When I go into the cabinet, I decided I would work on Open Government, and I decided to practice radical transparency. I published pretty much every meeting that I hold. Which means that I’m not allowed to even see or become aware of any national secret.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It’s just if that it does damage to society and then the judicial process decides that it is actually untrue, and then we determine how much the damage is exactly. I don’t think it’s untrue just because it’s a rumor. A rumor just means it’s viral and unchecked.

Then, of course, if the rumor then affects the election results, then of course, they need to be fact-checked by the judicial branch. If it turns out to be false, it is discovered by the legal process. That’s how I would define it. It’s not something that the administration or ...

Rumor, by itself, is not necessarily false or true. It just means that it’s viral and it’s not fact-checked. It may turn out very well to be true, but the person who wrote or spread the rumor didn’t check it. I think that would be the basic idea.

People can go through this process to become, essentially, immune to propaganda on particular topics, when they have thought and considered very carefully the different sides of opinions. At the moment, it is something of a luxury to build consensus in this way.

Of course, we have ways to do that now. We have deliberations, and we can design a user interface so that we see different sides of the argument. We do that on the public participation platform that we built.

Other than these, if you just talk about rumors that doesn’t affect the foundation of democracy or its society, then I see it as something to be contained, but not by the state. I think we need a way of inoculating people against the virus of the mind.

I think this explains why in the law, there’s epidemic and there’s election, because these two cases, they corrode the foundation upon which freedom of speech is built on, right? It is the social and democratic foundation.

The thing with elections, it could be defended, because if you, due to rumors, elect somebody who then destroys freedom of speech, it becomes self-destructive. So it’s the democratic system trying to protect itself. In other times, I think there really is no excuse to corrode the freedom of speech ...

I think it is peculiar to the US. We don’t get that here in Taiwan, because the previous election, the presidential election was a landslide. There was no rumors around the last presidential election that could have affected its outcome.

It is very interesting how rumor and election become inherently tied together when people think about it. If people get an idea that a rumor is determining the election or the election results, of course it gathers the attention of everybody who gets disappointed with election results, which is half ...

The only part of it where it is in the criminal code and is state-prosecutable is during presidential or high-level elections. If you spread the kind of rumor that intends to make somebody get elected or not elected, it is actually a crime, but not in any other cases.

I think it is particular to the US, because it’s so intimately tied to the election and its result. In Taiwan, we do have laws that somewhat restrict the freedom of speech and actually fine people over spreading rumors, but it’s always during an epidemic, with some very public, health-related ...

The laws just say "rumor", not "fake news". It’s not news, so people don’t put that much attention. Again, it is a self-selective evolutionary meme.

I think that the word itself creates hype. In Taiwan, in our legal system, there is no meaning, no definition of the word "fake news". Everybody associates their different interpretations to it. Whereas there is clear definition for the word, for example, rumor. It is actually part of the legal ...

I think this gives me some perspective and also optimism to see that this is mostly a symptom, caused by the current technological infrastructure, which is something that’s malleable; it’s not set in stone.

It looked like that automated spam people would always win, because of the very small cost and anonymity of the Internet, and the unencrypted nature of the Internet back then. It seemed that we were fighting an uphill battle. It’s eventually solved in maybe five or six years.

It was back in 2002 or so, when the Internet community made a concerted effort, a multi-pronged approach to try to solve the spam problem. For the first couple years it also seemed not solvable.

It also lets me think that it’s not something that is just specifically from a particular account. It’s a symptom of the underlying system. I was part of the community who worked on concerted efforts to do something about spam, with SpamAssassin and so on.

For people who are stuck in one echo chamber, it would just mean that the richness, the "veracity" [laughs] of the information that they receive from become much more sophisticated. For someone who just sees through all the echo chambers, like me, I just see a lot more diversity.

It was kind of lopsided. There are certain camps who are particularly adept. There are certain camps which are still learning. Three years from that, pretty much all the sites have sufficient sophistication and technology, so it creates a much more diverse ecosystem.

Back in 2014, the mastery of computational propaganda techniques were not that widespread. Live stream has just started, and the social media did not reach its complete penetration because of the lack of 4G connection. It was still at a 3G era.

