We’ll be on the record, if that’s OK with you?

Yeah, yeah. No worries.

Let’s get started.

I was very impressed but what all you’ve been doing about misinformation. Similarly, India, we’re facing huge problem. The difference, I guess, here is that you’re trying to solve it. In India, the government & its machinery is propagating it.

Currently, it’s a right-wing religious government. They benefit a lot to misinformation and polarisation, so they have huge IT cell setups through which they’re running it. I co-run a company called CrowdNewsing. We do crowdfunding for independent news, well that was the initial idea.

We started with that, but there are a lot of hate crimes against minorities where we are and people approached us, so we started raising funds for their sustenance & legal battles because no one was willing to stand up for them. Then, we pushed our campaigns towards an activist-friend who wanted to contest elections, so we raised clean money for him.

Now we’ve transformed into an initiative which is doing interventions wherever democracy can be saved, in a way and also where we could build a community. In that aspect, I was thinking a lot of things could be done here, and I would like to discuss with you.

OK.

We also have a couple of third-party fact-checking initiatives. There’s Alt-News and BoomLive. There are also lists of Facebook pages, websites, which create fake content. LINE is not that popular in India, as WhatsApp is, but there’s no way to track WhatsApp anyway. It’s end-to-end encryption, and they haven’t rolled out APIs in India yet.

There’s no bot on WhatsApp?

No, not yet. They might introduce it in the next couple of months, but right now, nothing. WhatsApp is completely dark, but Facebook, Twitter, they keep on making these lists of fake page...

I know you don’t really use the F word [laughs] "fake." Sorry.

It’s fine.

All those pages, accounts, these fact checking initiatives also do a real-time monitoring of them. So at the earliest, something which is damaging it’s being spread, they publish their own things about how this is wrong and how this is false information.

An immune system?

Immune system in a way, but it’s still more in line with damage control. There’s nothing at the source we can do.

It’s reactive then.

It’s reactive, and also affect is very small, because the amount of reach the government right now has to spread the messages is crazy.

Even the party president who heads the government, he has openly been saying that, "You know, we have the capability to spread any message within an hour throughout the country, to every person in any village." They tried it a couple of times, spreading misinformation. They got the results out of it within six hours.

How does the "to every village" part work? Is everybody on social media?

No, everybody’s on WhatsApp. They have a central IT system team. They run around...Last count was like 20,000 WhatsApp groups, which were run centrally in just one state election, and those are the party members. Those party members, at state level, will create sub-branches, for groups. At district level, they create branches and at the village level, they’ll create branches, and then it seeps into citizens whatsapp.

They have a whole ecosystem of WhatsApp, at least. Facebook, you pump in money and you post it to whatever target you want. They’ve been doing it crazily. Even as a majority, I guess the same is in Taiwan. Most of the media here, it’s against the government in a way. That’s what I got the feel of after talking to people.

Is what?

Against the government, mainstream media.

Mainstream media, they make useful criticism. I wouldn’t say it’s just against the government.

Of course, they would not want to be seen as government-controlled — certainly, they’re independent of the government.

If we do something right, maybe they don’t applaud it...

...but they do report it fairly.

That’s not that bad.

If we do something controversial, of course, they work with activists to bring different perspectives.

In India, it’s a totally different situation.

It’s different?

Even the presentations and stuff. There were seven major news TV channels, news channels?

Yes.

In India, we have more than 400 news channels, regional, the 30 states, and 28 official languages.

It’s through cable mostly?

Yeah, mostly through cable. There are at least 100 satellite, central national television news channels, and 99 percent are owned by big businesses. The current government is very friendly with the big businesses, so there is no criticism of the current government which comes in the mainstream news & its all changing the real narrative.

We also do the crowdfunding for roughly seven-eight independent journalist, media setups, online websites in total, basically, not the huge channel setup because it costs crazy. That’s also helping a lot.

At least access to social media is unrestricted?

Yeah, that is there. These independent channels are using Facebook and YouTube to promote the right news, this grassroots narrative countering the main stream narrative. That’s gaining momentum in a way.

Yeah. In a sense the freedom to assemble online is still there.

It’s there, but it comes at a risk.

Of course it is risky inherently, but also what you’re describing is that in the mainstream media, there’s few sympathizers that can amplify the message on the social media to the mainstream?

Yeah. That has worked a couple of times, but it requires a lot of organizing. There were a lot of hate crimes going on, so we had a huge protest called Not In My Name. It happened in 30 cities in India and 15 cities abroad, London, New York, we mobilized in such huge way, so then the prime minister had to reply to that, but that’s one-off instance.

It has to be really viral.

Really viral. We had an opportunity that the PM was in Germany then, and I knew a couple of campaigners, activists in German/International media. They published stories there, and there he was pressurized to make a statement that this is not acceptable & "I will do something to stop the hate crimes."

Just like #MeToo.

Yeah, similar to #MeToo.

