In K to 12, starting this August, all the schools can now design their own part of curriculum as must opt-ins and opt-outs. We have schools now specializing on philosophy, e-sport, which is not part of curriculum, and [laughs] all things like that, and teaching media literacy -- how to ...

It could be packaged in a funny way so that people participate in the investigation and therefore learns media literacy. Working with community colleges...

Each clarification actually becomes content, and you can make it viral by introducing the funny part of it and things like that, like framing it into a detective film, a whodunit episode, or things like that. Just making it fun instead of a pure, "You say that. I say that," ...

This is something that the state can do and, indeed, can sponsor. I’m sure that the social media people can also work with other people. The public TV is actually part of a network that does public television work. For example, the CTS is now airing the most popular clarifications ...

Everybody, after watching this film, gains more insight into media literacy than listening to 20 hours of lectures. This kind of public TV is just the beginning. We’re aiming to produce similar public discourse TV series for all the controversial social issues.

It teaches media literacy. After people view it, it talks about how media framed things. I think they use both YouTube and Facebook in the opening of each episode, showing how the social media justice can actually hamper the real dialog of investigative journalism and things like that.

I think a popular TV series is very useful. It’s called 我們與惡的距離, "The World Between Us." It’s now airing on not only HBO Asia, I think all over the world now. It’s funded by a public budget as part of our infrastructure plan. It’s done by the public TV here. ...

You get strength in numbers. You also get the civil society that specialize in, for example, healthcare or medicine can just fact-check their narrow domain without having to care about everything else that is unrelated to medicine. I’m not saying that you should lower your fact-checking standard. I’m saying this ...

Instead of having to choose, LINE just said, "Anyone who sign up as fact-checker gets this distribution of those trending rumors and do whatever you want about it." While the IFC and design of the Facebook-accredited fact-check network is useful, I think this more crowd-sourced fact-checking scene is also useful.

It’s very useful because, otherwise, people are always going to say, "Why do you choose this fact-checker over the other?" I’m sure that you face this all over Asia, [laughs] all the jurisdictions, fact-checkers that are more sympathetic to the administration, fact-checker that are not sympathetic at all with the ...

Again, it’s not because we’re the state. It’s just we respond quickly enough. I think this affordance of, for example, LINE now offering a very easy flag as spam, it’s not absorbed internally, but rather dispersed to, I think, four fact-checkers in Taiwan that everybody can independently do fact-checking.

A good thing about this, it’s because the state is not at privilege here. Any other party, any other community, can also respond within one hour and get the same kind of legitimacy. We’re grateful that the fact-checkers in the civil society -- there’s maybe four or five of them ...

It’s good humor. He makes fun of himself, not other people. Quantifiably, we know that this reach more people than the original rumor because it’s funny. It went viral. People who read this message will not share the original rumor anymore. It’s a good inoculation in terms of public health.

The fine print says, "What we have introduced is a labeling requirement for hair-product makers in 2021." I didn’t translate that, but it says a now-bald premier saying, "However, if you perm your hair multiple times in a week, it will damage your hair, and you may end up looking ...

This is a typical clarification provided by the state, this time by our premier. When we detect there’s a rumor that says perming your hair multiple times will be subject to a NT$1 million fine, which is false, it not only says that it is false, but with a young, ...

That is our primary way of responding. We invested a lot of people, and I’m grateful that Facebook also provided training, especially on our diplomatic foreign service personnel, about how to frame their messages better. There’s an outdated example that’s not new anymore. It’s a month or two old.

From the state side, what we are providing is a real-time clarification. Within one hour, we produce, always with at least two pictures, less than 20 words as title, less than 200 words -- by words, I mean Chinese characters -- as content. This means that it fits on one ...

Well, I don’t think there’s an average Internet user. It’s like there’s no average citizen.

Previously, it’s about politicians’ speech taken out of context in popular media. Now we have seen that, even in private groups, people are very keen to take screenshots or relay it out of context and then do a public tribunal on it.

I don’t have much specific incidents, but if you look at the rumors database, Cofacts and so on, you can easily find many such instances. I would say that a lot of political discourse is, indeed, centering around out-of-context.

It makes total sense in their private context, but if taken out of context, it could be interpreted as that she’s about to poison the captain. I’m sure that she didn’t mean to poison the captain. [laughs] She just said this is someone that we would add stuff or things ...

A lot of political discourse here is centered on screenshots. It could be a private group on Facebook. It could also be a conversation on a closed LINE group, which is a similar setting socially speaking. There was a large thing that a few months ago ran about a airline ...

