Minister Tang, I will start off with a more personal question, which is tell me about the first family of Taiwan, which I hear includes some cats and dogs.
That’s right.
A whole fleet.
There’s Ācái and Xiǎngxiǎng, the two cats of President Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. After she became president, she also adopted, I think, three dogs that was retired from service. I’ve met them, yeah.
It sounds like a good group to have around.
That’s right. They wouldn’t want to interfere into public construction or anything like that. All they want is catnips. [laughs]
I heard they’re uncorruptible, which is something we should all aim to be.
Exactly, completely incorruptible. [laughs] That’s right.
Tell me a bit about your visit to the US. What are you hoping to achieve here? Tell me a little bit about what you’ve working to build.
Sure. I’ve been to US many times in the Silicon Valley, and in NYC. I was just in Detroit for three days before coming to DC, but it’s my first time in DC. Really happy to be here.
There’s broadly speaking, three topics that I’m in DC for.
The first one is around how to protect elections against foreign manipulation. That includes, of course, propaganda of all kinds, disinformation, malinformation, and the hijacking of media narratives and things like that. I’ve had a lot of conversations with think tanks and with people focusing on this particular topic.
The second topic is what we call hard cyber -- that’s cyberspace security -- because Taiwan six years ago did a systemic risk assessment when we did our 4G telecommunications infrastructure. And after that, We decided that PRC components must not enter our core infrastructure.
We’re very happy that six years later, now people are waking up to the systemic risk.
There’s been so much hype about 5G and which countries are moving to ban it, which countries are moving to restrict it, which countries are embracing it. From your own experiences, what kind of evidence have you seen that the PRC is using these networks for espionage?
We’ve had that discussion six years ago. [laughs]
In Taiwan, when we did a 4G assessment, we understood that really, there is no distinct characteristics between a market actor in the PRC, versus a state-owned operation unit in PRC.
When there’s potential of escalation, or even in non-escalated times, the PRC government, and indeed, the party, has a lot of non-market forces that they can use to influence the behavior of their so-called private sector.
In the recent years, we’ve seen developments such as any enterprise above a certain size in the PRC must have Communist Party branches in that particular enterprise. All these systemic risk factors tell us that there really is no so-called market actor when it comes to PRC and telecommunication facility.
That is the kind of analysis we did back when we were doing 4G.
You mentioned that this is a conversation that Taiwan has been having perhaps six years ahead of the rest of the world. I can see, with the general preoccupation with electoral interference and your eye towards protecting your elections in 2020, what kinds of conversations are you having now that you feel like others will still be working their way through in six years’ time?
That’s right. I think in Taiwan, we are holding the free and open civil society space as the most treasured asset that we have. Whereas our nearby economies sometimes use the term, for example, “disinformation” to expand the state reach into de facto state censorship, that is something that we never do.
Our developments, our innovations around this disinformation crisis basically centers around the idea of “notice and public notice.” We never do administrative takedown or any of the other things that our nearby economies are some considering, and some even already implementing. We’re not going there.
What we are seeing is that we use crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, with full collaboration with, for example, our leading E2E, end-to-end encrypted instant message platform called LINE, which operates mostly in East Asia, into what we call a Digital Accountability Framework, where people can easily flag something as a potential disinformation, just as we can flag something as spam.
We’ve found it’s a really good metaphor, because email is private communication, where the state should not be a party to.
When you flag something as spam, you voluntarily donate that into an international framework so that whenever the spammers try to send email again, after a sufficient number of people flagged it as spam, it still reaches its destination — but it reaches the junk mail folder.
It’s not censorship. If you have too much time, you can look through them all. By default, it doesn’t waste people’s time. That is the kind of reaction that we’re getting from our civil society, that the government should actually do more education attribution work.
Indeed, we fund a very popular public TV series called “The World Between Us,” that talks about weaponization of media. It has, I think, 95 percent approval on IMDb, and even better domestically. That, again, I think both in our K-12 education, and probably education like that, is also very much worth public funding.