Today it’s #WontBeErased that’s trending in Twitter hashtags.

What you’re saying is that it needs an international organization for the government to take it seriously?

Take it seriously. It was not just social media, but it was homegrown, so we had 30 homegrown protests in different places. That helped in a lot of way, because all the local media covers it. That one thing, if even the mainstream media ignores you, local media they need news, so they will cover if you’re doing something local.

That is one of the ways we have been trying to tackle misinformation by promoting local media and independent media which works in a specific region, which has history of violence, which has a history of problem, so which gets inflated by the mainstream news. An initiative we raised money for is called ’Chal Chitra Abhiyan’

We have some certain startups there, small startups there, who work on those news and who maintain the peace, at least for now. That’s working in a way. Are you doing a campaign to tackle misinformation?

To tackle misinformation?

I’m asking you. Sorry.

There are many campaigns.

Let me bring my iPad.

Sure. Can I have some water?

Sure. The main campaign is called media literacy, and it’s part of an education reform. Before joining the cabinet, I was a K-12 curriculum committee member.

What we’re essentially doing is to make media literacy part of our K-12 education. Next year we’re rolling out in the first grade of primary high, the first grade of junior high, and the first grade of senior high the media literacy curricula, and it is not a specific class.

It is a way to teach civics, to teach mathematics, to teach physics, to teach anything using Internet-based sources, but with the teacher like a navigator explaining the framing of the messages and show the student how to see through the media framing and narratives and make decisions of itself.

This is the main...We’re the first one in Asia to basically say a teacher is no longer the authoritative source of truth, because everywhere else in Asia its teacher represent authority. There’s the standard answer, and you have to basically agree with the teacher to get a grade.

There have been a lot of rewriting of history in India now, so they have been trying to...Misinformation is not just limited to news, but they’re even trying to put it into curriculum.

It’s an example.

What you’re trying to do is you want to create media literacy in schools...

In the sense that everybody can form their own opinion. In Taiwan, the history of Taiwan is very different if you’re taking an Austronesian indigenous people viewpoint, or if you take it a viewpoint of people who lived in the Dutch colonies and the Koxinga period, or of people who lived under the Qing and under the Japanese rule, or people who came with the Kuomintang, and also newcomers from all over the world, especially from the Indo-Pacific region...

Everybody brings a different view to Taiwan so there are no "official" history. [laughs]

There are certain facts which are there.

Which are there, but we make it clear that these facts are felt differently by different people. We think the more complete the picture is the more capable the student will be able to form their own opinions.

We’re not censoring history. We’re doing the exact opposite. We’re uncovering the different memories from different groups of people around the same historical fact, but with the teacher or of civics...

Narratives are different.

...in a facilitative role. Not saying that you have to interpret it this way, but encourage students to deliberate from very different angles. In the classroom, there will also be students from different backgrounds.

In terms of rewriting history in India, they are changing the end results of wars basically.

Oh, wow.

There is a written historical reality of which king won and which king didn’t. Apparently, when there was a Mughal invasion in India and there were Hindu kings, local kings, most of the Hindu local kings lost because the Mughals had a huge army. They had artillery, everything. Now, they’re trying to rewrite the history that no, they won.

That’s what I’m saying in terms of facts.

You think it’s out of a motivation of...

It’s out of a motivation of appeasing the Hindu majority. This is right-wing Hindu government so they want to portray that they are the saviours. You need their government to make sure that Hindus are safe, which are 79 percent. They’re not under threat, but they want to create the perception that they are under threat.

It’s more of, you think, a patriotic kind of education?

Yeah, patriotic. It’s a false propaganda. It’s not based on history, and history in terms of just the end result of a war, not how it happened and what had been happened -- there can be perspectives and views about that -- but changing the outcome and claiming something which is not true.

That’s also happening in terms of changing curriculum. You’re trying to teach students to make their own opinions. Here, you’re imposing a false opinion to students.

That’s exactly right. We think the current misinformation, they piggyback on people’s ideologies. If those ideology are formed in a authoritative way, then the news that carries these messages, they only receive the part that agree with their authoritarian ideologies.

The news may be multifaceted, it may be nuanced, but if people are trained in one ideology, then they only take the part that they see...

...and amplify it. It’s not, strictly speaking, an issue of journalism? It is an issue of people selectively understanding?

It’s both layers. People selectively understanding is there. The last four years, this government has been in power in India. The way people used to perceive two years back has changed. They’re not that adhered supporter of the government maybe, some of them.

They’re changing because they also realize how the governments performance is weak economically. They also realize, "OK, this information was false, which the prime minister claimed that this has happened, and it didn’t happen."

Some of them realize it and some of them are changing, but who are sold to the strong ideology, they won’t change. At the same time, if the mainstream media keeps on repeating the same propaganda again and again and they also don’t have avenue to change their opinion, even if they want.

In that way, media needs to be...

