What we’re basically saying is that we are a source that can very reliably, if the fact-checkers ask us, give them something in an hour. We don’t have a exclusive right or privilege on that.

If you look at the Taiwan FactCheck Center, which is totally nonpartisan, and actually they rely on crowdfunding -- they refuse any funding from political parties and governments and things like that -- they’re not actually always in favor of the DPP, or the administration for matter.

What we’re doing is basically just working on the content layer or the application layer. That means that we’re not the arbiter of truth.

We participate on the content level. The Twitter account is nothing special. It’s just a Twitter account. The Facebook page is nothing special. It’s just a Facebook page. We’re not saying that we take control of the infrastructure layer, all the communication layer of the stack.

We have a coalition going on. It’s just one of the manifestations of this global coalition.

Actually, we didn’t develop those technologies in a vacuum or in-house. Many of the participatory platforms we took from the Decide, from Madrid, for example. The pol.is system that I just show you is actually from Seattle. The e-petition platform, the pro and con, call-ins, and so on, that’s from ...

The scale of communication is similar. In Taiwan, we’re really just a large municipality, geography-wise. From north to south is just an hour and a half by high-speed rails. We’re more similar in scope and geography as compared to these folks, rather than more central or federal areas.

We work very closely with our civic tech allies. Code For Japan is a large part of it. I think it’s better to work sometimes with municipals because it’s faster turnaround, and participatory budgeting is easier in the municipal rather than the federal level, for obvious reasons.

All the different cities, as well. It’s not an app or anything. It’s just a website.

Yeah, right.

No, we have our own platform. It’s called Join platform, join.gov.tw. It’s not just the administration. You can also see the auditing. Ministry of the Corrective Yuan is also there.

After serving as understudy since 2015, for a year or so, then Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became president. Then they decided that they need a digital minister, so I was just then re-recruited back from the understudy minister position to the digital minister position. My office here is physically the same ...

At the time, I was working with Minister Without Portfolio Jaclyn Tsai, who is in charge of legal affairs in IBM Asia before joining the cabinet. We are very fortunate to have at that time a transitional cabinet led by mostly independent, non-partisan people, and focusing on just enhancing the ...

Then the central government started hiring people who facilitated this kind of conversation during Sunflower into the central government. The English is the reverse mentorship, understudies, younger people that work with ministers to reverse-mentor the ministers while receiving mentorship from the ministers as understudy on the matters.

At the end of that year, there was a election. Everybody who supported the Sunflower gets elected, sometime to their surprise. People who did not, who are more authoritarian, lost their mayoral positions. It’s like something that happened in Spain in the 15-M.

At the time, what people have seen is that the civic hackers, the people who basically contribute to democracy, organized this demonstration not as a protest, but as a demo, as demonstrating that this kind of conversation can reach half a million people on the street and many more online, ...

After three weeks of non-violent occupy, they condensed to five consensus points. Then the head of Parliament, MP Wang Jin-pyng, actually agreed on them, so the Occupy was a success.

Our contribution, as the g0v movement, is just to provide a neutral communication facility so that anything that happens around the occupied Parliament become live stream, translated, transcribed, broadcasted so that it can reach the maximum amount of people, and so it makes consensus possible.

During that 22 days, around 20 different NGOs deliberated one aspect of the CSSTA. You had people debating the human right, people debating the labor, environment, and different sets -- education, cybersecurity, all those different aspects.

In any case, when the MPs, people said that they were on strike because the administration didn’t think they warrants a legislative debate, people just occupy the Parliament, do the MPs’ work for them on the CSSTA. That’s the legitimacy theory anyway.

Because of that, the Parliament doesn’t need to have the same level of oversight as they have on other more law-level agreements, treaties, or things like that. That’s part of a larger so-called ECFA framework. The people generally doesn’t buy this idea. People also generally doesn’t buy the idea that ...

Long story short, I helped people occupy the Parliament for 22 days. [laughs] That was the origin, actually. It’s the Sunflower Movement. The basic idea, very simply put, is that, at the time -- that is, 2014 -- the administration thought that the Cross-Strait Service and Trade Agreement is something ...

Exactly. If you look at the ministry of projects, like their Facebook pages, they do do provide their ministerial links to the actual numbers. The premier is actually just relying on the visual communication because people generally trust him.

