Thank you.

This is the deliberative?

We’ll see about that. [laughs] Do you have any other questions?

They are essentially, via several layers of laundering payments, working for foreign adversaries, possibly including China, and that specifically if they are engaging in marketing, that you would perhaps consider PRC propaganda, depending on the income stream, that that might not be legal.

So, just to follow up on that, we, one of the things we discovered kind of throughout our work this year, we’ve been in Taiwan for a few days now, is the idea that — putting the influencers and individual people aside — there are Taiwanese marketing firms, based here ...

This is already true for investment schemes, but we’re looking to extend it to… to more cases, or we can say, you know, there’s this general pollution on the fabric of trust, which can be cured through, like, journalism, through deliberation, through democratic resilience activities, and so your earnings part ...

Now they’re more and more saying, you know, using organic content and large language models or multi-models, that they’re no longer even copying the news anymore, and if they’re not copying copyright or copyright adjacency, adjacency doesn’t count. And so by us becoming a competent authority, we can then shape ...

And so this also gives us another pathway toward whether to direct some of the revenue they earn from internet advertisement into democratic resilience or into journalism or things like that, which is another highly debated area. Maybe not as much in the US, but certainly in Australia and Canada. ...

And by saying that, okay, previously there’s only the advertisement trade belonging to the economy minister, there’s no separate online advertisement. But, you know, the bus or the combo or whatever, all that, the so-called kanban advertisement, are nothing like those precision persuasion stuff that we were just talking about. ...

So I think we will continue to work with our Fair Trade Commission here, and, of course, the NCC for online communication in general. But I think the main change here is that we are assuming the competent authority mantle for online advertising and platforms, because with it comes the ...

It just sounds facetious, but anyway, at the current moment, it stays that way, instead of confusing the two categories. And this is, I think, why the analogy of robocalls and so on are so good, because there are already established practices in both the US and Taiwan about robocalls. ...

It just ensures that robots who don’t enjoy freedom of association shouldn’t, in the first place.

Audrey Tang Yeah, and I read recently that the fake calls are also local calls. So, very good, President. I think these are important, exactly as you put it, because none of this changes the fundamental protections of online speech or association, or any of those rights, right?

So I’m curious, and it’s not one-to-one, right? The authorities of the US and the Taiwanese FTCs are not exactly the same. So I’m curious in the Taiwanese context whether you think that there is any opportunity there in the deceptive business practice angle.

We know there isn’t really an analogous case here, but the Taiwanese FTC had a case a few years ago where they went after, I think it was Samsung, for doing fake reviews.

So I’m curious, because we’ve been thinking about this, not just Taiwan specific, but more broadly in the US context, in the European context, through a deceptive business practices lens, where, for instance, in the United States, the FTC has started to… there was a landmark case a few years ...

Right. And especially they’re not content-based measures, because they’re after the user.

Exactly.

So it sounds like the direction you’re going in general, you talk a lot about authenticity, transparency, anti-fraud measures, and it’s really interesting because we’ve sort of adopted almost a similar approach in thinking about this issue through a deceptive business practices, consumer protection angle. We, at least our initial ...

And they all very much serve a different purpose but are all kind of within this very broad…

And C2PA and all of that. Could you talk a little bit more about working with these platforms, both the big platforms, like Meta and Google, whatnot, and perhaps smaller platforms, like PTT? I know there are tinier ones.

You talked about how you’ve spoken to Meta and Google and some of these other platforms that now because they’ve signed on to this synthetic, and I forget the name of it.

We’ve covered a lot.

So you’re conceptualizing a threshold by which it touches or interacts with a certain segment of Taiwanese society that would be able to.

Okay.

No, I’m talking about the use of influencers who are in a particular niche. They talk about gardening or something. They don’t have a ton of followers. But they will be contracted out through these internet marketing agencies, who are contracted by parts of PRC to read from script or ...

Yes, exactly. They’re normal advertisers but it’s not an ad and it’s not sponsored content. It’s very hard for platforms to take it down if it’s not considered CID or coordinated online behavior, and to a layperson, it looks like organic content. So is that relevant or does that intersect ...

Right, through the pipeline.

I want to ask a question about working with platforms, and I know that you’ve spoken about this in the past, and it’s actually very interesting, given the legislation that you’re referring to about digital comments when it comes to ads. So one part of this ecosystem that we are ...

And also on authenticity, which I think we’ve thought a lot about as sort of the future of determining what is true. You talked a little bit about preventative measures for society and resilience building among societies, so I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you ...

Yeah. I know that’s super fascinating. And it sounds like you’re doing a lot on the provenance issue.

We know there are several agencies that work on a different part of this, the NCC, the Ministry of National Defense, so on and so forth. So, what role does MoDA play and what are the initiatives that you’re currently moving?

So, I guess to start, we’d love to hear a little bit about how MoDA kind of fits into the Taiwanese government apparatus of countering disinformation.

So, all of us have worked on cyber operations and influence operations from sort of the different vantage points, so it’s very interesting to working on this project together.

So, just by way of background, I’m Sarah. Before Stanford, I worked for the US government for the Department of Homeland Security, working on national security, cybersecurity, and influence operations issues. Elliot was the product owner of a social media analytics platform that had government clients, and Nickson is a ...

We’re working with the Doublethink Labs here in Taiwan to understand the ecosystem of Chinese disinformation both in Taiwan and globally, and specifically how the PRC uses private actors, including marketing firms both in Taiwan and outside of Taiwan, to carry out this disinformation here.

So, our project, we’re a Stanford group of researchers and graduate students.

So, I think you know a little bit about our project, but I’ll just give some brief introductions, and then we can get into it.

Well, thank you for meeting with us. We’re so glad that Kirk was able to put us in touch. He’s a good friend.

Trying to figure out where to sit.

I’m Sarah, it’s nice to meet you.