The Honest Advertisement Act I think is from the US. I think they are now still debating it. Maybe it will pass before the US does. There is also some inspirations from how this the spam was handled in the early 2000s. It’s structurally very similar.

It’s the same. It’s intentional harmful untruth. That’s a legal definition.

On disinformation?

I think this is where we’re going to see the first try in the next election, and we’ll also amend the rules accordingly.

In many ways, this augments the NCC’s existing rules and regulations, in the sense that it’s much more broad. It covers any digital platform, any printed platform, anything, whereas the NCC currently only do radio and television bands.

We learned from the French laws that says during the election campaign period, there’s a special court that looks at the media’s propaganda and so on, and do an injunction within 72 hours. Usually, it takes longer, but in an election, it doesn’t really work like that.

Because it’s in the parliament, I cannot talk too much, because the MPs will have to decide. Basically the draft bill says during the election, all the media coverage that intends to influence the result of the election is escalated in both the fines, the penalties, the offences, the timeliness ...

I do agree that it’s not a real deterrent, which is why, during the election, we are going to have a separate set of rules, a separate set of laws. Many of them are now in draft stage awaiting the parliamentary review probably in June.

Indeed it’s not much of a deterrent. At this point, it’s mostly saying that this is not the norm. This is beyond the norm. This is not journalism anymore. Basically, this is telling the public that this is not journalism.

That is why we have to respond within 60 minutes, because one iteration of this is essentially just one hour, and we cannot wait until the news that is fact checking, which takes a day, and we respond to their fact-checking calls, and so on. There really is no room ...

Once they do that, then they of course get quoted again by the social media, because each of those mainstream news has its own YouTube channel, and Facebook page, and so on, and so it’s very easy to get recirculated back and creating more division.

In Taiwan, many media, and that includes the pan green and pan blue camps, will actually source these social media memes into their regular news and adding very little value to it.

I would add that in Taiwan, these two problems feed into each other. Sometimes, people have a divisive issue, a meme going on on social media, whereas in Japan, because it’s not fact-checked, it is nothing to investigate. The press will just ignore that, and so it’s just social media.

Our NCC has already corrected some of the most controversial part of it that is clearly not journalistic work anymore. That is a separate set of problems.

If people get their sources of information from Internet rather from the television channels and traditional printed press, then we do get another set of feedback that says that there are some TV channels that dedicates more than 60 percent or sometimes 70 percent into coverage of one particular political ...

It may or may not be exclusively a disinformation problem; it may just be a bad interface design of social media. They encourage people to focus on the divisive part because they gather people’s attention and they spend more time on it. That is a general problem. It’s not just ...

Depends on who you ask. If people spend a lot of time on social media, people generally report that they get awash in their Facebook feeds with things that are divisive. I think that really is a problem.

It really is a sizeable chunk of the budget for communication, but if that’s the most that they can argue, it means that we did something well.

As for the president and premier, and deputy premier, and minister produced videos. So far, they are really highly acclaimed. We haven’t seen any significant backlash so far. I think the most the opposition party has complained about is that the ministries spend too much money on it.

The only mistake is that at one point, they confused the Judicial Yuan with the Ministry of Justice. [laughs] Out of the entire 10 TV series, I think that is the only mistake they made, and they did publicly apologize about that. This is really rare, and it’s of really ...

Of course. A few things. For these media literacy productions, I think we’re really fortunate that we found really good scriptwriters for "The World Between Us".

We’re not saying we’re the ministry of truth. We’re saying people could find it enjoyable to participate in rational discourse.

What we’re saying is that we always package our narrative in a way that contributes to rational discourse. Of course, the opposition party, or anyone really, can oppose our view. That is entirely fine as long as we keep it in a way that makes engagement to rational discourse fun. ...

Well, everybody has that capability now. What we are saying is that let us add our piece of puzzle, so to speak, to this information market. It really is a trolling-for-attention campaign. The people who are spreading this information, they’re really not interested in having a rational discourse. What they’re ...

It’s called "The World Between Us." It’s really, really popular here. I think HBO Asia is going to license it. This is paid by taxpayer money out of our public TV. This kind of lifelong education is, at the end of the day, I think the most useful, as my ...

We also use special budget and public money to fund a very popular TV series that’s 95% on IMDb, and I think even more popular domestically, that talks about how news is manufactured, how newsrooms work, how people use a divisive social issue to drive the wedge, those different social ...

