Now we’re on alternating years. It’s an election year, then a referendum year, election year, referendum year, so they won’t polarize each other anymore.

That rhetoric is on the decline. It’s not on the rise. I don’t see any divisiveness on the rise at the moment. If you asked me a few months ago, I would say it could tie into the referendum. Because we witnessed that if we tie referendum into the voting ...

Even the leading KMT, Mayor Han Kuo-yu, his main campaign policy thinker, ex-Premier Simon Chang, is now publicly saying the ’92 consensus is out of date and we shouldn’t hold to it.

That’s gradually changing. If anything, it’s not on the rise. After Hong Kong, people are generally not saying that anyone likes one country, two systems anymore. It used to be a real side that people can take. I don’t think anyone is taking that side now.

People who are affiliated with one party will be motivated, incentivized to paint people from the other party as essentially outside of the polity. This is particularly easy in Taiwan because of that single divisive issue with PRC.

That’s a great question. A lot of it are still along party lines. Especially, the next election is a single winner in each district or presidential. We’re not going to elect two presidents, right? [laughs] It’s a very zero some thing. Usually, in this kind of elections, most of the ...

Honest advertisement is consensus across jurisdictions. I’m very happy that Facebook is willing to try in the next election for this kind of transparency. In election, it will help a lot.

If they are all citizens, then it’s reveal campaign donation. If they are non-citizens, then we find the closest hop, I don’t know, NT$50 million or something like that because they are meddling in a election.

What we’re asking during election is that Facebook review both the precision targeting criteria, as well as who is ultimately the provider of the funding, and that we can use the same laws as anti-money-laundering to then ask those operators who their funding came from. Then recursively until we know ...

You can get a spreadsheet of individual records of donation. Every media can independently analyze these. If any political campaign donation came from a foreign source that is to say someone with no voting right, it is subject to a very large fine. Only people who vote can do campaign ...

What we have asked is essentially asking Facebook to treat these as campaign donations during elections. I’m very happy that I’ve heard positive commitments from Facebook so that we can reveal. In our campaign donation law, it’s extremely transparent.

Internet knows no borders. What we have done during the election is revealing where the funding came from. The real amplification method on Facebook is cash. [laughs] It’s not fake accounts. Fake accounts gets detected in no time. If you have sufficient amount of dollars you can precisely target whomever. ...

All of this can be boiled down to mechanism design. If you do the mechanism design well enough, then you can prevent much of the fake amplification issue.

People will vote according to their true preference. While they’re voting, we’re not revealing in a scoreboard of each project. We get a variable balance outcome out of these kind of voting by, first, not revealing during the voting period and, second, using a quadratic voting to make sure that ...

Many people discovered that these two have synergy. Maybe nine votes is too much. I’ll check something and vote accordingly. Mathematically, this means that each new vote, the marginal cost is the same as its marginal utility.

Two votes is going to cost 4 points and four votes, 16 points. Even if you vote everything into one case, that’s going to be only 9 votes and you still have 18 left. You can find something else to vote 4 votes that’s going to cost 16 and you ...

In the Presidential Hackathon, we also used voting. You have to join through a e-participation to vote. First of all, we used quadratic voting, which is a new system designed by Glen Weyl and friends at RadicalxChange. The QV says you’d look at 100 projects. You have 99 points each ...

You can see that even with, not even 200 people, this faction has more area than this one. If you have 5,000 people all voting the same way, the numbers may change but area will not. It doesn’t have any effect on the perceived sound or amplification. I guess it’s ...

That is a infrastructure that is responsibility of the state to provide for legally-binding referendums. That’s the identity thing. For the amplification, it’s very simple. If you vote but not review the result of voting or if you use visualization but, as showed in Polis, it measures the diversity of ...

Our main goal starting next year is to get the roll-out of such NFC enabled PKI cards to as much people as possible so that people can even join referendum signatures by using their phone and do a NFC authentication and entering passphrase on their mobile PKI card.

For referendums, of course, we insist on a PKI card with proper e-signature capabilities, which at the moment maybe one in four people have one. The ones with NFC capabilities, maybe less than one in seven people have the newer PKI cards.

Without people revealing whether they work at some public sector or things like that, it’s only when their idea finally become policy and they want to meet eye-to-eye. Then we discover their identity. It’s entirely optional. We have both pseudonyms but also SMS-based authentication. That’s a good compromise for non-legally ...

It makes it very hard for people to get 5,000 SIM cards. I’m sure it will trigger income money laundering or something like that. We are relatively sure that people who are on our e-participation platform are real people. Then we allow pseudonyms because many of them are advocating for ...

Whatever we learned in a previous era where CAPTCHAs still work doesn’t apply now to this current, where machines easily defeat people in most cognition tasks that are simplified. A few things, for the e-participation platform, we insist on having two factors. That is SMS to a real SIM card ...

Now that we have GPT-2 and transformer technology, what used to require a lot of crafts work is now entirely automatable. It’s like the old CAPTCHAs, I guess. It used to be a Mechanical Turk to defeat CAPTCHAs. Now it’s harder to design CAPTCHAs that doesn’t prefer AIs. We’re in ...