When it comes to moving the conversation in the US beyond a succession on bots and trolls, how do you think that conversation needs to be refocused to move it forward in the US context, from what you’ve seen?
From what I’m seeing, really, there is a perception of polarization, as if people in the Congress, when you ask a random person about the two parties and so on, they may have this perception that they disagree on everything.
Whereas in fact, if you look at the actual Congress -- we just visited the capitol this morning -- most of the things, actually, people agree on most of the things most of the time. It’s just the media and the social media, especially, over-focuses on the polarized part of the political discourse.
In Taiwan, we are working with the civic technology community to build things like what we call the Digital Dialogue Platform. This, we build in conjunction with the AIT, American Institute in Taiwan, to, for example, ask what people think about the future of the Taiwan-US relationship.
This kind of narrative shows everybody that actually, most of the people agree with most of their neighbors on most of the things most of the time. Whereas the social media may over-focus on those five divisive points, there’s actually a lot more that people have a rough consensus of.
I think these kinds of technologies, more so than polarized social media, can focus, again, our conversation on the rough consensus that we do have. This picture is actually an experiment that the people in Bowling Green City have learned, talking about the future of the Bowling Green City.
When people ask each other, “Are we a divided into partisan communities or are we a united community?” before and after they participate in this virtual town hall, the reaction is very different. I think there is a way to move beyond polarization.
What are some of the other ways that you find radical transparency has reshaped democratic culture in Taiwan? I know you’ve said that Internet and democracy are intertwined in a pretty unique way. Tell me a little more about that.
In our case, Internet and democracy are synonyms, whereas maybe in other jurisdictions, Internet and authoritarianism are synonyms, because they arrived together, roughly speaking.
In our case, there’s a radically transparent budget display in the national e-participation platform, join.gov.tw.
Anyone can look at any budget item, drill down to see its year-to-year, month-to-month KPI, delivery, procurement, you name it, and have a real-time conversation, really, with public service, without any intermediaries.
This kind of radical transparency affects public service, because then the public servants can give the why, not just the what, of policymaking, and enable, for example, investigative journalism to do much more solid work, without having to race with getting those groups up to speed.
People now have the same evidence for budget, for procurement, and for regional development. There are many databases. Now, we can’t claim credit, because this is actually a civic tech project. Back in 2012, it’s the inaugural g0v project, budget.g0v.tw.
It’s just after I become the Digital Minister, I merged the original fork into the government so that it now become protected by regulation, and is indeed part of our law and legal system. There’s many other examples.
For example, the radically transparent campaign finance records. Starting this year, all the campaign donations will be published in machine-readable format starting this June, and in row-to-row data, instead of just a summary.
It all enables individual investigators and researchers to have a much better, fine-grain detailed idea of how the politics is working.
Radical transparency can be seen as a driver of deepening democracy, in contrast with the more twinned authoritarian impulses of something like a social credit system, where the government is trying to pull citizens into its alignment.
They are making the citizen transparent to the state, right? Whereas we are the other way around. [laughs]
Exactly. So many countries are in the process of democratic backsliding. What do you think that finding a Taiwan-inspired model could do for those countries that are in that gray zone between democracy and authoritarianism?
There’s many people -- for example, just recently, in Thailand, in both parties, and also Future Forward -- they have visited Taiwan and indeed learned from Taiwan about peacefully transition, in their case, back to democracy, to trustworthiness between the governance system and its people, meaningful youth participation, and things like that.
Just seeing how in Taiwan, the digital has lowered the risk of the career public service when it comes to democracy, when we can meet with people who are about to protest out on the street and co-create something new and that is satisfactory, or at least people can live with together, I think that is a very compelling narrative that can tip, as you said, the gray zone jurisdictions back into the democratic impulse.
What’s a memory that stands out to you of a setting where you’ve pulled in someone who has been expressing dissent online?
Or even toxic.
Or even being toxic. How have they been brought into the mix of actually shaping policy?
