This story I’m writing, it’s largely about the use of Facebook, other social media in the upcoming campaign. Everybody wrote about it in 2014, but since then there hasn’t been much that people have said about it. Things have really changed since then. There’s been the Cambridge Analytica thing. Facebook has changed its privacy. There’s the GDPR things coming into effect.

All of this together, I think it’s really going to change the environment between 2014, 2018, and 2020.

What about 2016?

Again, not much writing that went on.

No analyses?

Yeah, as far as I can tell. 2014 was the big watershed, especially Ko Wen-je’s campaign. There’s been endless academic literature about that. Something specifically with you I want to ask about is, the social media literacy campaign. I know you’ve been working on this quite a while.

That was in my previous role working with NAER.

What’s going on with it now? Has it been implemented?

As far as I know, the NAER, the National Academy for Education Research, has been working with the Media Watch Foundation on a five year plan to develop supplementary materials for the teachers, train the trainers, to have teachers know what media literacy is, how to integrate it into everyday education.

How does it work across all the different fields and disciplines, instead of just one class for children learn? I think the Media Watch people will have the most up to date ideas. The NCC also, I think, is working on its own media literacy education programs and applications, as well, but I don’t oversee them on a day to day basis. I was part of the committee, but no longer.

Do you think Taiwan’s well prepared, in general?

Yes, very much so.

What do you think the state of media literacy in Taiwan is at the moment?

I was just talking with journalists from Global Views Monthly, the GVM. They are very interested in this topic, as well. I think people in Taiwan who are digital natives or people who learned to use Internet, it’s just part of their life. They don’t think real space/cyberspace. It’s already very integrated.

They get exposed to all kind of different materials, so source checking and so on, it’s already a instinct. It’s very difficult to infect people with a viral message and expect people not to fact check. In that sense, I think Taiwan’s very healthy.

Of course, there are pockets of population who are educated in a more authoritarian era, before the martial law was lifted. They tend to look at messages printed in some form that were spoken with some authoritative voice or are credited to some authoritative figure and be more inclined to believe it. That is really a Taiwan specific issue.

In many other countries, the freedom of speech was taken for granted for all the generations. In Taiwan, there is a generational/educational gap. With the prevalence of social media and lying in particular, we see a lot of cross generational learning taking place, as well. Even the older generations are now catching on that not all what they see is real.

Do you think propaganda specifically coming from China is a big concern?

I don’t think so.

You don’t think so? Why not?

First of all, the virality of a message is just like a chain mail. Every time it spreads, the one that was mutated to be more trustworthy seeming [laughs] gets more people sharing it. The one that doesn’t really hit something in people’s mind, they don’t get to spread.

Even though maybe the original message originated from somewhere else than Taiwan, for it to become really viral, it needs a lot of local contributions. For foreign actors, it’s much easier if you just sponsor a local team doing local originating content, instead of trying to supply your own message and try to spread it. The memes from foreign Internet culture don’t spread very well here.

I think people can tell the difference, too, when something comes from Taiwan and when it doesn’t.

Right, exactly. It’s much easier to buy entire media companies than...

...to try to play wu-mao.

Fair enough. The other half of this that I really want to get into is the use of...When the Cambridge Analytica story broke, everybody was talking about psychometrics and how they’d scraped all of this Facebook data. Do you think people’s private Facebook data is easily available for sale in Taiwan now? Or was it in the past?

It depends. For a while, Facebook was very lax in what kind of data is shared. Around the time when Farmville and related Flash games were very popular. It coincides with the initial round of mobile phone apps. I think people didn’t really have a social norm back then. It’s very easy for an app to ask for all the permissions and have the user accept it.

Now of course with recent end to end iOS, it’s no longer possible. The first time it asks you, you bet it has a really good idea because otherwise the user will not click to authorize a dozen of permissions, because it’s on an as needed basis now.

The design of the original, I would say, prototype, Android especially, mobile phone systems coupled with a more lax privacy policy created a much easier to access snapshot of people’s state back then. Of course, people grow. It’s been years now. It’s no longer very up to date. They’re irrelevant now, if you’re talking about evaluation of voting behavior, that is. People’s name, of course, may stay the same now.

I’ve talked to a couple of people in Taiwan. When I’ve asked them for practical things the Taiwanese people can do to keep their data safe, they talk very heavily about anything coming from China. You should never put WeChat on your phone. You should never use a Chinese phone. Do you think these concerns are overblown?

No. Even if you use an iPhone, if you don’t use two factor authentication, or if you use a seemingly very useful, but actually there’s no privacy policy and so on, if you download the wrong app, even if you’re using an iPhone updated to the latest OS, it’s not guaranteed that, because, after all, at the end of the day, it is your personal data you enter there.

Part of our Digital Communication Act, which is now under debate in the legislation, and we expect it to pass soon, what we say is that it’s important, it’s mandatory even, for those platforms to publish their privacy policy in a user understandable way to be accountable for the choices they make and things like that.