Amplification, so people robotically does the same sharing or things like that.

The second one is fake...?

Then people are keen to post more polarized because they feel that they’re disempowered. This kind of disempowerment is also a feeling, paradoxically, caused by social media. It’s so fragmented. Every tribe is just very minor among the entire polity.

I think this kind of micro-profiling, plus precision-targeted advertisement does make people feel more lonely than before. People would feel that they’re in the minority, that most people don’t think the way that we think. The majority of people think they’re in a minority. [laughs]

This kind of false tribalism worldwide, not just Taiwan, is the main false perception. I wouldn’t say it’s caused by social media because we see that in radio and television era as well. It’s certainly amplified by social media. Previously, people may think in a binary us-versus-them. Now, with social ...

If people get into the rabbit hole of just expanding that one divisive issue, then they have this false perception that these are people who are anonymous enemies that are even not part of the polity. That leads to both fragmentation by unfriending and blocking, as well as personal harassment ...

We just got the AIT people, the MOFA people to work on the parts that pass what we call group informed consensus. Both the grouping and well as the group informed consensus are very useful here to quantitatively show people that people have more in common than we thought about.

If we had allowed reply, easily hundreds of harassments would very quickly show up. Again, because we don’t have replies, you can see it’s the only thing that divides people. There’s nothing else. [laughs] People generally agree on most of the things.

As you can see, [laughs] half of the people absolutely love this statement. Half of the people really doesn’t like this statement. How to define our relationship with PRC and whether this is part of a US triangle or whether it’s a bilateral thing is the main political divide in ...

That depends on the topic of discussion. When we had a public conversation with the AIT, that’s the US de facto embassy, asking how to make more visible in the world, the divisive issue that would trigger harassment if it’s a reply-enabled situation is the statement saying, "Every time PRC ...

I’m sure that there are parts of attention management that you can adjust. My experience is that if it’s a reply-free situation, then people learn to respond to the statements, not to people.

It may be helpful for people who do the replies in a systemic way, reply to the statement instead of to the person by, for example, only showing notification when it tags a person specifically instead of just by me replying to you and somebody else reply also to you. ...

I am not saying that Facebook should take away the reply button. It’s maybe too drastic, [laughs] but it may help to make it easier to do single level. It may be easier, in the default filtering view, to not highlight that much the second-level replies.

In pol.is, if you get 5,000 people voting exactly the same way, it’s only to be one dot. In the principal component analysis, it has no effect at all. Whereas, in a reply-happy environment, if you get 5,000 people individually replying, then you just marginalize everybody else.

It’s these details of interface design. We don’t show the proportion to comment bar on the pro versus contra. We also show them as exactly the 50 percent part, so that people would not mobilize with trolling. All this is just skills at troll control, making sure that if you ...

They can upvote or downvote, but they cannot reply across the aisle. There’s no way to do personal attack so people don’t do personal attack. Because you can upvote as well as downvote, but we rank it by the number of votes that each one receives in absolute numbers, if ...

Most of the design, for example, the e-petition site that we borrowed from Reykjavík, from Iceland, has a pro and con in two colors. For each e-petition, once it gets 5,000 signature, we have to respond, but people can always, instead of joining the petition, post their counter-arguments on the ...

When understanding that we’re a polity after all, people can focus more of their energy on how to implement this on the second diamond instead of wasting their time on divergence on the first diamond. People can say, "How might we do something together?" where this "we" is a polity ...

In Bowling Green, Kentucky, everybody agrees that the K to 12 need to include arts. There’s too few arts. In the STEM, it should be STEAM. People think that there should be more choice in broadband providers, things like that. Just this picture itself is very convincing.

If you look at the local media or social media, you think those five things are all it is. People spend 95 percent of calories just talking about these five things. People forget that most of the people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the things most ...

People can see that, despite the different positions, it’s still your friends and family on the other side. Always, we end with this picture in our final report. As you can see -- this is from Bowling Green, USA, in Kentucky -- only five things divide people.

You can also comment, but you can only upvote or downvote, that is to say, agree or disagree with their statements. Once you agree or disagree, it just flashes another statement from a fellow citizen. There’s a principal component analysis that outlines the most divisive and the most cohere parts ...

I think reply button is the affordance that makes people confuse personal versus opinion arguments. If I am replying to your argument, I’m both replying to your personally and also your statement, verbally. For all the system that I use for public discourse -- for example, there’s a open-source system ...

There’s harassment meaning a personal attack, and there’s arguments, which is like, "I just don’t agree with your opinion." Having a more clear-cut designation of the nature of the debate really helps. In the system that I participate in designing, all the public-binding discussion forums are without reply button.

I would encourage you to look into that and maybe work with partners in the K to 12 curriculum. Every school is now under tremendous pressure to differentiate their curriculum versus other schools’ curriculum. Media literacy may just be the ticket.