Because May 1st is the tax season in Taiwan -- about four days, five days now, around the corner -- this year, actually, across Taiwan, all the Windows, Mac, and Linux users use the same web-based tax filing system.
We piloted that with Mac and Linux users last year. It’s really the first time that people had a 96 percent approval rating of the tax filing experience, which is unheard of. Usually, you don’t really like the tax filing experience in itself.
Nobody really likes filing tax, [laughs] but we managed to deliver something that makes it compelling for people to go through the process. Indeed, it started with something very ambitious. Indeed, because two years ago, there was an e-petition.
This is relatively tame of the toxicity back at the time. This e-petition reads, “The tax filing software is explosively hostile.” Its content is all negative emotions, but that is relatively tame, compared to the social media, which calls for the resignation of the prime minister, of the Minister of Finance, accusing corruption of the vendors, and things like that -- all because the Oracle Corporation at that year deprecated Java applets, and our tax filing system for Mac and Linux used to run on Java applets. It creates a very bad experience for people.
Now, what we did is that the participation officers, a team of people in each ministry in charge of engaging people who are about to go to the street, basically intervened on the e-petition platforms.
That anyone who complain -- and there’s more than 80 percent of people who do -- anyone who complain about our tax filing experience automatically gets an invitation two weeks afterward to the co-creation workshop.
This very simple intervention really changed. We saw that the petitioner, why is he so angry? Because he is a professional user experience designer. He would feel upset whenever there’s some line spacing issues or sans-serif versus serif issues.
Because of these, to him, unbearable ugliness of the tax filing experience, of course, he’s very upset. Once we invited him to the kitchen, so to speak, it was really helpful in triaging the thousands of inputs online -- because we live streamed the meeting, you see -- into the user journey that categorizes the entire encounter of people with the tax filing system.
After four co-creation workshops, the people who wrote really aggressive comments meet face-to-face with the people who they flame to. They really can’t keep attacking each other once they are co-creating. Finally, they delivered a new tax filing system.
That’s really interesting. I’m thinking about mapping this onto a US context. If we were to pull in Twitter trolls and attempt to have a co-creation workshop, I wonder how that would go. How did the government address safety concerns?
This is a country where there’s no shortage of guns, and people express a lot of anger online. How do you deal with those most extreme outliers? I’m sure they’re not making complaints about the tax filing system, but they’re a big part of political discourse in the US when it comes to fighting disinformation.
Certainly. Actually, the Pol.is system, the artificial intelligence-moderated conversation that I just introduced, does a wonderful job to take the bite out of the statements. What we have discovered is that if you take away the reply button, people become civil overnight.
That’s really interesting.
All our platforms -- the e-petition platform, the Pol.is platform, the Slido platform that I use to collect Q&As during town halls -- they don’t have reply buttons. All you can do when you are in our system is basically to see a statement from a fellow person.
The only thing you can do is to click agree, disagree, or pass. Even if you really don’t like this statement, the only thing you can do is propose something else for other people to resonate with. That actually takes the entire arsenal of trolling away.
If they just keep trolling, people just pass them or disagree with them, and they sink into nowhere. It doesn’t really consume people’s mental bandwidth. It’s just like going to the junk mail folder. People still compete, but compete on bringing more eclectic and nuanced statements to each other.
The face-to-face setting is, of course, also important. Most of our collaboration meetings take place in my office, which is the Taiwan Social Innovation Lab. It’s shaped by people with trisomy differences, people with Down syndrome.
They see the world through a different geometric lens. When we shape the space through their eyes, it brings the creative part out of people. We have excellent food and drink and chef.
That’s fantastic. I wouldn’t mind stopping by for a little.
There’s self-driving tricycles that just roams this space. It’s all very creative, is what I’m saying. Even the most, the people with an axe to grind, enter the space, enjoy excellent food, and become tame.
When did you first get a sense that you would want to build your career around the Internet and governance? When did this occur to you as something that you could make your focus in this way?
