2019-09-16 Meeting with J. Casey Hammond

Your prayer was very touching.

It’s also my job description.

Your job description?

That’s right.

Did you write this yourself?

Yes.

It’s beautiful.

Thank you.

I’ve shared it with a colleague. I said, “we should create a course based on this job description to counter the predominant mentality.”

…which is a perversion of categories. We say “human resource”, and we say “incentivize companies”. It’s a perversion of categories.

Yes.

Same for “Smart cities” and “Dumb citizens”.

Smart cities is one of the areas that the Singapore Government has targeted for Singapore’s future growth. Singapore hopes to become a center of innovation for smart cities. They want our university then to develop research focuses on smart cities

I like their new slogan, “Smart nation”. At least it’s referring to a group of people.

Yes. Let me share with you that I was at the Oslo Freedom Forum last year. I was invited to a human rights roundtable, a group of maybe 10 or 12 people.

Each of us had to talk about our work and we would see whether anything came out of that. The people at the table were from different parts of Asia and represented different nationalities. Most all of them were working with refugees, and indeed…

That’s one of the OFF’s distinguishing characteristics.

Indeed, they have big challenges in protecting the human rights of refugees, not only in their countries of origin, but also in relocation camps. Everyone at the table had to speak. I do some work with the Indonesian migrant workers here, so I mentioned them.

The Indonesian migrant workers with whom I work in Taiwan are all formal sector employees. They aren’t housemaids. They aren’t fishermen. They’re mostly factory workers or they work in hospitals or nursing homes.

I said, “Taiwan’s formal sector has pretty good labor regulations that protect the human rights of these migrant workers from being violated.” Every once in a while, one of them might get tricked or something like that…

We do have room for improvement, and some of this happens to local domestic workers too.

Yes. I said, “Listening to all of you express your interest in protecting the human rights of particular groups, I realize, more basically, that we also have to protect human rights themselves.”

I’ve been in this region about half the time since 1981, much of which time I’ve spent in Taiwan and also in Indonesia, and the last eight years in Singapore.

I said, “I’ve noticed that in recent years democracy seems to be backsliding in the region. If you want to protect human rights, you have to protect democracy. I think democracy is increasingly threatened.”

I said, “Two bright spots for democracy in this region are Taiwan and Indonesia.” I often travel between these two countries. Exchanges between them have multiplied very rapidly in recent years, but such exchanges are still at an early stage.

I said, “Most people in these two countries do not yet share a great deal of mutual understanding nor speak each other’s language. I think they ought to become more aware that they are the two leading democracies in this region. I have my own historical argument for why Taiwan is part of Southeast Asia. It may not be politically correct, but it has a historical basis.”

We’re a Pacific island, too.

Yes, Taiwan is also a Pacific island. And the indigenous people of Taiwan are Austronesian, the same as…

…all the way to Māori, culturally.

Yes. The indigenous people are Austronesian. Also, the Hoklo population…. Hoklos were in Java before they were in Taiwan.

Some Hoklos came to Taiwan directly from Fujian, but some of the earliest Hoklos also came from Java. When the Dutch set up in Tainan, these Hoklos were already in Batavia, and so some of the Hokkien speakers already in Batavia came to Taiwan with the Dutch.

Also for many years, Taiwan shared a similar sociological experience of single Hoklo men coming here and marrying local women and creating a new mixed-race culture.

Yeah, basically being assimilated biologically with the Pingpu peoples.

It’s very similar in some ways to the Peranakan in Java.

I totally agree.

So, I have a historical argument for why Taiwan is part of Southeast Asia.

Indeed. We’re starting to see it in some implementations of our curriculum, which I helped develop.

Thank you for helping to develop that curriculum.

In order to change the way people think, you need to reframe their understanding of connections.

At the OFF last year I said, “You know, Taiwan and Indonesia are the two brightest spots for democracy in Southeast Asia, so they are where human rights will probably be best protected, and this commmonality could be better recognized.”

I said, “In April of 2019, Indonesia will have a presidential election. In January of 2020, Taiwan will have a presidential election.

“This is all going to come up in the next 15, 16 months, and I know from being in Indonesia in 2014, during the last presidential election, that so-called ‘fake news’ was already a problem.

“In 2019, for sure, it will become a bigger problem.” I said the same thing about Taiwan. I said, “During the last presidential election in Taiwan” – it was in 2016 – “disinformation was a problem. It will become a bigger problem in 2020. This problem is going to grow. It’s not going to go away.”

