I’d like to introduce ourselves. We are Ukrainian journalists. We’re both cofounders of the organization called Public Interest Journalism Lab, which we now…We had a lot of experience in Ukrainian independent media. We used to work in the independent media.
One of the major projects we work on is documenting war crimes. We’re collecting testimonies of the survivors for history, for litigation. Almost five years ago, exactly five years ago, we cofounded this organization called Public Interest Journalism Lab.
It was the only idea. We thought that the idea of debunking fakes is not that efficient because it makes you live according to the discourse of the people who create these fakes.
You need to prebunk. We learned that lesson 10 years ago.
One of our also good colleagues is Peter Pomerantsev, the British Ukrainian scholar researching propaganda. We were at the time thinking about what is happening in Ukraine, that the polarization in the country is used for exploiting vulnerabilities and creating division.
We created this organization whose aim was to investigate how we can create public interest journalism, which depolarizes. That’s when we learned about you.
Yes. It’s like mask, vaccine and cure for the infodemic.
As in our first project was on call.
I should say that when we founded the organization, which was pretty new and it was during a particular type of crisis we also have, I really read a lot about you. I went to listen to the conferences. I found it in Austin and elsewhere because, actually, it was an inspiration and a model.
That story about Uber, the other thing. So you have a very specific role in establishing our organizations five years ago. [laughs]
I’m honored.
Thank you. Still, before that, I think not as part of introduction, but I really want to say it. Since then, I really wanted that it would be an opportunity to interview, to do this, to do that maybe. And then the full scale invasion hit, and we all were focused on the war crimes.
We were just changing.
When I was also re-watching these interviews, it felt like pre war time. I felt like I returned to the peaceful time when we were dealing with…
We can talk about polarization and connecting people rather than war crimes. Yeah.
Therefore, I probably just really want to explain because it’s very hard to understand the complicated concepts at that time. We just heard there is this Ministry of Digital Affairs in Taiwan. There are some cool people who are trying to find the solution on how to depolarize society by algorithm, by programming.
Just after telling that story about Uber, I understood what exactly the thinking is, and I’m giving a lot of examples about that to a lot of people. Maybe just let us start with that. That would be a very good introduction for our audience. What kind of things are you speaking about, the depolarization? Because I feel it’s very close to your heart.
Yeah. Certainly. I actually started this work in 2014. That’s even before I went into the cabinet as a minister in 2016. In 2014 the trust level in Taiwan was very low. President Ma Ying-jeou at the time was enjoying an approval rate of 9 percent which means that in our country of 24 million people, anything that the president said, 20 million people may be against that.
The society was quite polarized around one particular issue, which is the trade agreement with Beijing. In March that year, there was the Sunflower movement where people took matters into their own hands, and we call ourselves demonstrators, not just protesters.
We’re not just against something. We’re also pro something, ProZorro [laughs] . Pro transparency. Pro well, actually, you have the same movement, so I don’t need to go into a lot of details. But the idea is that we…
It’s a service, basically. You know ProZorro. Right?
Of course. Yeah. It’s a service to review the procurement and also the bidding process of the government. At the time, it was opaque in Taiwan, and so people were very anxious about the secret deals with Beijing and that really polarized our society.
When we were in the occupied parliament, peaceful, for three weeks half a million people were on the street, many more online. They all wanted to deliberate about the ideas of trade service agreements. If it’s online, if it’s on, say, Facebook or other places, people become polarized very easily because the algorithm rewards polarization and extremism.
We instead designed our own form of media, what we call prosocial media that brings people closer, that gives more voice to the bridges not the extremes.
That was hailed by the physical facilitators around the occupied parliament and also the online forums by the g0v people who built transparency tools, much like ProZorro for civic technologies that, for example, opened up the budget for visualization and things like that.
The civic tech people, the online people, and the offline facilitators joined hands during the occupation and produced, after three weeks, a very cohesive set of ideas that the speaker of the parliament at the time, Wang Jin-pyng, simply said, “OK. You have a point. We agree. Yeah. Go home.” [laughs] This is one of the very few occupy that resulted in a constructive role.
At the end of that year, I was tapped as the young mentor, kind of reverse mentor, adviser to the cabinet of minister Jaclyn Tsai at the time, and also vice premier Simon Chang who then put together this idea of online participation. Instead of having each controversy trigger another occupy, which would be too much, people thought maybe we can do the process online.
Uber, the next year, was one of the controversial topics. Instead of having people shout at each other saying, this is an extractive gig economy. This is a sharing economy.
At no end, we just ask people how do you feel about the Uber situation. The pro-taxi people, pro-union people, the people who are pro rural development, the people who are pro insurance, and so on, they see themselves in this visualization among one of the clusters of people who share similar feelings, but this is not a headcount. This is not voting. This is rewarding the bridges.
Anyone who can propose something that draws those groups together ends up having agenda setting power. We made a new law about the diversified taxis so that Uber can operate, but also the local co-ops. The surge pricing was allowed, but not undercutting existing meters, so and so forth. Very nuanced, uncommon ground that was built from this process.
This process then also informed many of the other controversies to be resolved in this way in Taiwan, so that by 2016, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became our president, in her inauguration speech, she said, like before, democracy used to be a showdown between two opposing sides, but from this point onwards, democracy needs to be a conversation among all the different sides.
I was then tapped as the digital minister at the end, October of 2016 to lead this change.
Can I ask you about the concept of social innovation that was introduced, as Angelina said, in Taiwan, just generally across the whole government and social innovation action plan, what is this kind of doctrine? Could you just explain a little bit?