I think it was around maybe I was five years old, something like that. I remember, at the time, Taiwan just had its first election, a true multi-party election. I still remember the martial law and the lifting of the martial law.
My parents, they were both political commentators and journalists, and were discussing an upcoming election. There’s two parties, the Nationalist Party, the KMT, as well as the Democratic Progressive Party.
They asked me which party do I think that they should vote. At that time, I think, at five, I already understand what a national citizen means, but I don’t know what progress actually means. I asked my parents, what is progress?
I still remember they explain it in the term that everybody has some different experience in social injustice. Each element can be improved piecemeal.
So it’s just like a sphere; we want to have everyone on the surface of the sphere to have an equal distance to the core to that sphere. That is our constitutionally-protected rights.
That basically explains why progress is all over the place. All it does is to ensure equality and access to the basic fundamental rights that is the core of our constitution. It’s a really powerful way to explain progress or social progress. I guess it sounds very appealing to me.
It goes way back. That’s remarkable.
Tell me about how your experience as a white hat hacker has changed the way you approach your job?
I am just an amateur white hat hacker. My training is in building new systems. I’m an architect. I just know basic cybersecurity. As a civic hacker, I guess I do have a lot of relationships with both the civic tech community.
Indeed, with the white hat community, I remember in one of the HITCONs -- that is the premiere Taiwan conference on cybersecurity, it’s called Hackers in Taiwan Conference -- they put out those trials, capture the flag trials for other white hats to test.
Before I entered their opening ceremony, I reported that, “Oh, I found two or three of those things really within my league,” and solved them on the way there. [laughs] I guess that gives me some street credibility.
When I came to the administration, I brought with myself a cybersecurity product, an open source one, called Sandstorm that people can build additional applications, like ordering lunchboxes together, on top of the sandboxed cybersecurity system.
We work with the white hat community. They did pentesting -- penetration testing -- on that for six months, filed three CVEs, and concluded that really, that’s the most secure public service, best system that they could find.
We worked with two teams. After they’re OK with it, we then open it to the entire public service. Of course, we have other regulations that ensure that new public procurements include at least five to seven percent dedicated to cybersecurity.
That’s in addition to the IT budget. I think we keep the white hats well-recognized, well-paid, excellent career. They meet with the President and Digital Minister once in a while to make sure that they don’t fall to the dark side, which has cookies.
(laughter)
Speaking more about the dark side, what have you learned in the last year about electoral manipulation that you think everyone should know?
Great question. I think that the core message I want to get across is that everyone is media now. To be a media practitioner, to be a journalist, to be a broadcaster in the old days, before social media, involves a set of common-sense training.
Of how to check your sources, of how to do the narrative in a balanced way, of how to communicate effectively, of how sensationalism differs from an argument, a narrative, and things like that. That’s what the basic journalism training...It’s not even journalism, just media literacy training.
Nowadays, of course, everybody is their own radio station. Everybody is their own television channel. That doesn’t mean that we should dial back the expectation of media literacy, and indeed, journalistic training.
We should actually make them into the K-12 basic curriculum, and let everybody understand that just like fire, we teach people’s responsible use of fire not by saying that only people who are professional pyromancers can wield fire. [laughs]
We teach cooking at a very young age, how to use fire responsibly, how it may destroy cities if we don’t construct our cities well, how it may harm people. We don’t do this by taking back fire from children. We make sure that they learn how to use fire responsibly when cooking.
Do the same with journalism, with media literacy, and with the basic standards of critical thinking.
How do you think major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, YouTube, should be taking steps to recalibrate their offerings, given what we know now about how they’ve been used to spread a lot of disinformation that has, at times, derailed public conversations around politics?
Right, the negative externalities. I think there’s quite a few things.
Especially during election, it would really help if people can tell whether a tweet, for example, is really from someone that’s about to run, that’s really officially declared to run, as versus someone who impersonates them, or verified malicious.