To be more balanced.

Yeah, I guess balance is the way. [laughs] That was one of the major reasons we started crowdfunding, because media today is controlled by corporate. There’s no way you can change that in mainstream.

Do you use subscription-based crowdfunding or just one shot, transactional?

We do campaign based.

Just transactional crowdfunding?

Just transactional because sustenance-wise there are a lot of independent websites. They have subscribers who pay monthly donations. We did around seven - eight media campaigns.

Out of that, one was a very senior investigative journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta who was removed from an organization because he did a very strong anti-corporate story, against a group owned by Gautam Adani, our PMs bff. The corporate filed a case. The media organization removed him. Then he was like, "I want to do independent. I’m not going to work with anybody now." Then we raised around two million for him. For the last year, he has been doing amazing stories, books, research.

Because he is independent, he has no pressure from the media organizations. We also helped expand a set up of a grassroots media company in a very violent area of a state where there was a huge polarization of Hindus and Muslims.

Now we can see that after one and a half years it has been effective, that the incidence of violence has gone down. People are coming together thanks to this media because it’s showing different angles. It’s showing different opinions and perspectives, which they won’t see.

Do you think crowdfunding will work here?

Here, we have a history of very successful crowdfunding. During the Occupy, there was a huge crowdfunding effort that put all the advertisement and even on international media.

Recently, subscription-based crowdfunding has been on the steady rise, which is why I asked you about this. We are also seeing shareholding crowdfunding in a sense that you crowdfund, but you become a shareholder. It is actually not recurring... It’s the other way around because it earns money.

You can earn back the money you put forward. We’re also seeing, of course, ICOs/STOs here, the initial coin offerings and security token offerings. There’s a bunch of friends now working on a journalism project called Matter News. What they offer is two things.

First, everything that an independent journalist posts on it is guaranteed to be stored on the InterPlanetary File System, which is a distributed system that cannot be changed. It guards against censorship from the editor or from the government. The piece of investigative report will stay there forever.

You cannot change it. The immutability is one. The second is that they’re designing an economy on it so that people who initially donated or joined a subscription-based membership gets the tokens to reward quality journalism.

They can, for example, collectively refocus on a pressing social need that currently no mainstream news is tackling and fund the journalist to work that. The journalist who make these things and publish it to the immutable blockchain then becomes material that other journalists can reliably use.

Because previously if you don’t have the copyright issue, and you don’t have the storage issue and persistence issue solved, then it tend to be just one piece of investigative journalism, which is good. People are more caring about how their mobilization or intervention changed the situation.

They are not just caring about the current situation or how bad it is. [laughs] They want to know how they can, through a series of intervention, then investigative journalists can follow everything. Like when the mobilization happens, it’s like 50 different branches.

We need maybe not a senior, but still very important, contributors to follow these. The important thing is to put it back to the same thread so that people can understand it from a historical perspective. That is one effort that I think is worth watching.

There’s another one by a long-time friend of mine called Readr. It’s participatory journalism. It encourages independent curators to piece together the context of the news.

For example, if I care about human right, I can connect what’s happening in Taiwan with what’s happening elsewhere in Asia, and see a common trend, or as you say, those international hashtags. One can do editorial work to put this in perspective so that initially, maybe Taiwan people will not care about what happened in your country, for example.

Through curational work, we can link together and say, "While this is happening, this happened in Taiwan 20 years ago. Because we made this change, this sort of thing doesn’t happen again." You can now also help them in whichever way and so on.

I think this curational work is equally important.

It gives a very good context to it.

It gives people a hope that they can make a difference, and that is, I think, as important as the original content work.

In terms of fact checking, are you supporting third-party fact-checkers?

The g0v community has a project that’s recognized in the LINE community as a well-known bot. The idea, very simply is, as you mentioned, in WhatsApp, it’s all in the dark.

By getting the bot, the CoFact bot, into everybody’s consciousness, the community people can encourage their parents and their family to, whenever they see a piece of potential misinformation, just share it to the bot. The bot then crowdsources fact checking and get back to them whether it’s true or not.

What this actually builds is, it surfaces what’s on the darknet into the light. When you share to the bot, if more than two people share it, it automatically gets into the Google indexable public consciousness. It becomes a social object.

Actually, most misinformation spread assuming that it only reach the people who already believe in that ideology or conspiracy. Once it become a common social object, people can contribute. Then it becomes less viral, because the time that the person receives it, they have already heard from somebody else that this thing is spreading.

It’s a long chain.

Right. It basically shortens the distance of propagating and discovery, which is always the critical part. Once it’s discovered by the general public, the general public is more than well-equipped to do fact checking.

The problem was initially that it can stay months in the dark without people knowing that there’s already reaching hundreds of thousands of people, but we don’t know the content or the payload, aside from anecdotes.

I think CoFacts mostly work as this venue. The government supports them not with money or with people — which will destroy the neutrality — because we want to be fact checked too.