Sure, and it’s going to be automated now, because the advances in picture generation now, you cannot really tell the difference when it’s synthetic.

I said, “These fact-checking agencies were recently set up in Taiwan and in Indonesia.” You probably know…

I am aware of that.

There’s an equivalent that was set up in 2016 in Indonesia. It goes by the acronym MAFINDO. It stands for Masyarakat Anti-Fitnah Indonesia, which means The Association of Anti-Slander Indonesia.

Does the administration like it?

These are good people whom I believe are respected by the Jokowi administration.

OK, that’s good. In Taiwan’s case, they’re, an arm’s length or two away from the DPP, and so it’s seen as more neutral.

Officially, it’s neutral. It’s nonpolitical. It’s a nonprofit group of largely volunteers. It’s not connected to a political party, but the people who run it or the people who volunteer are supporters of freedom and democracy.

That’s good enough. If it has, as I think they have, the Poynter IFCN criteria, they have to at least be transparent, or they’ll cease to be [laughs] neutral, or we’ll discover that they’re not neutral. It’s the same covenant that the TFCC here have signed.

I thought, “There are these new fact-checking agencies in both places. There could be an established channel of communication between them to share ideas and experiences, they could learn from each other, their dialogue could be focused on preventing disinformation in multiparty democratic elections that should be just and fair.”

Earlier this year, I went back and forth, and both sides said, “Yes, we would like to do this,” so it’s getting underway now.

Good.

The better educated people in Indonesia who know what’s going on in the world are aware of sensitivities that are attached to dealing with Taiwan.

They have to be careful. They’re interested in doing things with Taiwan, but they want to be sure that this relationship is set up properly.

Of course, but the TFCC, as you described, they are entirely social sector. It’s not like we are signing MOUs of any sort. It’s the academic exchange between social sector organizations, which happens all the time.

I personally taught, through virtual reality, students from the Academy of Art in Hangzhou, even after becoming a digital minister. It’s not seen as a big deal.

These fact-checking agencies are nongovernmental agencies, so…

Not at all.

…this can be done. I think in terms of disinformation, Taiwan is a particularly important place, because it’s at the forefront of new methods that China is developing. Taiwan will become the expert on China’s methods.

Once they perfect these methods in Taiwan, or believe that they have made them effective, sooner or later, they’ll use them elsewhere. I think Taiwan has something to teach.

To export.

To export, yes, but to say that their dialogue is motivated by such a future export may be sensitive.

Yeah, and we don’t even need to highlight the PRC part. Taiwan’s cybersecurity infrastructure is top notch anyway, even before the Great Firewall. In fact, we built much of the personal computers, the Internet, even on the hardware level, when the Internet first came to place.

I don’t think it’s a problem to say that Taiwan has had a long history down from its semiconductors to their routers and hubs, to the Internet connection ISPs.

We have some of the most affordable unlimited 4G connection now at $16 per month, and a very good digital opportunity plan that gives more than 98 percent of people in rural and indigenous places 10 megabits per second Internet access, and all this needs to happen for the Taiwan model of counter-disinformation to work.

My point being we can also share this background instead of the generative adversarial one.

Absolutely. This is something very practical versus something that’s more strategic. Let me tell you what’s on the short-term horizon. Here in Taiwan next month, October fifth and sixth, there’s going to be an international forum held in Taipei.

I received an invitation from Professor Hu to come and make a presentation. This is going to be a gathering of fact-checking agencies from the other democracies in Asia. There will be representatives from South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia…

The Philippines?

…the Philippines and India.

Right, because Bangkok has not yet set up one.

At this gathering next month, Professor Hu has asked me to make a presentation for about 20 minutes. There’ll be numerous presentations. Mine will be just one of many.

My presentation will be relatively short and cover a relatively general topic. It will not be a terribly scholarly presentation.

This is a way for people in Taiwan to learn more about Indonesia, as you have described.

I wanted to ask for your advice, to speak to an audience of people who are very intelligent, but not scholars. They’re doing practical work with setting up these fact-checking agencies in the Asian democracies.

I’m not an expert on South Korea, Japan, Philippines, or India. I can say something about Taiwan and Indonesia. I’m wondering, in a 20-minute presentation, what can I say?

What basic message can I get across to these people to help them understand a little bit more about Taiwan and Indonesia and the importance of having a channel of communication between their fact-checking agencies.

