Minister, my first question is about democracy. In the online conference of Harvard University in October last year, you shared a really interesting perspective on Taiwanese history of martial law era. You are the last generation to remember martial law in Taiwan.
Your parents survived that period as newspaper journalists, which is actually very interesting to me, by the way, and you implied that collective memories of the martial law have kept Taiwan’s freedom.
If I may mention a little something here, too, in Taiwan case, I am thinking that collective memories of the successful democratization may have enhanced a strong trust in government among citizens. Maybe if one experienced building a government by social movements, the concept of “We are the players, and we are controlling the government” must be stronger.
Minister, I’d really appreciate sharing your views on the democratization experience in Taiwan’s history to illustrate to Taiwanese people that are understanding politics and the government is something you can trust. Thank you so much.
Yes. I believe, because of the lifting of the martial law is a direct result of Taiwan’s democratization activism, so I think your reading is correct, that people attribute mostly to the grassroots, or as I mentioned in previous talks, the social sector. The credit goes to the social sector, when it comes to lifting of the martial law and democratization itself, so because of that, this collective memory has an empowering effect.
This is comparable to, for example, after a natural disaster, if people remember that, they’re rebuilding, reconstruction and welfare distribution process is done by people who organize among themselves, then it has a solidarity effect, so that the social sector can form from previously isolated charities or co-ops or social entrepreneurs and so on.
Democratization to me is the same as reconstruction, building back better after the martial law and dictatorship.
Yes, thank you, Minister. My second question is about the utilization of innovative online technology in elections. When it comes to election campaigns, Taiwan may be termed one of the most advanced democracies, in my observation.
The effective use of online influences, appeared earlier on in elections in Taiwan, before it became a practice in other democracies. In the US, since 2004 presidential election of the Howard Dean campaign, the advent of online communication has changed American elections a lot.
Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 was due to the advanced application of the social media complementing the tradition of ground games, like door knocking and a phone bank. Mr. Obama also mentioned in his recent book, interestingly, A Promised Land, quote, “What I couldn’t fully appreciate yet was just how malleable this technology would prove to be, how quickly it would be absorbed by commercial interests and wielded by entrenched powers, how readily it could be used not to unify people but to distract or divide them, and how one day many of the same tools that had put me in the White House would be deployed in the opposition for everything I stood for,” end quote.
Minister, it is said that social network is most likely composed of like-minded people with similar views. Some scholars even described this as, quote, “Using social media to connect with constituents may somewhat limit a politician’s reach or ability to grow their support, given that filter bubbles make it unlikely that their post will reach anyone who does not already support them.”
Minister, what are your thoughts on Mr. Obama’s, in a sense, pessimistic views in 2020, on politics and online communication in terms of political polarization? What do you think of the concept of filter bubble, in the context over divided politics in America, and maybe in Taiwan as well? Thank you.
To me, social media could be pro social or anti social. It’s largely the same people, the same citizens, participating in it. It is the configuration of the space that determines it’s pro social or anti social nature.
One of the examples I usually use is that in Taiwan, for example, we have the public forums that is built and sponsored by academic networks, that serves no shareholder or advertiser interest.
In these places, as well as the government built pro social media, such as Polis, Join platform, and so on, people can focus on the issues at hand, because the design of the space do not promote the same kind of divisiveness or conspiracy theories, or anger that turned into revenge and discrimination, as in on some more anti social corners of social media.
It’s not the people that are different, it is the configuration of space. Trying to hold a town hall discussion, the kind that Obama promoted during his campaign and presidency on, say, Facebook, is very much like holding a physical town hall in a nightclub with very loud music, a lot of noise, so you have to shout to get heard, addictive drinks, private bouncers, intoxicating drinks, I can go on. [laughs]
I’m not saying bad things about the nightclub. There is a room for the nightlife district in a city. It’s just this room, this space, is not a room for townhalls.
Thank you, Minister.
