next couple years or so.

So, I would like just to highlight that our participation in the Open Government Partnership, although we’re not a full member per se has already stepped up. I’ve appeared, personally, in the open response, open recovery, online forum.

Our National Action Plan is now undergoing review, not just by our experts, but, also, independent reviewers from the global OGP community and so on. All this facilitates, like leading to the democracy Summit and related activities, internationally, is shaping up to be in addition to agricultural technology, or medical technologies.

I think, democracy as a form of social technology is shaping up to be the third main technological contribution that Taiwan has to the international community.

Let’s say, when you leave office, for example, next election, the KMT one, would your office continue its operations or is it just a specific initiative of DPP government?

I work on the same thing as a consultant to Minister Jaclyn Tsai by the end of 2014 already and all the way to ‘15. Some say I’m more like an intern promoted to full-time.

I’m literally in the same office. Last I checked 2014-‘15 was the Ma Ying-jeou administration.

I don’t think any major party in Taiwan…any of the four major parties now has anything against open government democratic participation, and international communication based on liberal democratic principles. Actually, they compete on being even more radically open than the other parties.

Anyone who did not support this style of open governance, well, they already lose the election back in 2014, the end of 2014, or the mayoral candidate that did not support such principle simply did not become mayors. With open government being a strong norm in Taiwan, the work that I’m doing – not necessarily, me, personally, but these work – will continue regardless of which major parties win the presidential election.

I was just asking because you’re so well-known, so the continuity issue…

Yeah. I think the point here is I’m not working for the government per se. I’m working with the government in the sense that the social innovations that came from the civic tech community continue to apply, regardless of which government agencies collaborate with them.

For example, the contact-tracing system was prototyped so that’s the people in the social sector can actually roll out its implementation, even had we not worked with the five telecommunication carriers. Which, of course, are very grateful in providing toll-free SMS service.

If we did not arrange such a collaboration with the telecom companies, chances are that they will just work with any instant message companies and roll out exactly the same specification, but this time with no government threat. The point is that the civic tech community has more agency and sometime more legitimacy than the government itself, so I’m working also with the people, not for the people.

I think that is all for now. I have to edit this down for clarity.

Sure, of course. My local recording has only my video and your voice is coming through not entirely clearly, so maybe you will have to do a reverse or something. My part I think I’ve captured it quite well. I’ll send it to you right after this interview.

OK, thank you.

Sure.

All right, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.