Yeah, the Open Culture Foundation folks. There is also the head of the Open Data Alliance, himself a renowned weather forecaster, which is important, because they reach a very large audience through a weather broadcasting service.

Joel has all the details. I think one of the co-founders of CoFacts and the people…

I’m sure there will be more to come. We’re actually organizing a very similar workshop in Bangkok. Joel has the details. Maybe our lectures and so on could be also your resource when you try to build something in Indonesia.

Yeah, certainly. On October fourth, I’ll be in Buenos Aires and so I will miss the conference.

C’est la vie.

It means the news cycle has drastically shortened.

To find a new revenue model to make sure there’s a relationship between their authors and the readers, and now everybody demands a one-hour response, but how do we not sacrifice the journalistic standard.

This digital transformation takes up a lot of their energy. Maybe fact-checking and protection of democracy is not on the super-high priority while they are trying to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

Also, to be very honest, there is only a handful of institutional media that successfully completed the digital transformation, like the Commonwealth Group and so on. They themselves are seeing the Internet as something that they’re very busily trying to solve to please two audiences and so on.

Quickly forming a coalition.

Frankly, it’s not a very super visible part of the Line app. Line is doing what they could and we’re grateful of it. I’m just saying most of them still spend much more time talking about the news on institutional media, whether it’s through television or through printed papers.

I’m not in a place where I say the media should do something. It’s not democratic. What I’m saying is that for the institutional media readers, they are not getting the benefit of having a robust fact-checking network. That’s just an objective observation. They would mostly rely if they used ...

To the IFCN and extended networks.

No, it’s fine.

Now, Hong Kong people, no matter which age group, is affected by the creativity of the young generation, that they cannot actually unsee the brutality of the police.

It’s considered hip then to talk about politics. Before, there’s a certain apathy that resonates with the rosy view of the authoritarian regime as you just described. It may be a little bit like Hong Kong.

Yeah, the Occupy Movement, the focus on transitional justice afterwards, the sheer creativity of young people’s ways of communicating, what really happened during the White Terror and so on it captured the imagination.

We were in that point in 2013, as recent. After 2014, everything changed.

“Maybe it was rosy after all.”

Yeah. They can reminisce about, for example, four thousand years of the great Sino culture. They can also reminisce about the Austronesian culture, which lives in Taiwan for a considerably longer time. That’s not authoritarianism, it’s just cultural lineage.

No, I don’t think they even have words for it.

That’s very confusing, because when you say we want to give marriage “equality,” what exactly do you mean? That is being interpreted wildly differently by people of different generational groups.

Indeed, the law was that. If you get wed in a public ceremony, register or not, you’re married as specified by law. People who marry after 2008 only need to do a registration. It doesn’t really care whether you do a ceremony or not. It becomes something of the public ...

Being for example, when the older generation see marriage, they don’t think it’s an administrative registration by a democratic state. They think it is a social tie amongst kinships and rituals.

There is a linguistic and cultural generational gap that is our focus to heal. It is shown very clearly in the referenda of the last year.

The people younger than me don’t even have the vocabulary to describe in their vision in a way that’s compatible with that era, because none of those era’s documents is Googleable. The most you can Google is some scholarly article. It’s not very accessible.

It is. Like the World Wide Web, it’s intertwined with the red presidential election. It’s the same year. The first ever presidential election we have propaganda and disinformation on the web. It seems as chaotic. The people would reminisce about the earlier era that I still remember but people younger ...

That went for 10 years before we even got a presidential election in 1996, which is the same year as the World Wide Web becoming ubiquitous in Taiwan. After that, the society kind of went beyond their comprehension.

They sometimes miss the era of Chiang Ching-kuo where Taiwan was growing very quickly economically, and the regional re-cultivation of culture, the community building movement and so on were not only allowed but gradually encouraged by the authoritarian regime.

It actually gives it a bit more legitimacy compared to the Chiang Kai-shek, right? That is a problem, because there is people who are maybe my parents’ age in their 60s and the 70s.

Yeah. The thing is that people who were born before the martial law have a certain worldview that is compatible with authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, at that point in time in the ‘80s is already not a dictatorship. It’s more of a benevolent authoritarianism strain of things under Chiang Ching-kuo.

That’s right. I was born into martial law. The martial law got lifted when I was six or seven. I remember the martial law. People younger than me don’t. It is a problem, actually.

At the moment, it’s the remaining authoritarian culture in Taiwan. You were around here when I was born.

Thank you.

Putting those two pictures together and analyze it a little bit, like what is lip service and what is substantial, and then you have a presentation.

I’m sure that you can crowdsource part of your presentation to the coalition to describe the Taiwan situation. I think Cekfakta, just looking at their media partners, they may each contribute some statements to you about how participating in Cekfakta have improved their horizontal relationships and so on, similar to ...

Sure. Joel will collect…

The greatest thing is that you can compare all these different models maybe with the French model and so on and UK model and so on without even mentioning the PRC. That makes a really good workshop material to start with if we’re going to hold more workshops, as you ...

They have their own take on this issue. They are transitioning to a new media as well and every other institutional media copy from their text anyway. They may have some views on this matter. The traditional institutional media, they all have different thoughts and they’re not extremely loud about ...

I think the most I can do is to paint the picture of the coalition on this part. I cannot speak for institutional media. The most I can do is to introduce you to CNA, which is the media sponsored by the administration.

For the institutional media, there’s no formal way to ask, “What’s your take on fact-checking?” They often are not very clear about their contribution to the Internet governance versus their more traditional audience who rely less on the social media. They have two audiences to please, so to speak.

Yeah, as well as the coalition that I just mentioned that agrees to fact-check every presidential candidate. From there, you can probably reach all the important stakeholders on the IFCN and extended networks side to learn the whole picture.

I can send you the joint statement of the major platforms, for one, in English, as well…

It’s laudable, but the fact that they are mostly Internet-only media further confirms this modality shift between the traditional institutional and the social media.

It will not only be on the LINE system or the Facebook system. Also, it will give rise to a renewed set of expectations of journalism standards on institutional media similar to Japan. That’s not quickly happening in Taiwan. We have a coalition of newer media that doesn’t publish on ...

That is a problem because The Liberty Times is oftentimes seen as “partisan,” but if they’re willing to share their methodologies and investigations, and the folks on “UDN,” for example, is willing to do the same, together they will surely reach a larger population.

“The Liberty Times,” for example, runs its own rumor dispelling service as part of their website’s service, but that is siloed and not at all connected to this IFCN network and extended networks.

In Taiwan, maybe the CTS Television have partnered with the TFCC. Maybe the Public TV to some degree, but that’s about it. We don’t have a broader institutional media coalition that reaffirms the value of fact-checking.

In the Cekfakta, more like a cross-check initiative strives for neutrality, not through one or two well respected figures, but by the nature of international institutional media such as the AFP, as well as the domestic media of all sorts joining together to share their internal fact-checking procedures, if not ...

The involvement of institutional media is weaker than in Indonesia. In Indonesia, I understand the fact-checkers in the Cekfakta…Is that how you phrase it?