That’s good. [laughs]

Whenever we make a mistake in communication, we publish on the home page of the administration as quickly as possible. Also, if we found that other news has reported a partial information, we aim to put forward our part of the information in a kind of piece of puzzle, everybody puzzling together stunts also in our administration home page.

Usually, within one news cycle, like five hours or less. So people get into the habit that if they see something spreading on CoFact or on other channels in the morning, by noon, our ministry will come forward and say, "This is what we know about this."

People learn, because in paper-based magazine, you can have a balanced reporting. In the Internet, it’s impossible. Even if you write something like this, people with ideology just take a snapshot of one side and spread that. [laughs]

That happens a lot.

Instead of a space-based balance, which is gone anyway, we are now seeking for a time-based balance, so that when there’s a piece of information, right afterward, there will be a clarification. Now, of course, the civil society can also challenge that, but then it becomes like a turn-based game.

I make a move, you make a move, and it is more rational this way. In a frenzy of mob lynching or whatever, people don’t take a deep breathe or wait until noon. People just share an act in an outrage. What we are contributing is this sense of a very reliable and timely clarification and response.

What I saw in the presentation was that this bot has very limited reach right now, some 50,000 or 60,000 subscribers?

Yeah, that’s the regular people who use it. What I’m saying is that, because they publish on the public Internet...

They spread it around on the public Internet, yeah.

Which is why we don’t ban the publication of rumors on the Internet, if we ban it, CoFact will not be possible, [laughs] so there’s also more people who are not CoFact users, but they are using individual CoFact URL on Facebook or other social media as topics for discussion.

That reaches far many people than the CoFact core users. The core users just do the initial reporting, but the social media and so on can amplify it. As I must stress again, the main contribution of CoFact is that it gives the URL to a darknet message that previously doesn’t have a URL.

It doesn’t have a URL.

This URL becomes topic for Facebook, or whatever other public discussions. That’s the main contribution.

On ground, is there anything being done to tackle it? This is still social media, face-to-face, or community level.

What we are doing at the moment is three things. The first is my personal office hour. Everybody can come and talk to me. I also hold weekly gatherings every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM. I’m just here in the Social Innovation Lab, so people can come talk to me. It really helps clarify, like if you know what people...

You’re going to be there tomorrow?

I’ll be there tomorrow.

I’ll drop in. [laughs]

Just come by. What I mean is that if you know a friend, you can visit every week, if you hear gossip about them. Of course, it will be clarified within a week, but if that friend only writes back to you, and every five months, [laughs] now, of course, the rumor has room to spread.

Office hour, and then it’s not just two people in Taipei. I also tour around Taiwan to talk with the regional innovators. That also helps to dispel myth and rumors. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that for citizen-originated petitions, sometimes citizens petition for something that could provoke a lot of outrage.

There were people who petitioned for Taiwan to change its time zone from plus-eight to plus-nine. It’s like 8,000 people. What we do with the petitioners is very unique, because we don’t just respond to them on social media, which will only fan the flames, so to speak.

In another way, there’s also a counterpetition of more than 8,000 people, saying Taiwan should remain GMT plus-eight. They were proposing all sort of very wild arguments, like changing one hour will save energy, will increase tourism.

Whenever it is a social focus like this, we actually invite the petitioners from both side to the same room, face-to-face. It’s even live streamed, so people can join online.

We use design thinking methods, and have a team of participation officers in every ministry whose work is to talk with emergent social activists in a way that we use design thinking methodology to make sure all the different, a cacophony of ideas, is well-represented in an overview.

Then we co-create possible solutions by asking, you have different ideology and position, obviously. Are there some common values? Like in the time zone case, we actually, each ministry made a report how exactly changing one hour will change the energy. It doesn’t change much.

It will not increase tourism. There will be some price to pay for the initial migration. There will be some ongoing cost, and so on. We ask, what are you really doing this for? After a morning of meetings, we decided collectively that what people can agree, regardless of which way they petitioned, was that they wanted Taiwan to be seen more unique in the world.

This is something that everybody can agree. The time zone is just one solution to this common problem, this common value. Then we say, first, it would cost a lot. Also, there’s many countries with many time zones.

There is many countries, like Hong Kong, has its own currency. It doesn’t actually make Taiwan that unique. Maybe it will make international news for a day, and everybody forget about it. We have to pay ongoing cost, so maybe not the best idea.

Then the time zone petitioner actually become convinced. Then we started to brainstorm, given this budget, how can we actually make it better use, and make Taiwan more unique? Then they started brainstorming about, for example, we can emphasize our work on human right.

Maybe we can do the open government, diplomacy. It collectively always result into, like this is our tax filing system, which was really ugly. People petitioned against it, and almost started protesting, and calling the minister of finance to resign.

