This is fantastic. I think one of the things that I struggle with when I design programs is I always want to build Taiwan into it, but I feel like we’re also starting to overburden your team a little bit.

Is this separate from the Facing the Ocean?

His Twitter is spicy. It’s great.

He seems like a great ally for you.

Exactly. We need to be more transparent, and we need to be using these tools to facilitate inclusion, deliberation, and so on, and so forth. I’d love to hear more about your plans about how you’re going to do that. Do we need to wrap up?

Exactly.

China’s presenting this high-tech version of authoritarianism that looks like it can…

I think, for the mission of my program, is really focused on this positive story about the future of democracy. Yes, we have to fight disinformation. Yes, we have to protect against cyber attacks against democracies, but democracy is not going to win if we say the 1980s, 1990s version ...

It has to be a base level. Following on from that, you mentioned that you also want to be taking this out to other places and doing the ambassadorial role that you’ve done so well talking about this.

One of the ethical conundrums that we come up against is that e-government in general is obviously a good way for governments to leapfrog expensive bureaucratic processes and have more inclusion. When there’s only a small proportion of the population online, it’s also completely non-inclusive.

This inclusion thing, you’ve mentioned the broadband as a civil right thing in a few other meetings that we’ve had. I think it’s so essential. IRI works in a lot of developing democracies, where Internet penetration is really low.

What is it?

I’m sorry, this is a really ignorant question. In Taiwan, do the e-petitions have any legal rights?

You mentioned petitions. Do you mean actual petitions?

Exactly. Then the other piece is to build expectations among citizens so that, when it’s not happening, they say, “Oh, this is terrible. Why have you messed everything up?” Are you going to be focused on passing regulations that require open government to take place?

Ah, regulation. One way to do it is to make it law, that you have to publish transcripts and make all of this stuff public. Another way to do it is to build culture and to have a culture of government…

Yeah. I think one of the challenges with initiatives like this is making sure that they continue after people have left government.

Absolutely, of course.

That is a positive contribution to the world. [laughs]

Slight subject flip, but obviously, disinformation has been a huge priority for the last couple of years since 2018, I guess. It’s going to continue to be a challenge, but I’d be interested to hear what your priorities are for this administration, now that you’re back in government, and you ...

It’s a fine fine. That’s fantastic. Do you have more disinfo questions?

Are they meaningful fines, or are they symbolic?

It was amazing. You had all of these televisions with television stations showing completely different results from the election. Vicky was kind enough to explain that it’s complete nonsense. It’s just completely fictional, because the Taiwanese culture is, you need the real time, some information about nonsense.

We saw this. We were in the Counting Information Center, and we had all of the television…

A follow-on to that, did you see much of disinformation narratives jumping from one platform to another, so jumping from Facebook to television to radio?

There’s already divisions there in which people are being awful to each other in the real world. Then they take that online, and so it can be exploited more, which is really tragic. Do you have more questions on disinfo?

That’s really fascinating. I think the nature of the disinformation/misinformation problem in Taiwan is also different to what we see in other environments as well, where you have, like in a Sri Lanka, for instance, where do you actually have a lot of hate speech.

To the exclusion of hate speech and…?

G0v, the open source movement, and so on meant that there was already this culture there, but is there anything else that you think made Taiwan particularly capable of doing this, and is there anything that you think in particular is replicable in any content?

It’s something I would love to see replicated elsewhere, but I don’t know how we would do it. I’d be interested to hear from all of you about why it is you think this happened in Taiwan. I know that your office played a huge role in facilitating a lot ...

IRI works on disinformation, and particularly around elections all over the world. It has been really striking to me that Taiwan has been able to build up this ecosystem that includes civil society, government, and the technology companies working together in a way that seems to also be relatively trusting ...

That’d be great.

That’s wonderful. These things all need to be turned into movies.

Is your perception that there was as much effort put into disinformation or undermining the information integrity?

Complicated.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, only candidates?

Others have said, “Actually, it was quite severe.” I’d be interested to hear your perspectives.

One of the mixed things that we’ve heard is that some people have said that there was less disinformation or less of an information operation than had been expected. Some have said it’s too early to tell. We don’t actually know what the information operation do.

That’s really incredible.

This is all volunteers?

Cool.

I didn’t know they did that. Wow.

Yes.

Cool, a Valentine’s Day trip.

Chris oversees our partnerships here in Taiwan as well.

There’s an optimistic vision for the future of democracy, and you can see it at play in Taiwan. That’s our agenda. Am I missing anything?

Now that we’ve moved past the election, one of the things that we’d love to be able to do is expand the cooperation with your office to talk about the positive ways in which technology can be used to support democracy and how we can be holding Taiwan and the ...

Then the third piece is IRI, my portfolio specifically, and we’ve talked about this in the past, is much broader than just disinformation.

The second thing is we also wanted to say thank you to your office for all of the incredible work that we’ve been doing together in the Philippines. I think we’ll be doing some stuff in India, and there’s a few other things as well.