There’s that kind of account, too, especially in the age of deep fakes, and indeed, of machine-automated, generated propaganda. Like in the previous election system, these two technologies are not that mature, not that off-the-shelf.
In the 2020 one, both technologies, thanks to recent breakthrough in machine learning, are going to be very convincing.
What’s the wildest deep fake that you’ve seen in your line of work?
[laughs] Actually, it was of myself.
Really?
Tell me about that.
I actually built a 3D-scan model of myself, the first thing I did, even before becoming Digital Minister, because I want to have meetings with schoolchildren in virtual reality, in which I lower my avatar to be the same height as they are.
That’s amazing.
We can talk about their kindergarten buildings and so on, without me seeming very imposing or very tall. That is a kind of deep fake, if you think about it. [laughs] If I can convince the children that what they see before their eyes is a just scaled-down version of me, I can also make that avatar do anything.
You could have a three-foot-tall Minister Tang going to a local school to give an approachable conversation? I can see how that could be weaponized by nefarious actors.
That’s right. What I did two and a half years ago was I released that model. I actually released all the recordings and films myself and so on publicly online under Creative Commons licenses, saying, “Now, everybody can make Audrey say anything convincingly.”
That’s two and a half years ago. Of course, the technological progress has lowered the expense in setting up GPU clusters and so on ever since then. Then people need to understand, unless I tweet from my own account, no film of me is me.
I think that is the kind of awareness that both the platform and social media platform suppliers, vendors, need to make it really clear, that it’s not just a verified account, but it is really that person themselves making this.
Nobody else can really impersonate, because we can’t really trust that a video is the evidence now.
You think that in the future, there could be 30 videos of a hypothetical candidate, and we’re going to need to give people using social media platforms an understanding that they can only really listen to one that has been brought through a very official channel.
Trust that account, right. There are many technologies nowadays that, for example, I take pictures of myself when I want to prove that I am really somewhere on Earth at this time point, talking to these people, using apps like Truepic.
Cool. You want to take one?
Sure, but of course, then I think it will require a GPS connection? Oh, there is GPS signal. That’s great. Right, so we can take one together.
(laughter)
Foreign Policy, at TECRO.
That’s right. That proves that we’re really here. All right.
Come on in. Come on in.
Yeah, come on in. [laughs]
I’m just curious.
Basically, what it does is that it uploads it to the blockchain and takes the hash, the signatures, and runs it through a series of tests. It can even detect whether the camera is taking photo of another photo, things like that.
Oh, right.
Detecting the accelerator and everything, all the different signals of forensics. This is applied forensics.
That’s how you know that we’re the real Foreign Policy and the real Audrey Tang.
That’s right, exactly, [laughs] in the real TECRO.
(laughter)
I think it’s remarkable that we’ve got through a whole interview, we’re both trans, and it hasn’t been the first order of conversation. I think that’s really refreshing to be able to have a wide-ranging conversation about the work that we do. But I will ask: How has your identity informed you as a digital citizen?
I think it enabled me to empathize more, and to have a larger tolerance for when people just don’t see other people’s viewpoint. It enables us to be a much more effective intermediary that helps people understand that they, although seem very different, they do have common values.I think it makes me a better facilitator.
I can definitely relate to that idea of learning how to break through polarization and be a facilitator through the kinds of experiences that being gender non-conforming brings.
What do you wish people asked you about more often when it comes to your work?
That’s a great question. I guess I would like people to ask, “Where’s the citation?” Like the Wikipedia question, “Citation needed.”
If more people start asking, not just, “Is it true or not?” but “Where did you see that? Where did you hear that?” I think it makes us stop and take a deep breath, so we stop being vehicles of any memetic manipulation.
Any memetic manipulation, any disinformation or malinformation campaign, can be defeated very simply by saying, “Citation needed.”
You think the answer to fake news is fact-checking?
That’s right, or really just the habit of checking in general.
Well, thank you. Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Thank you all so much for our round table. It’s been a great way to finish the week, and I appreciate the work that went into it.
Awesome, thank you.