Yes, please.

I think that is natural. I’m not arbitrarily thinking that we should improve the success rate of startups, as long as it’s to the benefit of the ecosystem, that they pivot and write postmortems and let the ecosystem know where they failed, when they pivot.

The social entrepreneurs that I work with, many of them try four or five different iterations, maybe one as a NGO, one as a coop, and the other one as a company, whatever angle they can get donations, investments, or whatever. Then finally finding a way that has learned sufficiently ...

I think the one-year mortality [laughs] ...Most of the start-ups didn’t really linger. The idea is that, as in Silicon Valley, we pivot. We don’t fail. [laughs] The idea is that for many, I would say a majority -- I think that the number is like 85 or 90 percent ...

Which is why you see the digital minister replying on Twitter and Facebook, within 30 minutes, any time there’s anyone mentioning my name or if there’s any policy that I’m making and things like that. It’s the idea of the authentic, bi-directional communication. It’s a long answer, but it’s OK.

Make sure that all the evidence-checkers and people who work on media literacy can then use these as easy sources. That is what we’re actively doing. I think, Taiwan is where we work with the constraint that we must never censor anything.

The other thing is that when there is some fact that we can provide to aid those fact-checkers, those collaborative efforts, we need to make the Frequently asked questions each into its own URL, in a very easy-to-disseminate format, in a very easy-to-share, basically, make it content form-like, so that ...

The government’s part in it is just, first, we shouldn’t make rumors ourselves. We shouldn’t tell lies. This is very basic, but it’s easy to forget.

You will automatically check whether it’s true or not, and it will link to a collaborative, edited Wikipedia-like database to verify the authenticity, and also work with international fact-checkers. The beauty of it is that it’s not something government-sponsored. It’s not something government-mandated. It is just society volunteers, many of ...

There’s one project, the Cofacts project in the g0v, that tries to build a LINE bot. LINE is a popular messenger system, an instant message system here, that you can just add it as your friend, and then share whatever disinformation in your family, chat room, or whatever, into it.

Then, we make an alternate version under the same domain name but with the gov changed to g0v.tw, so we don’t have to place high on search engines, because people know just to change the governmental website, the O to a zero and get into the shadow government.

For people who are already adults, the civil society are already working on I wouldn’t say an inoculation now, more like an immune system. For example, the g0v movement, G-0-V movement, that I am still a part of aims to, again, identify. The idea of g0v.tw is to look at ...

Once people do that for some very basic concepts, then they are not prone, like my generation or any older generation, to any specific font, any specific voice, any authoritarian layout that will convince them without reflection as to the authenticity of those events.

People have listened to both sides of ideas and have considered it very carefully. As we are now building this kind of deliberative media interest into the K-12 curriculum, we’re ensuring that a generation will grow up learning things by arguing and thinking from many different people’s sides.

That is to say, if we listen to each other very carefully, have a civil debate, a deliberation on a certain thing, like we did with many controversial cases like Uber, people get immune to future propaganda, to future disinformation.

Translate that to the social media scene, that would mean we would stop seeing this information as something human made. Maybe we see it as an epidemic, just like spam was. Maybe we start negotiating with virus, because it’s not possible. It’s different categories. Maybe we just see it medically, ...

Every gateway along the way, without censorship, unite with every other point, to create a reputation system that blocks the worst senders. People who go into loopholes to take over machines to send spam emails, they no longer easily do that because of the upgrading of the security system, the ...

How to solve it? A few things. I was part of the people fighting the original spam wars. At some point in Internet’s history, spam seemed like an unsolvable problem, because it costs nothing to send an email and it costs us a lot of time to read through the ...

Then, any other counter, rebuttals, or fact-checking is now facing an uphill battle, because people are already set in minds on a particular thing, in its affect. This means in the sense that there’s an emotional charge associated with these words.

With social media, if they can engage your fast-response system in the first six seconds, through imagery, a title, or whatever, people, then, are inclined to share it before they finish reading it. That causes the story to go viral, which is great for advertisers, I suppose, but it also ...

It is true, that with the social media, for the first time, it’s easier to share something than it is to read it. In the old, traditional media, we typically read something. Even if it’s a blog post or something, we read it, and then we share it. That’s the ...

There is a lot of other different sorts of disinformation around in the legal system but there’s no term with more ambiguity than the term "fake news," because it could refer to any of those modes while discrediting the media. It’s an interesting design, but I won’t use that word.

It’s a term with no legal definition. In the legal definition, we have rumors, which are either true or false, but it just means it’s unsourced. There’s disinformation, which means that it purports to be legitimate but it’s actually, actively spreading untruths.

...seems I’m preaching to the choir here.

Well I’m not like certain other politicians... [laughs]

Great question. First, I don’t use that F word. [laughs] I see the words "fake news" as an affront to professional journalists. It is designed, I think, to sound like there’s something to blame with the media, so I don’t use that word, sorry. Instead, I use...

I don’t think, if people in any of those sectors now stop and say, "It’s all the industries fault. It’s all the government’s fault. We didn’t elect the right people," this just never gets solved, because it has to be solved in a local context-sensitive manner.