What we ask is transparency. We’re not saying the government is rating the apps from five star to one star, but we’re asking as the bare minimum that they’d be responsive and accountable to the privacy policies and actions that they take. This is the same direction that’s taken by the European Union when it comes to their disinformation or misinformation principles.

It is up to each user to choose who they trust. It is also up to each user to choose reputable vendors that have a good privacy policy. I certainly wouldn’t say that the nationality is the only or even a major indicator. There’s many other indicators. The lack of a privacy policy, for me, is a huge red flag.

Do you think the act goes far enough?

I’m sorry?

Do you think the act goes far enough, the privacy act going through legislature right now?

It’s several acts: the Digital Communication Act for one, the Cybersecurity Act for another. There’s also the very specific action acts like the Anti Harassment Act and things like that. Taken together, we try to strike a balance.

In Taiwan, freedom of speech is a core value. It’s not an instrumental value. Anything that we introduce, it can only empower the citizens instead of doing decisions for the citizens. The entire idea is working with the people instead of for the people.

With the people direction, I think we’re going pretty far. There’s still a lot of room, especially around education and media literacy, but Taiwan is definitely leading Asia in this particular regard. There are many other Asian countries going other directions, and they’re going very far.

Those are not the directions we’re going.

Especially Malaysia now. Who is collecting the most data from Taiwanese citizens?

LINE and Facebook.

The LINE and Facebook? True.

Nobody has been able to give me concrete numbers on this. I’ve talked to a lot of people who have said that many government agencies had their own Facebook social data scraping, Facebook and other.

Some of them, yes. They look for specific keywords. It’s not about private profiles. They just look at the public posts, and they watch specific keywords.

Do you have any idea how widespread this is?

It’s pretty widespread.

It’s pretty widespread.

At least a dozen agencies or ministries are paying companies to do this kind of keyword monitoring for them.

Individual election campaigns, presumably, will have their own operations.

I have no idea.

You have no idea?

I’m not running.

You’re not running?

I’m over that.

Despite rumors to the contrary, I know.

That would be misinformation. [laughs]

Cambridge Analytica themself, their parent company said on their website that they’d worked for some campaign in Taiwan somewhere around 2010 or before. Do you have any idea who this is, or do you know anybody who might know?

Not at all. As I said, I’m not involved in election at all.

You’re sure?

Not even in the previous campaigns. My only role is that of a voter.

[laughs] Fair enough.

I really don’t have any idea.

Do you have any idea who would be overseeing this or who would know about this specifically?

The individual candidates, especially after 2014. Many of the candidates and the major parties, they all have specific departments related to Internet’s public relationship and things like that. If you’re talking about 2010, I don’t really know. I don’t really know, yeah.

OK. What advice would you give to ordinary citizens looking to keep their data private?

Check for privacy policy and always use two factor authentication. If you’re using a messaging system, make sure it’s using end to end encryption. If you’re going to a website, look for the HTTPS lock sign. It’s just very, very rough cybersecurity advice is. Actually, not clicking past this is insecure website screens, I think is one of the habits.

One of the thing that I did when I become Digital Minister is that we asked 25 interns last year, 35 interns this year, to check for the desktop and mobile versions, respectively, for all the government websites and services. We’re upgrading everything to secure HTTPS.

We’re making sure that as part of our service flow, regardless of which device you use, you see the same experience and not having to click through insecure warnings and things like that. If the government makes a habit for people to ignore those warnings, then when they encounter real, malicious cyber attack or phishing attacks, they get a wrong habit.

They get used to clicking through Java warnings as part of filing their tax system. That was the case last year for Mac and Linux users. That was a really bad thing to do. Today we have completely rewritten the Mac and Linux tax filing system on many other systems.

What I’m saying is that the government should not ask its citizen to perform insecure actions. We tried to let citizens see that as red flags, instead of things that are just a nuisance for people to just click past.

What else have you been working on lately?

Lately, I’ve been working on AI related policies. There’s an AI banking, fintech sandbox, that’s already passed by legislation. Just this week, we’re going to work on the AI mobility sandbox on crude vehicles like on ships, cars, and drones.

We’re going to have a what we call a regulatory co-creation environment, where people can experiment of co-domestication of AI mobility agents to establish a social norm around safety and explainability together. It’s fascinating area of both social and technological innovation. We’re working with the legislation. Hopefully, we’ll send it this week.

Great.

We’ll be updating our plans in AI Taiwan. That’s ai.taiwan.gov.tw. There are many other web pages, smart.taiwain.gov.tw, bio.taiwain.gov.tw. That all ends in gov.tw. It’s using a more modern aesthetics. We’re very aware of that. We’re working on that, too.

Speaking of that, how would you rate Taiwan’s e-government right now?

I think it’s pretty good at the service level, the responsive level, the way it works on mobile. The few cases where it’s not working, I said that 35 interns around Taiwan as we speak, are now doing service check to make sure that all the government websites and services are mobile friendly, accessibility friendly, and things like that.

