It transcends the political issues.

That’s right.

It is.

Yeah, definitely.

OK.

OK. That’s great.

That’s right. That’s right. What’s your impression so far?

No.

Oh, OK. I’m going to Hualien early tomorrow too.

Yeah, the Secretary for the National Sustainability Council.

What are some highlights that I may be of help to...?

How is it going?

Yes, thank you.

Thank you.

Now we’re flagging this to send a very clear message that this is the same as a political donation. Essentially saying this is campaign money, and if you accept that from a foreign national without disclosing the fact, it’s just like money laundering.

In the previous election, there’s a lot of that happening. But it was not clearly illegal -- or it is questionably legal -- but it was not very clearly illegal. People generally thought, "Yeah, maybe it’s just earning a few bucks."

So for this case, we make sure that it really becomes a social norm that says political sponsored advertisement, it’s the same as campaign donation. We rely on people who are intermediaries and their conscience to flag this as wrong, essentially.

Right, but that’s exactly the same as anti-money laundering, right? Theoretically, you can catch money laundering by the flow of bank accounts -- or by bitcoin flows, in principle. What we’re really doing is that we put a really high kind of criminal penalty on it. We encourage whistleblowing, all ...

Well, those media outlets, they have to file taxes somehow...

They have to file taxes somehow, right?

Once it becomes a meme, what we can only do is that we make our own counter narrative and we make those reach more people than those memes reach the same people.

On the other hand, at some point when it goes viral, everybody actually does its own second or third level recreation on it. Once those remix enter the memetic marketplace, all hope is lost. You really cannot trace anything about it anymore, because it just becomes a meme.

Just like with a biological virus, you can’t really interrogate a virus. [laughs] It’s not the same category of things. We do keep an eye on the general trend of where it comes from, whether it looks like a composition that is domestic, whether it looks like a mission translated ...

It’s easy to trace who posts that particular message. It’s very hard to say at which point this message becomes virus so that everybody posts it. It’s two different questions.

Yes and no. We look at it as a kind of epidemic and virus of the mind. Just like -- I don’t know virus, [laughs] or whatever -- influenza, you do trace its origin. Again, it’s very hard to pinpoint at which point did it start to mutate into this ...

Yes?

It may or may not work, but it certainly beats going back to martial law days.

Exactly.

All this pressure results in us having to think higher and propose a more innovative system that’s more universally applicable instead of regressing.

It’s really a very innovative system that’s born out of necessity. I usually say that Taiwan is caught between the Eurasian Plate and the Philippine Sea Plate, and that’s why we have lots of earthquakes, but that’s also how the Jade Mountain grows by five centimeters every year.

Generally, in Taiwan, it’s extremely unpopular and would be borderline political suicide to propose anything that blocks the freedom of expression, especially on the Internet.

Even in this very narrowly defined case, people flooded the MPs telephones and office, and there is a lot of blackouts by popular websites, my website included, [laughs] and things like that. People show it very clearly that they don’t want any kind of censorship even in the name of ...

For copyright reasons, all this conversation we just had, we had that before. There was people who petitioned in the MPs, saying if there is a oversea copyright of a violation pirate website, then we should hold the ultimate button to basically close it down and block any Internet communication ...

As for whether people really value freedom of expression, I think each and every time when the members of the Parliament even start consulting or even talking about any measures that could potentially block Internet access, or that could potentially... for example, the notice and take-down system is not invented ...

You can look at it in several ways, right? If you’re talking about the right to vote, then our voter turnout is pretty good. The public interest on referendum is at all-time high. We do have people participate even between votes, e-petition, participatory budgeting, you name it. It is actually ...

That’s right.

I can easily think of a lot of corner cases. But in the general case, where the media serves their subscribers, or just the journalistic community, then they’re not actually classified as a political advertisement, and so not part of this spot, or not part of the 72 hours.

This, I think, is a really narrow criteria, whereas most of the press’s work if you are not sponsored by any campaign, is actually not touched by Minister Lo’s legislation.

There need to be a kind of sponsored money trail on this part. The harm need to be to the public, and they need to be initiated by a candidate that runs.

On the other hand, they have to do it only in the name of the person who run, so the candidate’s name is on the stake, and they can only target paid advertisement or paid reporting or things like that.

Of course, any laws may have unintended consequences. I’m not saying that during the election those 72-hours rule may or may not have an adverse effect. For example, I can easily imagine like two competing media companies each flagging each other’s paid advertisements. That may be a possibility, because they ...

You do understand that Minister Lo Ping-cheng is a human rights lawyer, right? From all our meetings, I think not harming human rights, including the right to expression, is on the foremost of his thoughts.

Do you mean like backfire?

Disinformation. [laughs]

How to technically enforce it is really challenging, actually. I don’t really quite see how that could technically be implemented without banning Telegram outright. [laughs] But we’ll see. The Singapore people are also very innovative. Maybe they’ll figure out some technical way.

The general correction order of Singapore is really innovative in the sense that even unrelated social media platforms, they can also issue a general correction order, and these social media will have to put on those clarifications, even if those disinformation did not touch that media.

Singapore, I think, is a recent example.

Sure, but it’s the same, digital or otherwise. The court has always had a say on that, and you can appeal the usual way by the rule of law.

Also, we feel that it would lead to a chilling effect, because the large platforms will tend to over-censor. That is why we developed instead a notice and public notice model.

There was a round of discussion that this inspired by the NetzDG in Germany, where the large platforms are in charge of doing its own regulation of hateful content and so on. We ultimately didn’t quite go that way, mostly because, first, what we care about is intentional harmful untruth, ...