I wanted to ask you for your advice. In order for these fact-checking agencies to have credibility, they do have to be neutral. They do need to have a critical stance domestically, as well as internationally.

Sure, as any news workers is.

A 20-minute presentation goes quickly. It’s not a whole lot of time. I’m wondering…

This channel between the fact-checking agencies in Taiwan and Indonesia is intended to defend their democratic elections. Is there any problem in Taiwan about which I might learn more in terms of…

I’m thinking about what’s going on in the United States right now with President Donald Trump doing certain things that aren’t illegal, but nevertheless undermining the ethos of democracy.

I’m wondering, are there domestic problems like this in Taiwan?

Not so much. The main challenge we have is mostly that fact-checkers are seen as part of the Internet governance community that mostly concerns the platforms that have signed on the counter-disinformation manifesto, that is to say Facebook, Google, Line, PTT, the usual suspects.

The involvement of institutional media is weaker than in Indonesia. In Indonesia, I understand the fact-checkers in the Cekfakta…Is that how you phrase it?

Yes.

In the Cekfakta, more like a cross-check initiative strives for neutrality, not through one or two well respected figures, but by the nature of international institutional media such as the AFP, as well as the domestic media of all sorts joining together to share their internal fact-checking procedures, if not materials, to build the legitimacy together. That’s from what I understand.

In Taiwan, maybe the CTS Television have partnered with the TFCC. Maybe the Public TV to some degree, but that’s about it. We don’t have a broader institutional media coalition that reaffirms the value of fact-checking.

“The Liberty Times,” for example, runs its own rumor dispelling service as part of their website’s service, but that is siloed and not at all connected to this IFCN network and extended networks.

That is a problem because The Liberty Times is oftentimes seen as “partisan,” but if they’re willing to share their methodologies and investigations, and the folks on “UDN,” for example, is willing to do the same, together they will surely reach a larger population.

It will not only be on the LINE system or the Facebook system. Also, it will give rise to a renewed set of expectations of journalism standards on institutional media similar to Japan. That’s not quickly happening in Taiwan. We have a coalition of newer media that doesn’t publish on paper that agrees to fact-check all the presidential candidates during the election season already using crowdsource.

It’s laudable, but the fact that they are mostly Internet-only media further confirms this modality shift between the traditional institutional and the social media.

This might be an interesting thing to talk about because it is a fundamental starting point. This basic work must be done before other things can proceed. How can I find out more about this situation so I could just give a 10-minute talk on it?

I can send you the joint statement of the major platforms, for one, in English, as well…

Thank you.

Yeah, as well as the coalition that I just mentioned that agrees to fact-check every presidential candidate. From there, you can probably reach all the important stakeholders on the IFCN and extended networks side to learn the whole picture.

For the institutional media, there’s no formal way to ask, “What’s your take on fact-checking?” They often are not very clear about their contribution to the Internet governance versus their more traditional audience who rely less on the social media. They have two audiences to please, so to speak.

I think the most I can do is to paint the picture of the coalition on this part. I cannot speak for institutional media. The most I can do is to introduce you to CNA, which is the media sponsored by the administration.

They have their own take on this issue. They are transitioning to a new media as well and every other institutional media copy from their text anyway. They may have some views on this matter. The traditional institutional media, they all have different thoughts and they’re not extremely loud about their thoughts about this matter.

That might be a good place to start. I can look at the equivalent situation on the Indonesian side. Maybe that will fill up 20 minutes and give people in the audience a basic understanding about these…

The greatest thing is that you can compare all these different models maybe with the French model and so on and UK model and so on without even mentioning the PRC. That makes a really good workshop material to start with if we’re going to hold more workshops, as you mentioned, across the two jurisdictions.

Yes, that might be a good place to start. I’d be really grateful for any information.

Sure. Joel will collect…

This event will be on the fifth and sixth of October, which is only about three weeks away or so, so I’ve got to get busy with this.

I’m sure that you can crowdsource part of your presentation to the coalition to describe the Taiwan situation. I think Cekfakta, just looking at their media partners, they may each contribute some statements to you about how participating in Cekfakta have improved their horizontal relationships and so on, similar to the coalition that we have here.

Putting those two pictures together and analyze it a little bit, like what is lip service and what is substantial, and then you have a presentation.

Yes, that’s a good idea.

Thank you.

Thanks. Joel, can I stay in touch with you and…?

OK, thanks. Let me ask you, just to learn a little bit more about your work, what do you see as your biggest challenges?