What we’re saying is that elections are special, and we’re protecting elections in a way that is much higher than the usual notice and public notice system. At the end of the day, I think the most useful education tool is media literacy.

Each advertising agency, each middle person, need to reveal where their funding sources come from, just like anti money laundering. By the end of the chain, if it points to a foreign national, or to a PRC, or Macau, or Hong Kong source, then that is actually a crime.

In any case, they can just infuse money to influence the election in this way without declaring them as campaign donation. So We’re basically saying no, it’s the same as campaign donation. You have to reveal it in exactly the same way, and only domestic people get to spend money ...

I think it’s the most transparent in the world, one of the most. Because of that, we do witness that foreign money prefers not to enter through this route, because it will get revealed, you see. They prefer to buy precision target advertisement on social media or even on regular ...

Finally, during election, we have a special set of rules -- it’s the same as the US-proposed rule called Honest Advertisement Act -- that says because in our campaign donation, everyone who donates has a cap, and the auditing, the Corrective Yuan publishes down to each detail in a machine-readable ...

We are reaching very similar agreements with other social media as well. And so LINE, Facebook, and so on, they are all on board to implement this "Notice and Public Notice" system, which is definitely not a notice and takedown system. We’re not taking anything down, you see.

If you click here, you can learn more, but if you have any other friend, then Facebook prefers to show you the post from other friend instead of this one. They say that it can decrease the virality to maybe less than one fifth of the original reach, which is ...

Once they do that, we expect that this would inform the Facebook’s algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people’s newsfeed, but it’s not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it’s already ...

God knows why they spread this message. In any case, it is a popular message, and so the Taiwan FactCheck Center go into the conventions, the actual treaties that our Minister of Foreign Affairs signs, and things like that, cites, or its sources, and finally say this is false.

Here are all the reports that they just published. For example, there was a really popular rumor that says whenever a earthquake is larger than degree 7.0 then other nearby jurisdictions can send its rescue teams without the approval of the country that suffers the earthquake. A excuse for invasion, ...

Even more than that, we have professional fact checkers in the Taiwan FactCheck Center that looks at the trending disinformation as reported by this mechanism and do a real reporter fact-checking public audit to that by checking to the sources, and so on, and publishing the report. The TFC, or ...

When sufficient people flag it, it goes into a public database where you can see all the trending disinformation, propaganda. That, by itself, inoculates people because it becomes a social object in the open, google-able, that people can talk about.

We’re developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality ...

If we have too much time we’d go through the junk mail folder. If you do look at a junk mail folder, you’ll still see a warning bot that says, "This is probably junk mail. Think twice before responding."

There’s a whole system for that. It’s like the email’s immune system so that after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach the recipient, it’s not censorship, but it goes to the ...

Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag that as spam you’re essentially donating the signature of this message. It’s not involuntary. It’s a voluntary donation to a global system ...

If you receive an email and you think it’s spam or junk mail, theoretically it’s personal communication. The state should have nothing to inspect your email. If you think this email is from a random country that has a princess that has $5 million that ask for your account or ...

We have developed, in conjunction with LINE and various on Facebook and friends, a system, what we call Notice and Public Notice. This system is akin to the anti-spam system.

What end-to-end encryption means, unlike Facebook, Twitter, or something that’s google-able, these channels you cannot use search engine to discover them. It’s like a closed room, an echo chamber, and so it’s really easy for them to mutate into a more potent meme before they release this out in the ...

Some of them do get viral without our notice. Usually it takes place on end-to-end encrypted channels, like WhatsApp, but in Taiwan it’s called LINE. It’s the same thing.

It took a while. We started assembling this since Kolas Yotaka became our spokesperson. They only become really pervasive by last month or so, so it really took a while, but now if you look at our real-time clarification it’s really quick. That’s the first line of defense.

It is very time consuming because this is not part of the public service training. We do have to get this kind of cross-discipline team assembled within each ministry to do that.

Even with that, deputy ministers, as well as director generals, they do have a 24/7 channel for this kind of real clarifications. If something escalates really quickly, then they can approve really quickly.

What we’re doing is a few things. First, that each ministry, some of them have the budget to contract out to professional communication firms. Also, we try to get the ministers to pre-approve frequently asked questions so that they can use these material in real time, without going back to ...