Fascinating. Thank you very much, minister.

Government after Silicon Valley, how is it?

No, I agree. I’m saying, compared to Taiwan, if you’re...

If you compare the size of Taiwan’s datasets to the size in China’s, and the willingness. I don’t what privacy laws exist here. We assume that in China, not only is there a large amount of data, but the freedom to exploit that data for generating AI...

The other thing, when we’ve written about AI, that we’ve focused on a lot is the utility or essential to have access to very large datasets to be able to use those.

How worried are you about the brain drain, and what can you do to reverse it?

I wonder if I could ask you about digital skills and brain drain.

Sure.

In other words, if you want to use them, there are solutions out there.

When we’ve first heard about this, we’ve also understood it in terms of attention hacking. In other words, systems that are optimized, social media companies optimizing their systems in the way they distribute information in order to hack your attention, which is something that email doesn’t do.

I see.

The dot, dot, dot is point of view.

What about if it says, "Such and such a politician gave a racist speech"? How do you know if that’s a rumor, or whether that’s just your point of view? It’s a political judgment.

Just on the Cofacts, because fact-checking, that’s a very familiar concept, I get how that works. With the stage before with Cofacts, when they’re identifying something as a rumor, what do you do about something...Obviously, if it says Tsai Ing-wen is actually a communist agent, that’s a rumor.

Unfortunately no.

Would you say that because you think that there is an evidence that misinformation can change public opinion, mislead and distort public opinion?

Because of the response to it.

It’s considered by some as draconian. I think we’re a favorite. [laughs]

...RIPA, isn’t it? You know the RIPA Act in the UK?

No, it’s not that law. It’s the...

[laughs] The UK is just not scoring top marks.

UK...

That was a Bill Gates proposal, wasn’t it?

As journalists ourselves, we’re often accused of it. [laughs]

There are various layers. There’s the cybersecurity layer. It would be good to cover all of them, but I was thinking initially the misinformation, fake news, and stuff like that.

I wondered if I could start by asking a question about digital Taiwan and digital China, and how much China infiltrates digital Taiwan. In other words, how active in the cyber area China is, and whether that’s a threat to Taiwan in digital at all?

Thank you very much for seeing us. This is my first visit here to Taiwan zone. I’m a generalist on my island, as you’d imagine. This is Ed McBride, who’s our Asia editor. He runs all our Asian coverage. And David Rennie, he’s our Beijing bureau chief, and writes our ...