Then we invite everybody who petitioned. They automatically get an invitation to co-creation meeting. People just collectively made a better version this year. 96 percent of people likes it, and other 4 percent, they know their ideas will be brought into the next year.

I think this co-creation is really we being humble, and say people who petition or who protest, it’s because they care.

Always the case.

They know something that we don’t know about this thing. Maybe we can be humble and invite five of them, and listen.

That builds your own community, in a way, that you’re responsive to people’s problems and issues. Then there’s nothing more they want.

Exactly. Then all the 16,000 people who participate in the time zone petition then become kind of friend. They all receive a newsletter of what we have discussed, the points. They are free to still keep their ideology, but at least on the factual basis, we’re on the same factual basis.

This is what I referred to as the public health way to ensure public access and collaborative decision making in a transparent institution. If we do this right, then misinformation does not grow into organized disinformation, because there’s no need to.

There’s no need for it? Also, this still looks to me like more of an urban and social media phenomenon.

No, we go to the rural part, like in Hengchun, the southmost part of Taiwan. They petitioned for helicopters [laughs] to station there as ambulance because they are very far from a largest hospital nearby. It’s a real local medical need.

Because it can be solved in many different ways, it’s not solved until we went into it. It could be solved by having helicopters or it can be solved by working with the ministry of defense which has an airbase nearby or it can be built by building a faster road or it could be fixed by having a better hospital. There’s multiple solution.

Previously, whenever there’s this cross-ministry or interagency issue, then agency A just say, "You know, we think B is the better solution. Agency B was the, is the better solution."

[laughs] It’s funny how...

[laughs] C would say, "A is better solution." Then it goes nowhere. It has been like that for 10 years.

Because our participatory regulation, which I can send a copy to you, has this key clause that says, "You know, if there’s more than two, uh, um, agencies, uh, two or more agencies who think each other should own it, uh, they all own it." They cannot escape.

All the six ministries went to Hengchun with me. Then we start a real town hall discussion that’s two rooms. One is with the stakeholders and the petitioners. There’s 8,000s of them. Then there’s maybe eight of them in the smaller room doing a more expert deliberation.

I’m in the larger town hall which can have hundreds or even thousands of people. I’m like an ESPN anchor...

[laughs]

...to explain to them what this move means in layperson’s language.

I suppose you’re not too popular among the ministries?

Quite the contrary. Really, the larger room views a live stream of the smaller room but not the other way around. People who want to protest or whatever, they can reach me directly but without interrupting the discussion in the smaller room.

I don’t think anywhere in the world this model has been applied or worked. It’s really amazing.

Yeah, but this really works.

At the end, we collectively decided the insight which is the common value which is we need to keep the heart of the nurses and the doctors to the local clinic. The people need to trust their local health workers more. If we send all the people who suffer injury or whatever to Kaohsiung, then gradually people will not even trust their local medical doctors.

We allocated a lot of money actually. I think it was 10 million USD, a large amount of money, 3 billion NT dollars, to build a really modern, state-of-the-art hospital there including the place to live and the latest medical devices. Of course, the local doctors and nurses, there’s no such amount of number to operate them.

We say, "We can make the Kaohsiung people visit HengChun to train. Uh, and if something really happens and there’s no local doctors, we can fly doctors from Kaohsiung here instead of flying patients." because if you suffer a stroke, flying you to Kaohsiung doesn’t make sense. [laughs] People generally agree this is actually better because then the local doctors and nurses can learn from those trips.

That’s the end result. Every other Friday, we run this collaboration meetings. The next Monday, I bring to the prime minister and other ministries a portfolio like, "This is what people want, and, and did you agree?"

If the premier agrees, for example, in this example, he just went to Hengchun to understand the situation himself two weeks afterward and say, "OK, so we’re allocating the budget." Then that’s solved.

That’s much quicker. I don’t think policies are made out so quickly anyway.

That’s right. It’s meant to be a reaction to the already organized. We’re in a sense just amplifying what the local organizers already know without the local organizer because it’s a really small town. They don’t even have this number of people.

They had to organize by inviting people who stay for B&B. Before they check in the B&B, they have a QR code saying, "Do you know what will happen if you run into a diving accident here?"

[laughs]

[laughs] "Before you check in, you better sign the petition."

That’s smart.

They really summon us to the rural place. We even did offshore, like very small island like the Marine National Park in Penghu in the Pescadores. It is used not just in an urban or social media. It’s really used in a rural, as well.

That’s nice to know. [laughs] Also, the general impression is that government should take a lead on tackling misinformation, which is still third-party fact-checker thing?

Yeah.

Not major government initiative?

No, the major government initiative is in the sense that...

It’s just reactionary. If you heard something, then you clarify on the website that...

Yeah, we don’t lie. We clarify our mistakes. If we find people who are mistaken, we clarify quickly. That’s the extent of it. People are worried, of course, that we will move to a priori censorship, which is very popular in Asia. [laughs] We’ll never do that because Taiwan really has the freedom of speech as our core value. [laughs] We’re not changing.