This makes democracy seem fun. If you ask questions on the public participation website, you tend to get substantial answers because people have the same facts in their minds already. That’s the idea.

This is actually very funny because this is like a Russian doll of three messages. Every week, they renew the number of the investment. [laughs] It’s outdated, it’s outdated, it’s outdated because every week we receive more investment back.

This is from May the 4th, where they look at the execution rate of the advanced infrastructure project, which is over 100 percent. The force is definitely strong with that one. This is about our wind plant. This is about how much of the Taiwan investment overseas, actually mostly in ...

That’s right, the memetic landscape. This has a side effect of making democracy seems fun. It makes democracy seem something you can engage in your leisure. You can only look at the policies, but they’re no longer abstract. They’re beautiful comics and things like that. Let me find another example, ...

The meme is.

It is a cross-functional team, actually. We need political advisors in that team to make sure that it doesn’t backfire. [laughs] We also, of course, have people who are professionals in visual communication, in animation, and things like that, of course.

Some of them are your age.

This is all about reducing the interval between having a popular message, and having the people seeing the honest conversation coming from the leaders. Again, time is key. It’s not the content. It’s not the format. It’s not how funny it is. It is the fact that it is pushed ...

Then if you hear a disinformation about a friend, you will check with that friend, and will trust their response. If the friend only respond to you after six months and in cryptic Latin, or something like that, then, of course, you tend to lose trust.

Like every Wednesday, you can find me in my office. Every other Tuesday, I just tour around Taiwan to meet the people. I think it’s just, trust is something that you just share experience in a short interval. You have a friend where you meet every week for a movie, ...

I think the point here is just to make sure that we’re very easily reachable. If you comment on the premier’s Twitter or Facebook, the team actually respond to you very quickly. You can always see through livestream, real-time virtual town halls, and so on, people just interacting in real ...

On average, it’s 60 minutes. You can see it’s liked by 2,000 people, amazing reach. More people see this before they see the popular rumor. This is very funny.

Right. Basically, there is a scoreboard, actually. It’s not a scoreboard for payment of salaries of public servants, but all the ministries see how fast other ministries are in responding to rumors. There is a friendly competition going on.

Within an hour.

You have two years to start correctly labeling the chemicals, the products, of the perming products. They are not fining people who do the perming, or receive the perming. Then the premier also says, "If you keep perming your hair across a week..." If you perm your hair this week ...

The smaller text says what we have actually passed is a FDA-like labeling requirement of the producer of the chemicals that dye their hair. It’s not about people who do the perming. It actually takes effect two years afterwards.

The red balloon says false. Then the premiers who, with his younger self, says that, "Even I don’t have hairs now, I will not punish the people with hair because of it."

You can just go on Twitter. This is our premier. This is mine. You can very quickly see this one. There’s not an English translation here, but basically, the top four characters says that there’s a popular rumor that says after a week, if you dye your hair, or to ...

Thank you.

That’s, like, my five-minute pitch.

We make sure that money will not unduly influence elections, but that is a special act just for the election period. In the normal times, we use the notice and public notice system to make sure that people actually get more immune over time. This is the metaphor that we’re ...

They must disclose each transaction, and they have to, like money laundering, disclose who is the actual person behind that’s paying it. If we can track the money to anything that is outside Taiwan, including Hong Kong, Macau, PRC, and other foreign nations, then it’s actually a crime.

...to make sure that all the advertisement during elections, or any message bought in any medium, is to be treated the same as campaign donation. They can only be spent by nationals in Taiwan.

We see people actually circumventing that by throwing money at precision targeting, advertisements, and all sort of public relationship firms. We’re now introducing the equivalent of the US Honest Advertisement Act, and we will get it passed faster than the US...

That’s in normal days, but in elections, there’s a different set of law. The campaign finance law in Taiwan basically says the Corrective Yuan as a separate branch publishes the individual records of campaign donations. It’s very transparent.

The international figures say that it would be reduced to under 20 percent of the population, while our clarification messages then reaches more people. As you can see, we look at it in a very epidemic kind of view.

It’s not, again, takedown, because if you look at it, it’s still there. It’s just with a public notice here saying, "Oh, it’s been fact-checked." We’re looking forward very soon to partner with also Facebook, basically reducing the virality of the fact-checked as false information, so that it reaches less ...