At the moment, it’s the remaining authoritarian culture in Taiwan. You were around here when I was born.

I was here under martial law.

That’s right. I was born into martial law. The martial law got lifted when I was six or seven. I remember the martial law. People younger than me don’t. It is a problem, actually.

Still?

Yeah. The thing is that people who were born before the martial law have a certain worldview that is compatible with authoritarianism. Authoritarianism, at that point in time in the ‘80s is already not a dictatorship. It’s more of a benevolent authoritarianism strain of things under Chiang Ching-kuo.

It actually gives it a bit more legitimacy compared to the Chiang Kai-shek, right? That is a problem, because there is people who are maybe my parents’ age in their 60s and the 70s.

They sometimes miss the era of Chiang Ching-kuo where Taiwan was growing very quickly economically, and the regional re-cultivation of culture, the community building movement and so on were not only allowed but gradually encouraged by the authoritarian regime.

That went for 10 years before we even got a presidential election in 1996, which is the same year as the World Wide Web becoming ubiquitous in Taiwan. After that, the society kind of went beyond their comprehension.

There’s something similar in Indonesia, where some people now miss Suharto.

It is. Like the World Wide Web, it’s intertwined with the red presidential election. It’s the same year. The first ever presidential election we have propaganda and disinformation on the web. It seems as chaotic. The people would reminisce about the earlier era that I still remember but people younger than me don’t.

The people younger than me don’t even have the vocabulary to describe in their vision in a way that’s compatible with that era, because none of those era’s documents is Googleable. The most you can Google is some scholarly article. It’s not very accessible.

There is a linguistic and cultural generational gap that is our focus to heal. It is shown very clearly in the referenda of the last year.

The referenda of the last year being…

Being for example, when the older generation see marriage, they don’t think it’s an administrative registration by a democratic state. They think it is a social tie amongst kinships and rituals.

Indeed, the law was that. If you get wed in a public ceremony, register or not, you’re married as specified by law. People who marry after 2008 only need to do a registration. It doesn’t really care whether you do a ceremony or not. It becomes something of the public sector rather than the social sector term.

That’s very confusing, because when you say we want to give marriage “equality,” what exactly do you mean? That is being interpreted wildly differently by people of different generational groups.

Do you think that the younger generation, say, those born in the 1990s, are they as susceptible to the sentiment attached to this reminiscence about authoritarianism as, say, people in their 60s and 70s who might think, “Ah, those were the good, old days?”

No, I don’t think they even have words for it.

They don’t even have words for it.

Yeah. They can reminisce about, for example, four thousand years of the great Sino culture. They can also reminisce about the Austronesian culture, which lives in Taiwan for a considerably longer time. That’s not authoritarianism, it’s just cultural lineage.

That’s interesting. I’ve noticed in Indonesia that some younger people who have no memory of the New Order regime of Suharto are susceptible to what some older people are saying about that regime, that order was kept in those days. That there was predictability in those days. There’s a longing for that.

Some of the younger people who didn’t experience any of the suppression that occurred then are susceptible to thinking, “Yeah, maybe…”

“Maybe it was rosy after all.”

Yes.

We were in that point in 2013, as recent. After 2014, everything changed.

With the Sunflower Movement?

Yeah, the Occupy Movement, the focus on transitional justice afterwards, the sheer creativity of young people’s ways of communicating, what really happened during the White Terror and so on it captured the imagination.

It’s considered hip then to talk about politics. Before, there’s a certain apathy that resonates with the rosy view of the authoritarian regime as you just described. It may be a little bit like Hong Kong.

Now, Hong Kong people, no matter which age group, is affected by the creativity of the young generation, that they cannot actually unsee the brutality of the police.

It’s interesting to know this. Tell you what, I don’t want to take up too much of your time.

No, it’s fine.

The suggestion that you just made, I would like to have it sink in so that I can begin thinking more about it. One of the issues here in Taiwan is that the traditional media may be doing some fact-checking on their own, like Liberty Times, but it’s not connected to…

To the IFCN and extended networks.

That’s what really should be happening.

I’m not in a place where I say the media should do something. It’s not democratic. What I’m saying is that for the institutional media readers, they are not getting the benefit of having a robust fact-checking network. That’s just an objective observation. They would mostly rely if they used the Line software, their clarification messages online today.

Frankly, it’s not a very super visible part of the Line app. Line is doing what they could and we’re grateful of it. I’m just saying most of them still spend much more time talking about the news on institutional media, whether it’s through television or through printed papers.