Every other day, there is a case against a media organization.

Yeah, which is why I don’t say fake news because both my parents are journalists, [laughs] out of filial piety.

They must be so troubled to see what is happening.

That’s right. I think there’s a rediscovery of the value of quality journalism, because social media has proven to be more emotion than facts. Traditional investigative especially journalism is about facts and then emotion. It’s a different order. I think this is still of value.

Do you think not a government initiative but some independent initiative on a larger scale which is crowdfunded so people have a stake in it? They have ownership in it.

Yes.

The end result is for people because they are the one who are affected by it.

It’s for public good.

This would also make it mainstream news that this initiative has been working. It started. Then people who are contributing have a stake in it. Then their family and friends will also be involved. It’s happening.

The general feeling which I get is that it’s not happening at a larger scale which needs to be done. I don’t know. I have just been here for four days. I travel and talked to a lot of people. That’s what it is.

I think there are several things here. First is that traditionally, the media itself, especially media with longer history, they say, "We already do fact checking well." They have a history of a newsroom fact-checking.

An independent fact-checker to them is a new idea because they thought, "You know, we, we already do fact checking, even transparently. So why do we need another fact checker to check our facts? [laughs] We’re already doing that as part of media."

I think that sentiment is really what prevents the independent fact-checking campaigns from really growing, because they don’t yet have the endorsement of traditional large media.

If people are unhappy with the traditional larger media, then we’re to take off in a good way. That’s the sense I get, that people are really unhappy with the mainstream media here.

The TV perhaps?

Yeah, mainly TV.

I think magazines and special segment newspapers, they’re still doing fine. Paper-based media, I think generally people still respect to a degree. It is true that mainstream TV is not as popular as it was.

I think that’s also a problem here in the sense that people think if it’s on TV, then you have a license, you a cable, you have a broadcast power. Of course, you need to be held into a higher standard whereas anybody can print anything. [laughs]

Hence actually the opposite.

Nowadays, as you said, it’s actually the opposite. Printing something is very costly. It’s very expensive. Everybody can put anything on your screen now. [laughs]

They’re just advertisements for your pay.

Right. I think it’s really a perception change that need to happen before people actually can understand the idea of a crowd-curated media maybe works for everybody’s benefit more.

Because people have stake in it, they are the contributors. It would be again as you are saying that people are shareholders. They are the stakeholders. They can hold them accountable for everything they do.

We’re seeing that over the world as well. For example, in Bristol, UK, there is still a broadcast station that is a co-op. Basically, everybody in the community is a owner. A co-op, regardless of how many shares you hold, you get one vote. It’s democratic governance.

We’re seeing more and more of that in Taiwan as well in a local way, a local magazine, a local station. I would say in the sense of that it’s spreading, it’s really spreading. In the sense that we can’t point to it and say, "Oh, that’s our new paradigm, like this is a really large one," we don’t have that. We have maybe thousands of small attempts.

Also, in terms of now government policies which are misrepresented in the people, is there conscious effort to do something about it? It will not be a government propaganda in a way because you are just trying to counter the misrepresented narrative which is being spread around. I guess for nuclear plant, there’s an issue with that.

Yeah. I think what we’re now doing is what we call the policymaking context or the accountability trail and account for a policy. There’s many good attempts in Taiwan that basically starts participation way before the policy is made, because if we involve people only on the later stage, the just go to the referendum now. [laughs]

It’s important to have a flow of how people’s ideas can get into the final synthesized white paper. For example, you just mentioned energy. We have an energy transition white paper that transitions into renewable energy but in a way that people can trust.

We have a design. This is not by me. This is by a bunch of friends and people in the energy bureau in the ministry of economy to basically talk to people face to face around Taiwan. It’s like what UNDP did when consulting for the sustainable development goals. They asked millions of people and have a synthesized report, "The World We Want." Then this is very much like it.

We hold any number of meetings and collect everybody’s word. You can see who said what when and where. It’s color coded. Then it shows the segment that it flows through, the working groups that synthesize these ideas into recommendations. Each ministry have to respond and so on.

For people who really participate in any of it, they will go back to this website to see how their words flow into the accountability trail and give comments. Of course, if you haven’t participated in the process, just from the abstract, I agree that this is not sexy enough [laughs] to draw people in.

This is what we see in, for example, the National Forum on Justice Reform, the National Forum on Cultural Policy. This is again a very national forumish thing. We have many national forums that are currently of this shape.

We have some good qualitative indication that people who actually participated, it really changes their way of seeing the policy-making context. It’s less likely for misinformation to flow for these people.

Each one now maybe only reach 5,000 or 10,000 people of the 23 million people in Taiwan. We’re still beginning. I’m not pretending to say that we’ve solved it. This is the way we’re scaling this out.

That’s why I was saying - on-ground initiatives also are required for this?

