Very cool.

Wow. There’s traditional elements. There’s cartoon elements. It’s very cool.

When was this released?

I’ll grab a picture of this.

[laughs]

Right, but it’s been a bit shy on policy discussion, this election. Have you been…

Yes, the types of conversations, the content of conversation around this election. In an ideal world, we think of elections as places where there’s a contest of ideas.

This is maybe more of a personal viewpoint perspective. I don’t know how much you deal in these sort of things. When you look at this, there has still been a lot of misinformation flying around. Have you been disappointed with the tenor of conversation?

Do you have any initial ideas on what might come next? What next steps have seemed to be necessary based on what you’ve seen?

I presume there will be an exercise in review after the election is over.

I understand, but it’s an important issue isn’t it not? It does feel like it’s very different for democracy for people inside a country to be having a debate as opposed to a foreign power trying to influence, right?

That’s one example. In aggregate, is the problem, as you see it, largely foreign-inspired or Chinese? Is it largely domestic do you think?

They’re not answering your calls?

Are you able to speak with any authority on the source of disinformation that you’ve seen, as in domestic versus foreign?

That said, this is, in some ways, more important. This is the presidential election. The stakes are higher. Do you feel like all of these efforts have in large measure succeeded, or are you disappointed?

There are fewer questions out there.

That’s interesting. I understand what you’re saying. There’s a lot less scope for disinformation.

You’re talking about restructuring the system of elections in response to disinformation in some ways.

By tenfold?

The surface?

I’ve got to tell you, from the firewall perspective, it’s not getting any better. It’s getting a lot more difficult in China these days. When you look at this in sum, there’s still been a great amount of disinformation that is circulated. Do you feel like, from an overall perspective, ...

What are your observations about, in general, the things that are most effective? Is it as simple as saying, “You need a whole bunch of different ways of attacking this”? Presumably, there’s no silver bullets here. Are there silver bullets?

We’ve talked about two very different things now. We’ve talked about Facebook taking a corporate action in conjunction with the government. We’ve talked about…Is it fair to say more of a crowd-sourced approach when it comes to reporting disinformation in the same way you might report spam?

Did you say there’s four fact-checking groups behind that now?

Yeah, right.

To Thai?

That’s one. One of the questions I had was in which ways do you see some of the response in Taiwan through this election cycle as developing solutions that could potentially be helpful elsewhere? This is one example. Where also are there examples?

To your knowledge, has Facebook ever done that for an election somewhere?

Facebook is providing that data?

Wow.

Facebook was not?

Not about checking?

I know Facebook has had a war room here looking at some of this stuff. Can you tell me about some of the stuff that you’ve seen the social media companies do? Is it as simple as shutting down ads and flagging certain content as potentially disinformation, or is it ...

That’s Puma Shen, yeah?

Baselines are hard. Are you able to do any comparatives in terms of the volumes or types of disinformation this time, perhaps compared to 2018 or 2016?

Right.

There’s been a lot of people talking about it, from the academic side, from the political side. There’s been a lot of people suggesting that they were concerned about this election.

Yeah.

That’s great. It’s just easier to have here.

Do you mind if I take a picture of that?

Uh-huh.

There’s also been efforts by, as you know, Facebook and others, ministries, parties themselves, to counter some of this disinformation at a very fast pace. What have you seen? Do you have any statistics? I know these things are hard to gather.

Exactly. The election’s tomorrow. I guess we can now speak about the election process. Can you give me any sense of what you’ve seen? There’s been lots of warnings that this was going to be an issue. There’s been lots of anecdotal discussion about some of the various memes and ...

Interesting. There are a couple of things I wanted to talk about. The first was the current election. You’ve been one of the people involved in some of the efforts on disinformation and that sort of thing.

You get hits on it?

875,336 words, there you go. Do many people read it?

Wow.

237,841 speeches.

Yeah. You must be at millions of words of transcripts.

How many words of transcripts are you at now?