The traditional media might be doing its own fact-checking, but it’s not tied into a larger network of fact-checking, whereas online media is more…

Quickly forming a coalition.

Forming a coalition. The challenge is how to bring the traditional media into this coalition so that they might benefit from it.

Also, to be very honest, there is only a handful of institutional media that successfully completed the digital transformation, like the Commonwealth Group and so on. They themselves are seeing the Internet as something that they’re very busily trying to solve to please two audiences and so on.

This digital transformation takes up a lot of their energy. Maybe fact-checking and protection of democracy is not on the super-high priority while they are trying to reinvent themselves in the digital age.

They have their hands full just transitioning to digital media…

To find a new revenue model to make sure there’s a relationship between their authors and the readers, and now everybody demands a one-hour response, but how do we not sacrifice the journalistic standard.

When you say they demand a one-hour response, what does that mean?

It means the news cycle has drastically shortened.

OK.

C’est la vie.

I understand. I won’t take up too much more of your time. I really wanted to meet you and make this introduction. I hope that we can stay in touch.

Yeah, certainly. On October fourth, I’ll be in Buenos Aires and so I will miss the conference.

I’m sorry.

I’m sure there will be more to come. We’re actually organizing a very similar workshop in Bangkok. Joel has the details. Maybe our lectures and so on could be also your resource when you try to build something in Indonesia.

Right. May I ask, who in Taiwan will be involved in running a workshop in Bangkok?

Joel has all the details. I think one of the co-founders of CoFacts and the people…

Open Culture?

Yeah, the Open Culture Foundation folks. There is also the head of the Open Data Alliance, himself a renowned weather forecaster, which is important, because they reach a very large audience through a weather broadcasting service.

He is generally seen as reputable – that’s very important – and currently makes that open data around air pollution, water pollution, earthquake prevention, and so on, public or even open as in open license, especially just to promote such independent broadcasters to give a more understandable framing rhetoric to the local people in a more precision targeting way.

Our Central Weather Bureau can only issue one press release, but Taiwan actually [laughs] have a lot of different islands and altitudes. A micro-targeted weather service is a large market. This actually can be seen as analogue to disarming this information thing.

Dr. Peng Chi-min has always been very helpful in advising Taiwan's open data strategies, especially around open government data. Here in Taiwan, when we say open data, we also have citizen science data, private sector data. Open data by its own means data collaboratives across sectors. He is a real expert and has run many Asia-Pacific open data hackathons and activities.

We also have the National Development Council Deputy Director, Chuang Ming-Fen, in charge of running our open data and our open government platforms and our e-participation platforms.

That’s important, because the Join platform has 10 million unique visitors out of 23 million of Taiwanese. That’s like our own community where people can raise e-petitions and meet the officials face-to-face. Two years ago, a 16-year-old girl proposed that we ban plastic straws gradually so as not to harm the sea ecosystem.

Taiwan has 10 percent of the world’s marine biodiversity and we thinks it’s a treasure. We arranged a collaborative meeting, because she very quickly get 5,000 petitioners under a pseudonym, which is allowed, we thought that this must be a very senior environmental activist to get so many people so quickly, but then she is 16 years old.

We met with the producers of one-shot utensils and they said they were social enterprises. Back when you first came to Taiwan in the ‘80s, because hepatitis B is everywhere. They entered this industry not to earn profit, but to solve a public health problem. They were with a social purpose.

Now hepatitis B is cured. You just take a pill and everything is gone. It’s not a problem anymore. They’re very willing only if better material than plastic is available. People started developing sugarcanes. They work really well. Starting this July for indoor drinking, it’s banned.

I think it also helps that environmental group understand the position of the plastic producers in that they were joining these industries long ago with a social purpose, and they will respond to the new social purpose.

That was a pretty good success story. When you have that, there’s no room for disinformation to grow, because there is no misinformation or no misunderstanding in the first place. I think the NDC have a lot to contribute as well.

Finally, somebody from our office, Romulus, is going to share how we build such technological tools to encourage rough consensus rather than polarization online. Any of these might be your resource when holding an Indonesian workshop.

The Thai people seems to be happy with this lineup.

Thank you very much. As for your job description, may I share that with others?

Sure, of course. I relinquish all copyright, as will be this transcript after we edit it for 10 days. It will be in the Commons.

OK. Thank you so much.

Thank you.