This is all underground.

Reach-wise, it’s still very limited as you mentioned.

It is very limited. In the next step, what we’re doing is now we’re working on a SOP for running this sort of thing. Through the evolution, we make sure that all the municipalities know how to run this themselves.

In Taoyuan, they have run this kind of participatory budgeting for people who are immigrant workers. They really include people from four different Asian countries. They were not voting citizens. Nevertheless, through participatory budgeting and translation service, they can integrate and collectively decide something.

We’re also working with the Tainan City government who has introduced the same participation officers network. In here, it’s all 34 ministries have a team of PO. In Tainan, it’s in every department and every bureau. They will also talk with the municipalities.

Our experience is that the smaller the jurisdiction and region is, the easier the on-the-ground operation. The challenge is always but people don’t feel the same way in the other city. They don’t bother to check the Internet version of it.

The way we think around it is to have people around Taiwan talk about the same thing in the same time. That will increase the solidarity.

There was an early example of that around climate change. In World Wide Views, people connected Taipei, Taichung, and Tainan I think and basically have each room to be a large projection of two walls that connects to other cities. People can make exercises together or dance together...

...and feel that they’re on a larger virtual room, 100 people each, about 300 people in total.

Wow.

That worked pretty well. People really feel that, "Oh, so we’re in the same space, and we’re, we must participate in a way that, uh, take care of every corner of Taiwan, not one city at the expense of the other city." This is also something we can try because it very low cost. It only require a few projectors. [laughs] We’re also working on that.

In terms of a larger narrative, misinformation I guess is the most damaging for the good in government. In terms of changing that larger narrative, in terms of getting out what really the government has been doing in terms of policies and effects, is that being done also? Or it’s just reactionary to things?

As I said, all those context-making exercises is done before a policy is made. That’s my focus.

Even during the process and after the policy has been made, there’s still a lot of misinformation flowing around with that.

It’s true. We make short films. We make easy to understand, bite-size information. Actually, CoFact is useful in that too because CoFact has some facts people reported because it goes viral. It’s actually true. We also learn from those viral true messages how to package. [laughs]

Reach-wise, yeah.

Also, because zero community really helps. For example, just a few days ago, there was a train accident.

Day before.

Right. There’s many different source of information, from the ministry of health and Welfare about people who are impacted, from the railroad station itself, and from the local government and everything.

Got the g0v people usually make one collaborative folder every time that there’s a major accident. This is kind of a tradition now. You can see bilingually all the relevant informations about...

You can search for whether your family is impacted. You can if you want to do blood donation and how currently the levels of blood requirement is. You can also very easily crowdsource this Wikipedia and list of people. You can also crowdsource against misinformation.

There is one misinformation collection folder about all the misinformation that’s spreading, like people add to Wikipedia a piece of false information that says, "The premier says that, um, the driver, um, is a CCP party member, and this is an act of sabotage..."

Exact same incidents happen. In India also, four days back, there was a train accident. The misinformation which has been spread is that the driver was a Muslim and he intentionally derailed the train.

Which is why the community reacts within seconds and then first publish...Of course, they went to Wikipedia and fixed that. I think it’s important to inoculate people.

To tell what all has happened.

There are people intentionally spreading it. It’s this IP and so on. Then, of course, there’s also mainstream media that says, "Uh, maybe, uh, people suffered because they have not wore seatbelt, um, on the train." but there’s no seatbelt on the train. [laughs]

Wow. [laughs]

Clearly misinformation.

That is mainstream media.

That’s even mainstream media. What I’m saying is that the government, of course, by partnering with the civic hack community, we can get the message out in a timely fashion. Basically the ministry of health and welfare and all the ministry I mentioned, they just provide the raw data, like a Excel file.

How much is the reach of this? I guess it boils down to ultimately that, what percentage of people you reach with this correct information.

I don’t have the numbers. I think previously, which we do have numbers, the g0v and extended network easily reaches, just the core subscribers, is a quarter million people. With the similar network on social media and people who share it, I think it easily reaches millions of people. How many millions this time, I don’t know.

During the Sunflower, because the g0v was this hub of all the Occupiers’ information, it’s not just the reach, which is easily in the million. How many million I don’t know, but the public trust on the information here is higher than the government’s own news source. We need to work with them [laughs] to be seen as accurate. There’s...

Now you’re saying that there’s this IP which published this misinformation, so you’re not working actually on creating a list of these IPs and monitoring it real time?

The civic tech people do some trace back, but this is a professional, and it’s located in the UK and clearly a jump board.

Jump IP.

A jump IP, and so we don’t get...which is why I’m not actually that a fan of using IP address to indicate anything, because especially now with IPV6, it’s so easy to get any IP you want.

Not just IPs. Now on a Facebook format, we know that there are these 500 Facebook pages which are in the business of running fake news throughout the day for that.

For that people, people...

People, pages, false accounts, all that stuff.