Now, here is the next question. With a growth of the major social media platforms, a negative campaign can be now created anonymously, especially in the US, even foreign powers have the capability to influence the main agenda during the campaign cycle, thanks to the advent of sophisticated cyber technologies, ironically.
When increasing forces, sometimes by foreign intervention, dominate the political agenda with “fake news” via anonymous negative campaigns, what are the potential challenges facing democracy in this modern era? If more and more regulation is not the answer, how can we deal with that?
I think what’s important is to have what I call a People-Public-Private Partnership, meaning the social sector need to set the norm around these non democratic forces and the public sector amplifying the norm and the economic sector must implement then the norm.
One example is that in 2018, when we held a national referendum plus mayoral election, there was a lot of suspicions about the foreign sponsored advertisement on social media, when it pertains to political and social issues and agenda setting.
In Taiwan, a social sector movement called g0v or gov-zero, have been calling for the radical transparency, that’s to say, open data for the campaign donation expanded to over quite some time now. Because of the civil disobedience work, that’s the gOv people advocated and participated in.
For example, going to the national auditing office, coming out with Xerox copies of the campaign donation expenditure and scanning it and doing what we call OCR, Otaku Character Recognition, by getting people online to collaboratively reverse engineer the paper reports into spreadsheets.
What we have done in g0v is to set the norm, and then the government, the national auditing office finally worked with the legislature to implement and amplify the norm.
2018 is the first election in which data campaign donation expenditure are published not just as paper but also as open data enabling investigative journalists to determine that most of the actually, probably, all of the foreign social media advertisement are not declared as campaign donation expenditure.
Now, these money, the expenditure for campaigns have a very well regulated norm in that only local domestic donors are allowed, and also that it needs to be disclosed as open data.
We talked to Facebook and other social media companies saying, “Look, there is a very strong social norm here, so any political advertisement during elections must be published in real time open data, enabling the same investigative journalist oversight and calling out any what we call dark pattern.”
Without passing any new laws or amending any act, by enforcing the social norm that the social sector force the public factor to adopt the private sector work with two sectors.
Starting in 2019, Taiwan became one of the first jurisdiction in which Facebook adopted radical transparency in real time for advertisement rivalry. We’ve seen that this hate speech and divisive campaigns do not appear as much in sponsored advertisements in the 2020 presidential election.
This is one concrete example. There are many other examples, but I believe, like trade negotiations, if the citizens, the social sector sets the norm, it’s much easier than the public sector unilaterally setting on the top-down measure.
Minister, what do you about the Big Tech like GAFA platform regulation issues?
That’s what I’ve just said. The GAFA, of course, adopt different polices in different jurisdictions. One of the employees who later on left Facebook civic integrity team would eventually speak to the media, and say that Facebook adopted a different civic integrity policy depending on how much social pressure they receive.
For example, they singled out a few countries, including, of course, our country, and said that they received this kind of pressure, so they have to adopt a different policy, a more transparent one in Taiwan. In jurisdictions where there’s no much social pressure for one reason or another, then they did not adapt that quickly.
Finally, really quick, if you could share your views on America and American politics, I would greatly appreciate it. You started your business in the Bay Area. What kind of inspiration did you gain, if any, from your experience in America as well as from American democracy?
To me, the Internet itself remains very much informed by the counter culture in the America jurisdiction. That is to say, the idea of end to end principle, meaning any innovator as long as they can convince another person [laughs] to try out an innovation. Then, nobody on the Internet can put a stop to them.
That enabled what we call permissionless open innovation on the Internet. That is, frankly speaking, very American. To me, the American experiment is not limited to its constitution. Of course, it’s a great experiment, but in many other fields, including the formation of the Internet, the same spirit of trying out various different innovations failing sometimes publically, correcting itself publically for all to learn. To me, that is the spirit of the American democracy.
Interesting. Thank you so much, Minister.
Thank you.
It is a huge honor to have such a great opportunity. I’m going to talk about the transcript with your secretary Zthat later.
Very much appreciated, and thank you for the very thoughtful questions.