To polarization.

This kind of out-of-context leads then to tribalism and to people fragmenting their audiences into different worldviews. I’m not saying that it’s all about interface design. I’m just saying that because you can change interface design [laughs] that are the pertinent parts that I observe here.

There’s multiple interface pathways that leads people to amplify the supposed to be friend-and-family conversation into the public sphere. The public sphere then does a critical examination on it, but it’s almost always out of context because people don’t have access of the original group where the conversation happens.

I actually provided a suggestion that maybe you reserve the lock icon into true end-to-end encryption so that Facebook can securely say, "We don’t even know of the conversation details." Currently, it is hidden behind a hostile design that people have to explicitly choose end-to-end encryption instead of, like on ...

Actually, not only it could be data mined, but it’s very easy for people to forward a private group conversation. You can always screenshot, but it’s very easy to make it leak to the public. People’s expectation of a end-to-end conversation is violated regularly.

The private group, the private is a lock icon. It means that a access-controlled group. That same icon is also used for secure end-to-end communication in both browsers and your end-to-end encrypted chat. It creates confusion of people looking at a lock icon and assuming that this is a protected ...

That then makes the conversations very easy to leak out of the -- to reuse a Google word that’s no longer relevant now -- circles of the original designated audience. For example, somebody may post something on a friend-only or a private group.

Part of our culture is that you can call a random person on the street aunt or uncle, and people won’t [laughs] find you strange. It’s just part of the large-family thing. I guess it’s appropriate that people just randomly treat Facebook "friends" as "families."

I don’t think it’s a Taiwan-specific issue though. In Taiwan, maybe Facebook penetration is very high and people tend to confuse friends-and-family conversation with political conversation. In many other jurisdictions, we see people using Facebook for one and Twitter for the other, or some other thing. In Taiwan, it’s all ...

All this makes it easier for people to identify other people with a negative projection, see people as the distractors from civil discourse, and choose to then flag, distance, or block other people. All those affordances I’m sure are great for mental health, but then it automatically make a polity ...

Over and again, we see discussions that ends in unfriending and/or blocking as a result of a conversation. By definition, people with the most time wins a conversation by default. Because the system doesn’t have this idea of a rough consensus, or like Discourse or other specific forum ideas, it’s ...

From its interface affordance point of view. In Twitter, it’s now very easy to mute people, almost too easy. On Facebook, likewise, actually. Although I think you show something like you can distance from that user instead of blocking them, still the block affordance is very easy to reach. Indeed, ...

I would say that a lot of PTT’s design criteria is because it’s a public forum and because it doesn’t have a purpose other than a social purpose. It’s a single-purpose, not-for-profit social media.

The more converging a social media is, the more contribution it will have on the upcoming election. It allows people, although supporting different parties or different platforms, to reassure that we’re of the same polity after all. Instead of being shepherded into filter bubbles of echo chambers, it can serve ...

I would say that it’s designed with convergence in mind. Although Facebook did make some improvements, for example, changing the comment box into rounded corners -- I think that helps [laughs] -- by and large, it is about keeping people’s time on Facebook instead of about converging into similar values.

The PTT is interesting because, first, it is a public forum. Most of the public boards are written in the Discourse style. Instead of multi-level threaded conversation that distracts people’s attention, it has a very simple up-vote, down-vote, with comment idea that can very quickly converge on similar values despite ...

When I think of social media, also because I was involved in BBS since ’93, it kind of is a prototype of my understanding of social media’s role.

Because it’s open source, the governance is in the social sector, and people can trust that. They will not be bought by Tencent [laughs] because they’re in academia, hosted by the National Taiwan University.

Before Facebook, LINE, and Googled signed the counter-disinformation best practice, many approaches were already prototyped by PTT developers.

One of the largest social media in Taiwan is the PTT, which is like Reddit, except it’s an interface inspired by BBS from dial-up era. The greatest thing about PTT is that it’s entirely open-source, with its own governance mechanism.

Social media in general, or Facebook in particular?

Yes, exactly. So for your questions, I’m sure that I will be as specific as possible, as I understand it’s part of the ethnographic... hanging out.

Double diamond, user journey, all that.

I’ve been kind of indoctrinated in design thinking...

Cool. The first hires of our office are interaction designers and service designers. Right now, we have 21 interns, all working in UX and are looking systemically to improve the government services as well.

That sounds great.

Would you like to briefly introduce yourself and the role that you play in the civic integrity team?

OK.