In PTT, which is our main forum, like Reddit, there’s people who run automated tools to see which kind of people log in just to post one message and then log out immediately and people who operate in some time zone and work for 12 hours, and fully. [laughter] They’re semi-automated people who does this as a job, just go to work and leave work, very consistently.

Professionals, basically.

However, this is not censorship.

This is not censorship, yeah.

The community is just...

People should know that these are the names and these are the pages which are in the business of...

Which has a certain pattern.

Exactly.

It’s just like junk mail.

We are at a point, people who will trust them. That’s the whole game...

That’s the whole point. It’s not to take their ability. It’s just like people decided maybe people in Nigeria....They still deserve the right to send email. We’re not saying people from Nigeria should not send email. We’re saying if they claim to be a Nigerian prince, maybe they should reach fewer people.

Exactly. There’s no notion of censorship anyway, but this thing at least should be...

Yes.

Let me check. I had made pointers of what we can talk.

Sure.

This is just an overview I made. Have a look at it.

I think all these are really good proposals.

I don’t know how the government functions here and how the government could take up any of these initiatives. I’m not sure.

I’m working with our Minister without portfolio in charge of law, Lo Ping-Cheng, in this matter. I’m more of a social media and technology adviser to him. He is the main person coordinating this work, assisted by me and by our spokesperson Kolas Yotaka, to devise a comprehensive strategy on disinformation.

As I said, because my background is more in the civic tech, education, and social media, I share with you the part that I know or I’ve already done. Of course, there could be additional efforts, the ones you outlined. If you don’t mind sharing that with me, of course I can discuss it with Minister Lo.

I would email you that. I would like to help. I don’t know which way I would be able to help.

We will roll out, for sure, a plan of what to do before the election, but any regulatory changes....

People need to know that, that the committees hear...

...that will be after this election.

That will obviously come after.

We just want to make sure that everybody has a psychologically safe zone on the Internet to share and partake in the fact-finding effort together. That’s our ultimate goal.

Are you going beyond CoFact and...

Media Watch or fact checking or whatever.

When people’s participation increases, that’s the real change you’d...

Exactly.

...I would want to see, anyway.

That’s a longer-term goal. In the short term, we just want to make sure that organized disinformation does not create a threat so that people are afraid of speaking authentically online because that will harm the participation.

In India, we face a huge threat for that. Even protesting or asking question is completely anti-government now. Anybody asks questions about government policies or something false which the prime minister has said, you’re labeled as anti-national in India Now. It’s very clear.

That’s right, but we don’t have that problem here.

What we don’t want to see is that, through this government action plan on disinformation...

That might happen, yeah.

...we don’t want to create a sense of self-censorship. Individuals acting out of their curiosity — not malice — and posting something that maybe be speculation, creating a parody for discussion, an invitation for discussion, this is totally not disinformation.

If, when reacting to disinformation, we make these people less safe to post, it would take away people’s freedom. Maybe that’s what the organized disinformation perpetrators really want. [laughs]

Yeah, to push you to that brink, they do that.

Right, exactly. We were not bulging.

Not that, but in terms of mainstream media, when they’re consciously spreading misinformation, that needs to be checked in a way. Mainstream media is, again, bound by media ethics. It’s not a free...

Yes. We’re working on that too, a SOP of fact checking. The mainstream media used to say, "There’s no source to fact check, so we just take what’s on the Internet and post it."

We’re now saying, "You know, we have fact-checking independent repository. We have the government clarification repository. We have all those feeds that, even with automated, means that delivers before you." It’s no longer a good excuse...

...to just say that we don’t have anything else to look to or nobody else to ask, or, "The government doesn’t return our calls." [laughs] That’s not...

That doesn’t seem to be the case.

That’s not the case. [laughs] People who ignore these, then maybe we will have a way to show they’re not following the SOP. I think this is important to let everybody know. As you said, the ultimate goal is not to revoke their license or whatever. It is just to let people know which media is doing journalistic work...

Automatically, they’re run out of business...

...and which media is maybe doing a non-journalistic kind of work.

Upholding journalistic ethics, that’s ultimately the...

That’s exactly right. Yes, we’re fostering that culture.

Awesome [laughs] . Would you be able to share the...

The plan?

Yeah, whatever it’s fine for you to share.

Sure, of course, once it’s published.

I’m happy to go through it.

Of course.

The media literacy thing which you are trying in K-12.

We’re going to make a full transcript, and then I will send you an email to edit away anything you don’t want. [laughs]

No. It’s there. I spoke whatever I wanted, anyway, so that’s no problem.

For supplemental information like the slides and the curriculum, we’ll collect a list of links. We publish everything, including our dialog, in the same URL, 10 days after this. You can point people to this because then it will be a more complete context.

The whole...

Instead of individual...

Just the slides. It will be even beneficial for me to remember what we spoke and what the slides are for.

OK. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much.