Of course it is a concern. It is something that we see every day of those different political camps engaging in propaganda. I would say it’s now a reality. It’s not even a concern or merely a possibility. I would say it’s an everyday reality.

I say this because of the much, much higher likelihood for a pro-unification local meme to go viral here, versus having to cross the great firewall and then adapt to the local memetic sphere. It’s actually far more likely for it to be of domestic origin.

If they engage in pro-unification propaganda, it’s much more likely that it originates out of their own pro-unification ideas, not because they were remote-controlled by Beijing.

I would say that, for people who have affinity to particular political camps -- I wouldn’t even call it Mainland China, I would call it pro-unification -- it is a legitimate political idea in Taiwan. They enjoy the same freedom of speech.

It is of course a possibility, but I wouldn’t say that is even likely in the general idea. But it may be one single case or two single cases, it may be possible to trace it to a mainland China origin.

Which means that any message that originates from China and goes viral on the public Internet has to go through much more strict measures — so it takes somebody who is determined, or it’s sponsored by the state... There is no easy way to tell one from the other, and ...

Any other places can also do this. China is interesting because they have their own Internet. This reason is this year, I think they made VPN connections more difficult to establish on the link to the public Internet.

It is just those memetic centers trying to infiltrate each other’s spaces. I think that’s much more accurate.

I would say that it just depends on how tuned the local population is to that particular meme. Maybe it goes viral or maybe it goes through some translation or adaptation before it goes viral. I wouldn’t call it anything that’s occurring "around" or "across" national boundaries.

Part of the the idea is that if a meme goes viral in any region, it can spread. Because social media really knows no boundary of nationality, it is likely to go viral in any other region as well. I wouldn’t say it’s purely domestic.

Because it costs almost nothing to manufacture, and if one out of 100 goes viral, it’s still worth it. If you just review it on an hourly basis, it’s not limited to anti-government, there is also pro-government groups doing much of the same thing, much like in the US or ...

It is evolutionary, of course. That is to say even if it’s coordinated, it still need to resonate with the recipient. Of course, there is always this useful second tier propaganda. There are, of course, very clearly delineated circles on those social media forums, that just churns out these messages.

All these kind of memes, used for attacking and disinformation and so on, occurs on all sides of political or social controversies.

For example, you see one picture with purportedly some mutant species from Japan. Of course there’s also that tsunami wave amplitude photo from the US government agency (NOAA), but with the caption sign that claims it is radiation level. Things like that.

You can see a prime example being the gay marriage case, and also around the Japanese food import case of the radiation standards. You see a lot of, I wouldn’t even call the rumors, because they are more resembling memes.

There is a lot of social controversies that the current administration is trying to tackle. Whenever there is such kind of policy being tackled, those sites or multiple sites of course engage in their own kind of computational propaganda.

Still I wouldn’t say that one is counterfeit or one is fake of the other. I would say they are two fundamentally different kind of agencies.

The problem is, the people on social media, there is no distinguishing factor to tell, which means a news agency and a rumor-spreading site purporting to be something like a news agency. They don’t usually say that they are a news agency by the way, but they are similar.

They may call themselves a news agency, but they publish things that are not fact checked, that does not meet basic journalism standards. That is still part of their exercise of freedom of speech.

Although they may have seen the same format as articles through a news media. I wouldn’t call them fake news because they are not purporting to be news. They are not news. They are just rumors, basically.

They’re usually around the social media channels. Other social media companies -- Google, Facebook -- are taking it very seriously and trying to put some kind of control into this phenomena. Because this kind of computational propaganda is still part of social media.

It's pretty questionable, really, the word itself, which is why I don't use it proactively. There is of course rumors, and there are systematic computational propaganda based on rumors, synthesized to further particular agendas. It is a pretty advanced form of what we call a psychological manipulation, if you will.

First of all, publicly, I had a declaration, which Zach probably sent to you already, and in it, I pretty clearly said that I refrain from using the word "fake news" because I see it as an affront to the whole journalism media.

Are you also recording?

Mm-hmm.

Pretty good.