However, if the service is in English, it may not be as good. [laughs] It’s sometimes not updated in time. It could be very unfriendly. Or it lags behind. Or you can’t find things. Or even if it’s in English, it’s not phrased in a way that native English speakers would use. You have to guess what it actually means. Normally, it’s actually easier if you go to Chinese website and use Google Translate.

It really depends on the government department, too, in very unexpected ways. The agriculture, the website’s perfect in English.

Yeah, it’s very good.

The National Police Agency, it’s godawful.

Well, which is why we’re working with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This whole taiwan.gov.tw domain belongs to the MOFA. The MOFA did not work that closely with all the different agencies. Just as you said, there are some that really have a sense and work very closely, but some don’t. They don’t even know there is a resource that they can use.

We’re now working with all the different agencies to try to give the English presence on the web a more unified look. Also, a better updated way of getting the target audience something relevant to them, instead of pushing essentially just fliers [laughs] into the website. Yeah, I’m painfully aware of that.

How important is English? Do you have any idea like when people access government websites what percentage is in Chinese? What percentage is in English?

Yes, we do. I think that one of the things is that we have to really strategically use Google Translate. We see more and more people if they use Chrome, they just automatically go into an English version because it’s machine translated

I think a more strategic use of auto translation, a more strategic use of accessibility guidelines, because if everything is in PowerPoint, or PDF, or just plain images, then there’s harder to translate for the current generation of machine translators, I can do to make it easier.

The very simple thing of being things as text, things have a readable alternative text, and things like that, that massively helps not just blind people but people who rely on automated translation. We’re not saying that anything have to be painstakingly hand translated, but we’re making the whole website more amenable for Google Translate and other automated translations, that's what we’re saying.

Do you think you’ll stop with English?

No. If it’s Google Translated...

If it’s Google Translated...

...all English related languages.

Even if it’s Arabic or Klingon, if you’re using Microsoft Translator...

...as long as we have the right infrastructure, I think it would go very well.

Especially now with the New Southbound Policy, we now have that more of our people actually are working with the Minister of Economy and so on to make sure that we have a targeted portal for if you’re in India, if you’re in Indonesia, and so on, that the website doesn’t look too bad even if it’s translated into local languages.

Admittedly, it’s still a long way to go compared to English, but if we do it in a more universal, what we call internationalization, instead of just localized to English way, then it will pay off for all the different languages.

Back to social media literacy, it’s getting taught in schools, presumably, now. I had a journalist call up a couple of schools. They haven’t implemented it yet.

No, because the new curriculum takes effect next year. All we have now is pilot classes.

Where are these pilot classes?

You have to look up the National Academy of Educational Research. You can contact the NAER directly.

That’s for younger people, but I feel like older people are the problem. What can be done to get older people more media literate, more tech literate in Taiwan?

They can spend more time with younger people.

Fair enough.

Other than that, I think education is the lifelong thing. Recently, Minister of Education said that even if you’re already going through adulthood, you can easily get back to a college and apply for a up to 10 years program.

University or college, including the normal universities, and also what we call experimental schools now up to university can apply to be experimental as well. Also, community colleges, they’re the three pillars of that, should and it’s already engaging with the public more. If you want to look into details, the key word here is University Social Responsibility or USR.

This year, we’re expanding the last year’s USR program into what we call 高教深耕, the deep cultivation of higher education so that they work as a community center, open up a lot of the literacy programs and other programs to people around their university as a community rather than just people who apply for their degree.

I think the USR program will also play some role in making sure that everybody has access to the latest thinking around media literacy.

Is there anything else you want to tell me about this subject? These are my questions.

Many of this is, in Taiwan, I would like to emphasize that, for people who are of an older generation. It’s not just digital transformation, because in other countries, when we talk about digital transformation, it’s mostly from paper, a non-interactive media to a screen, which is a very interactive media.

In Taiwan, there’s also a change of thinking from an authority based political system and education system to a more communication based education and political system. That is unique in Taiwan. Spain went through something like that. Now some Asian countries are going through this.

By and large, in Taiwan there is a very coinciding timeline where the Internet, personal computers, democracy, and lifting of martial law happened in the same year and created a very huge divide between the generations educated before that year and generations educated after that year. I’m caught in the middle.

People younger than me don’t remember martial law, but I still do. It is our generation’s social duty to make sure that both generations understand each other, where they’re coming from, and then together face this new kind of media landscape.

This work, if done correctly, it’s not just digital transformation, but it will be a transitional reconsolidation between the different generations’ take the role of authorities play in the society.

That’s very good even from a transitional justice viewpoint. It’s very good because, frankly speaking, for the young people, many of them can’t understand why this reliance on authorities is so big for the older generations. For the older generations, that’s part of their natural education.

I see. Great.

We’re good?

Those are my questions.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I’ll send you a transcript.

Great. I’m going to publish on Friday.

We’ll publish afterwards.

Awesome.