I think this value-building thing is the core of solving the inclusion problem, because it’s just uniting people who see such injustices as something that they can actively work on, no matter which sector they’re at and they can converge on something. We have a lot of examples like that ...

We have the entrepreneurs and NPOs turned into sustainable business models and we have the for-profit companies seeking its social missions. I think they converge in the middle of a very old world. It’s something like cooperative economy or solidarity economy, in the sense that people collectively define what is ...

We see more and more companies, big companies, with a for-profit vision or mission, including foreign companies like Facebook, who then suddenly take such a mission because they see their work as something that is being embedded with humanity. As a fellow human being that, perhaps, do not want their ...

In Taiwan, there’s a huge number of people in the voluntary sector. Tsu Chi, for example, is almost governmental size in its aim and in its reach. The NPOs, including Tsu Chi, as I mentioned, now turn to work with the market in a way that is innovative and is ...

When I work in social enterprise or social innovation here with these three groups of people, we see people who are entrepreneurs, who set out to solve a societal problem, mostly young people. We see NGOs, the not-for-profits, taking care of the parts that is neglected by industries and by ...

I don’t think this is anyone’s fault or anyone’s blame. It is a natural consequence of a one-dimensional value system, that values something that is accumulative. It’s a proxy of utility of value of human quality of life, but it’s a pretty bad proxy, in my book. That’s the general ...

There is a concentrated talent, concentrated development, concentrated what, and the people who cannot or will not make into those concentrated places gets discounted, in a sense. This is, of course, a general dynamic.

I think they are like two sides of the same coin. As long as things work, in either taxation or consumption, in a hierarchical collection, and then redistributing way, whether it’s in industry or it’s in a government, there really is no good force to promote inclusion. If it’s capital-seeking ...

My collaboration with the people you mentioned, was about people who work in a remote place. We of course work on cybersecurity infrastructure to make sure that they can safely call home and to make sure that the collaboration tools work with regards of the very specific Internet situation there ...

As I said, as far as trading, or just profit-seeking is involved, it’s really not my department. [laughs] I’m not the Minister of Economic Affairs. I’m mostly working on the digital transformation of the government system here and in dialogue with the wider civil society.

I trust that the knowledge and technologies that’s shared in the commons on the Internet will be to the benefit of everybody involved, including, of course, the People’s Republic of China’s government.

There’s quite a few ways, I think, we can integrate the virtual domain. The knowledge itself, and technologies and methodologies, they are inherently cross-border. As long as everybody keeps to their cybersecurity, as long as there’s no anonymous attackers bringing the Internet down, Internet, by itself, is a machine run ...

I taught classes over the Internet. I even connected a Hangzhou classroom with a Kaohsiung classroom in this kind of VR environment. Of course, there’s no risk, because it’s not my bodily presence for me to visit and it also violates no bilateral or multi-lateral things, because there’s nothing to ...

We’re still continuing this project because it’s easy to talk about budgets and laws, but if it’s about construction of a park or an airport, you really have to do it with VR. We all wear glasses like this and we see a holographic projection of the airport that we’re ...

Sure. Even after becoming a digital Minister, I taught classes in China. I’m not averse of anyone who want to attend my VR lectures on how to make civil deliberations work in virtual reality. That’s one of my research projects before I joined the cabinet.

Whatever injustice is caused -- it could be political, it could be cultural, it could be societal, it could be just natural disaster -- it is a crack in the society and the light gets in, for people to get stronger and to listen to each other more. There was ...

We see that happen many, many times here. When, after a disaster, after a typhoon, after an earthquake, that disrupted the local social order, people of course fled the place, but the people who stayed, after its cataclysmic event reformed into a much stronger solidarity ecosystem. We see a lot ...

Mostly, innovation just flows from there. When people organize together, when people have solidarity, they somehow think of a better picture, a better way of working together, even if it’s just 10 people or 20 people. That will transform into a small social entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Learning, not in the sense of reading books -- although, that helps -- but by actually getting to know the people in both sides or many sides, who suffer from those or deliver those injustices. Then, try to form some sort of solidarity that lets them at least trust you ...

For all the social entrepreneurs, that is a requirement. It’s not something that you can just learn by reading books or reading analysis. If there is a social injustice, if there is a social issue that makes some young person go mad about it, my advice would be just to ...

I think that the general idea is that, while outrage mobilizes people, it doesn’t actually result in social production. To do such a production, one needs to listen to all the stakeholders and that includes listen to people who are unfamiliar, people who you find strange, or even repelling.

When we work with social media, we always work with the premise that there must be no censorship. There must be no limitation on how people can express themselves. I think that makes for a diverse and sustainable ecosystem, as I described, and that makes innovation happen in a way ...

All this points to the idea that Taiwan, like my generation, is the first to enjoy freedom of speech. My parents’ and grandparents’ generation paid dearly for it and nobody wants to leave behind this kind of freedom. Freedom of expression has taken on an almost unchallengeable position.