The first time in history. [laughs] That is actually interesting because they have similarities. They sell addiction. They create externalities on the society. They are going to be regulated the same way. Facebook is saying, "We are socially responsible for the mess that we caused. We sign on to those ...

Exactly, because they are at a all-time low in terms of social trust. People are considering Facebook worse than tobacco and liquor companies.

Facebook, just like Line, have signed on what they call they call the counter-disinformation best practice. They did agree on that.

If the ultimate payer is not a Taiwanese citizen, then it’s subject to $50 million NT dollars fine, something like that, for everybody who are in this chain. Basically, we want to limit political advertisement to only by citizens and disclose in the same way as the campaign donations.

Now we’re changing the law so that they must be accounted for in the same transparency as the campaign donation. That is to say, anyone who place advertisement must disclose where their payments came from and the previous one have also them declare where their payments come from, like anti-money ...

They must be from the citizens. They must not exist at the top and so on. What we observe in the previous election, because we just passed that law, everybody who have redundant money or from foreign sources just put their money on precision-targeted and political advertisements. Those are not ...

Finally, during elections -- which is the highest payable, it’s exponential -- we introduce, just like anti-money laundering, a way for people to having to declare their political advertisements. This stems from our campaign donation law, which is one of the most transparent in the world. Anyone now can just ...

All in all, it reduce the virality to maybe one-fifths or less while it increase the virality of the clarification. That’s exactly the pattern, how we foil spam. This is the same project that having the social sector to become the fact-checkers.

Once the Thai Fact-checking Center rates something as false, for example, it goes back to the Facebook algorithm so that people will stop seeing that on their news feed. It would become not preferred to share. It’s not entirely censorship. If you go to that friend’s page, you’ll still see ...

The same for the IFCN. The IFCN basically gathers the signals of people flagging something as disinformation. They publish fact-checking reports in a investigative-journalism way.

Exactly. It doesn’t waste people’s time.

Those signals go into machine learning. They publish the signature of people who match those emails. All the email providers after receiving the matching emails, it doesn’t go away. So it’s not really censorship. It goes to your junk mail folder, which you only check if you have too much ...

Flagging something as spam is a gesture to donate something that doesn’t belong to the personal space anyway into the public discourse. There are international organizations, like Spamhaus, that basically gather those signals. That is how the spam wars are won.

"...if you pay the transaction fee." [laughs]

Even they may say they care about me a lot and they’re are a royalty some foreign country that have a lot of money...

Just like email, email is supposed to be anyway secret communication. But anyone can flag something as spam. If you flag something as spam, you’re basically saying, "This is not personal communication. This is a infringement to my personal domain by people who don’t really care about me."

The second defense, of course, is collaborative checking. In Taiwan, we have members of the International Fact-Checking Network as well as the collaborative fact-checking community that allows anyone to just press on their Line, which is like WhatsApp, which again the Google doesn’t see.

We saw that more people saw this clarification before they see the rumor. They serve as inoculated agents. This is the first defense.

"You may end up looking like me." -- Premier Su

Finally, the now bald Premier says, "However if you keep perming your hair multiple times in a week, you will damage your hair..."

What we are actually doing is requiring the products of hair products to be labeled in its ingredients and takes effect only 2021.

"But I would not punish people like that." -- Premier Su

Within one hour, we have the Premier, Su Tseng-chang, posting this very viral picture. It went viral on multiple social media that says, "There’s a popular rumor that says perming your hair will subject to one million fine. It’s not true. I may be bald now," -- this is a ...

This is a real example. There was a rumor that says the administration is going to fine anyone who dye or perm their hairs multiple times in a week, a large fine, [laughs] like one million NT dollars. It’s obviously untrue.

The three defenses, very quickly, is that we found scientifically that if there is a trending rumor, if the ministries go out and clarify within one hour, then actually more people hear the clarification first.

In any case, there are certainly Chinese continental forces. This is a slide that I gave in Thailand, in Bangkok and actually also in HQ of Agoda for the search of collective solutions in a world of disinformation. The main insight I would share from Taiwan is that it’s basically ...

I like how she referred to Taiwan as "an island off the Chinese continent."

I think the new phrase, as coined by our president last week, is now the "Chinese continent."

Yeah. A few things.

Consent.

That is actually flipping the legitimacy theory because previously, it’s the government making civic participation, but the government still owns the agenda-setting frame, even individual agenda. Now, it’s the people owning the frame, and the state joining as one of the participants who supports but doesn’t control at all this ...

It’s very rare that in Taiwan we adopt the idea of, whenever we see a large-scale social innovation like this, for example, people starting measuring their own air quality and threaten the legitimacy of the Environmental Protection Agency, we always say, we can’t beat them, so we join them.

In this kind of balance, people can see when the social innovations actually works better. For example, if you want to transfer money over jurisdictions, it obviously works better than the SWIFT system.

This kind of social innovation implements governance, but in a way that is remarkably free of the current legitimacy theory based on representative elections.

Our vision is basically use technologies like Ethereum, but for it to be owned by the social sector. Because Ethereum is open-source, anyone who want to fork, meaning that take it to a different vision, can do that. Actually, it’s done that many times. Ethereum itself is a fork of ...

In any case, what I’m trying to get to is the RadicalxChange vision. I’m joined by the likes of Danielle Allen and also Vitalik Buterin, who invented Ethereum and was there also last evening.

Just last night, I went into a meetup for RadicalxChange. I’m also a director of the board now, which is itself an innovation because before October last year, it was impossible for public servants to also serve as a director of the board for an international non-profit organization, but anyway, ...

...is to foster social innovation, meaning that the social sector can take control of the technologies, emergent technologies that are for the benefit of the society.

...my mission...

As a conservative anarchist...

To their interests. I think the solution for that is to have alternate legitimacy structures.

That’s exactly right. In the ideal case, we would take this and deliver or encourage innovations that take care of everybody’s interest, but as you have witnessed, it’s not always like that. People would always want this to still shift a little bit...

Yeah.

COGOV.

If widely circulated and collaborated on such a norm, then even the most belligerent actors or state actors will actually concede a little bit to that norm if they understand that everybody really consider it a very bad taste. Again, it’s not law because on the international arena, there really ...

Nowadays, we see a lot of cyber norm packages. These packages are widely agreed. For example, maybe a sovereign state shouldn’t really do cyber espionage for their private sector. Maybe it’s not a good idea.

Exactly. Basically, it establishes a norm allowing people to say it’s not encouraged. It’s not a good idea, but it’s not as punitive as a law that forecloses possibilities.

The norm-first approach is what we usually emphasize for not just sandboxes but also e-petitions, also Presidential Hackathon, and so on that we establish a co-gov way of establish the norms and decide incentive but not yet laws nor even policies.

If you start with law, and having the law immediately constraining the norm -- which is what laws always do, it opens up the possibility for the algorithm holders to lobby. If that happens, code will decide the law, that decide the norm, that decide the market. That’s the worst ...

Law, as I said, always lag behind, but for a very good reason, because if you start with the law, that means that lawmakers need to know more about innovations than innovators do. I wouldn’t claim that and I wouldn’t say any sane lawmaker would claim that. It’s like having ...