Yes.

Thank you very much.

If we need to double-check something, do we just email you?

Can we embed it more in some way? Can we codify the use of Polis to not just be…

It’s a ray of sunshine listening to it, because our situation is so dark and so negative. How sustainable is it? How vulnerable is it? Even as we’re talking, I could see so many ways this could be undermined. Will the next government do it? Is this just you?

Audrey, all this, it sounds exciting. In this brief conversation, we’ve gone through regulatory measures. We’ve gone through security issues. We’ve gone through content creation. Clearly, your philosophy, I can see how it works in all those things.

They’re doing this pro bono. They’re doing it out of their sense of social service, not like a public broadcaster.

That’s good, then. We’d call that government comms. The comedians and stuff, this is a full-time job, especially like now. Is that the case?

I get the fact-checkers are doing their fact-checking thing. There’s a limit to that because there’s not that many fact-checkers in the world. This other side, this humor over rumor, is that like dedicated journalists who have now committed themselves to this? That’s their jobs, basically? It’s a very specialized…

Facebook then agreed to put that fact check on all this content that they have identified?

The content itself isn’t necessarily untrue. It could just be emotional in some way.

When you talk about deception there, you’re talking about it has to be deceptive content or deceptive behavior in this case? A lot of Russian and Chinese ops are the same. They just say whatever. They just say, “You can’t trust this thing.”

Two questions.

How do you define public harm?

If I understand your position towards foreign information operations versus the domestic one, it’s about competing rather than takedowns. Is there a legal definition of disinformation?

That seems to be a more solid principle to unite democracy and security. Of course, China is also, it’s not just about ownership. It’s also about various disinformation campaigns. I am very interested about how you try to get the balance there as well.

Basically, we’re saying, with non-democracies, which is a different set of…That has to be one of the standards that promotes openness. Openness goes together with other open systems.

How does one make sure that those decisions are also based on rights and democratic values, or is it just like them and us? We know that they’re threat, therefore, they don’t come in. Is that how ultimately that’s decided?

You framed that around an efficiency argument, but it’s clearly a security argument as well. How does one find that balance between security and openness? You talk so much about transparency, but here was a really quite hard geopolitical decisions.

It seems to me quite an insidious challenge, in many ways, not least because, in its own weird way, the Chinese internet is an efficient Internet. It seems to be, anyway. It seems to deliver services to people. It’s not open about its oppression. You’re much closer to it. What ...

Audrey, we’ve been talking a little bit about these American companies, but of course, the other big challenge is China. You’re right on the edge of that. To what extent do you frame or do you think about your vision of how Internet and democracy should work together vis-à-vis the ...

There needs to be progress to find consensus among the democracies that we think are of the key movers.

I’m wondering if enough democracies could club together around common principles, essentially we’d have trade unions. We’d be like trade unions bonding through the algorithmic rights.

You think that has to be done jurisdiction by jurisdiction? There are some dreams which aren’t actually at that great a distance, about democracies creating common regulatory norms around algorithmic transparency …

I suppose I have got stuck in thinking about data as a block. Practically, would that mean people would have more rights around these different types of data?

We have the Chinese model, which is all about giving up a lot of your data. But without data, I guess the Internet loses its power as well in terms of its problem-solving capability. How have you solved this?

I suppose that gets into the next question, a question about the other big debate everybody’s having, is about data and data rights. What is privacy? Obviously, we have this idea of surveillance capitalism.

How do we get that right, or what is the real…? We get transparency a lot as the solution, and I just wondered, as one thinks it through, when does it end?

This idea of radical transparency that you talk about a lot, how far does it need to go, and are there any limits on it? In this case, we’re talking about whether people do have the right for a little bit of a lack of transparency in order to protect ...

We work with Demos together, so know how they’re using it. Anne, I think you had some very specific questions about Polis and how politicians might react to it. I don’t know.

We think we understand it, even though we’re not technologically that savvy. Could it just as easily work somewhere else? Is Polis and vTaiwan, is this like a new model that we can start overcoming polarization?

As we’re on polarization, maybe we should get into the innovations that you’ve been pioneering or you’ve been helping pioneer. We’ve read a lot about them. We don’t you to repeat for the millionth time how it works.

It is, but in America, I’m not sure who’s meant to heal the crisis. In Europe, we have a tradition of public service media. There is an idea about who could do this. In America, they trust innovation and a tradition of civil society which I think is quite drained ...

Right, yeah. The Vatican encyclical.

Maybe Facebook reform has to be pushed by megachurches, and then everybody in America could get behind it. That’s very interesting. I wonder how one could replicate the mutual commitments and trust in civil society.

In America, actually, there’s new research that shows that one of the civil society bodies that actually overcomes polarization in America are megachurches. Very surprising, but they actually have both sides onside.

It’s like a degree of trust in the social sector in Taiwan that also helps this or is that polarization issue?

Also, I’m thinking like, you’re talking about the social sector as a unified body that everyone seems to trust and represents everyone. I can just imagine in America, where civil society is already a polarized term, civil society is seen, sadly, as only representing one part of society.

It’s part of the code of conduct for the parliamentary elections that Facebook was going to do an ad library, and they ignored it, basically. [laughs]

Fine. That already sounds a lot like the philosophy that we’re talking about, but in terms of vision of the Internet, is there a role for the state in it then? How does one make sure that that role is never coercive and is always…?

With. Sorry.

Excuse me?

You now work in government, and how does translate into…

Maybe I don’t know the…I know the philosophy of the early Internet superficially, just from John Perry Barlow, the former Grateful Dead singer and stuff, and it’s literally anarchist sometimes.

This is Peter: We’re running this interview together in our own kind of Taoist exercise, I suppose. How’s it been like taking those principles, especially the early Internet philosophy, and then moving that into actual policymaking? Is it possible to translate those ideas?