Yeah. Definitely. The idea of social innovation is that innovation should not just be for the people. It should be with the people. Top-down technological innovation sometimes forces people to comply with the innovators’ worldview. For example, Uber makes the drivers adhere to the Uber algorithm. Unless we can steer it from the taxi driver side, it is owned by a few not by the people.
For example, in India there’s this union movement against Uber. Instead of just protesting on the demand side, they moved to the supply side and made its own Uber like app, like Tuk Tuk. In Taiwan, we also have similar things like 小驢行 and so on.
That is the innovation that is done with the people and the logic, the programming, and so on, responds to the actual needs of the people instead of the innovator somewhere in Silicon Valley or somewhere in Beijing or something like that.
Basically, it is innovation that is responding to a societal need, and the innovators are everyday people so with the people, not just for the people. That is the basic idea. The social innovation action plan basically draws resources, for example, through university responsibility programs, the university social responsibility, USR a lot of capstone projects done by the undergrad people and so on end up feeding into social innovation.
Instead of teaching the student to compete with one another only in a very capitalistic fashion they complete their grade by helping out, by innovating with their community, solving the community problems and also getting the school credit for it.
We also have in the basic education, the Civic Competence Plan so that by 2022 our 15-year-old, according to the International Citizenship and Civic Standard Study, ICCS among OECD equivalents, our 15-year-old are top of the world when it comes to the feeling of competence in the civic realm.
They can set an agenda for civil society, and also they can start very powerful petitions that change the course of Taiwanese society, not just banning plastic straws, but also going to school one hour later because one more hour of sleep is better for the grades than one more hour of study.
Also crowdfunding a first museum for menstruation and within two years, just removed the taboo around periods, which is no mean feat actually in the Asia society, and the innovator Vivi Lin also became a cabinet level youth adviser.
Actually, the petitioner for the banning of plastic straw, Wang Hsuan Ju, was also a cabinet level youth adviser.
Just uplifting the 17 year olds and so on, the social innovators into cabinet level advisory positions, and also get the impact investors so that when they form social enterprises they can get the impact investment they need to accelerate their ideas and also turn those infrastructure ideas that they come up with the national infrastructure budget through presidential hackathon to upload five teams every year. I can go on, but there’s many, many resources.
In Ukraine, we are very proud of our online governance for our system Diia which has 130 services. Very cozy and also beyond being very useful and handy for the people, it really prevents a lot of problems and troubles.
For instance, the paperless country helped us to avoid the refugee crisis in 2022 and internally displaced crisis because in 2014, we had it. The country and the state was more or less stopped in some places physically, because people cared not about real needs, but I lost some paper, without this paper. I couldn’t do that.
If, for instance, by 2022, we didn’t have this service, that would be really, really very bad, tough, great anxiety, crisis, and whatsoever. This platform is used on numerous things, logistics, and now about the military draft.
After listening to a lot of and looking at what makes Taiwanese approach different, what is ours is just clearly services for the people. It’s purely about services. Make them easy. They help to fight corruption for instance. Transparency helps to fight corruption, access to documents.
Everything is about the state providing the service, but there is no other, it’s a good idea, but there is no philosophy of participation. It’s a very different idea from the Minister of Digital Affairs.
No. But for example, we have this voting for Eurovision, Song Contest through Diia and some other things when the government wants to hear the voices. But it’s rather working upside down than…
Yeah. So it’s so-called participation.
Yeah. It’s the main difference.
Yeah. Right.
In Taiwan, the citizens set the agenda through petitions. Yeah.
That’s not the case. So that’s…
That’s why for me the question is, actually what is at heart? Because it’s all about digital technology. All is good for people. But what makes your approach you know, what is at heart of it?
Is it participation or technology, and how you enforce this principle to the people, to the government, that it’s not just user-friendly as we today say. We’re speaking about user-friendly services for the people, but it’s not about democracy too much.
How do you insert democracy in that? Why do you think it’s critical for you? Why is it such a priority issue for you? On an ideological level, why is it more of a priority than building a lot of good services?
Yeah. Now I’m Shùwèi, the Cyber Ambassador. I used to be the Shùwèi, the Digital Minister. But in Mandarin, Shùwèi de means not just digital. It also means plural. When it’s just a single, singular, we say Yīwèi. When there’s more than one we say Shùwèi. Quite a few, many. Shùwèi literally means plural, like many.
Going back to the inauguration speech of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, to me, digital minister or digital ambassador is also the minister for or ambassador for plurality. Plurality is a very different vision than singularity.
Singularity is technology doing everything and automating away all the human work, but plurality is the collaboration across differences. Fostering the differences, but not letting them, the conflict becomes like fire that goes like wildfire destroying things, but harnessing the fire as energy for the democracy to co-create. That’s the ideological philosophy of plurality.
Well, it’s just interesting how it really works on the level of government. How it really work. If you could explain us through some simple examples.
Because we can relate. I mean, we can understand because we’re really a digital state now. But still, this idea is not behind these services.
Of course. One of the principles of our plural technologies was adopted by Twitter, when it was still called Twitter. It’s called, at the time, Birdwatch. Now it’s called Community Notes. Maybe you have heard of it. Zuckerberg now say they’re also doing Community Notes and YouTube also. It’s like everybody’s doing Community Notes.
Community Notes is based on this bridging approach where you see a post, maybe by Elon and then people have different context, maybe correcting him, maybe adding important context. Then those notes are voted by other people, like a jury, but the algorithm is different.
Instead of the most count wins, like the normal voting which tends to basically let people get astroturfing a lot of trolling accounts, just upvote this one single thing up. It doesn’t do that. It’s first, again, like the Uber example, it clusters people, like the left wing and the right wing and so on because they don’t agree with each other.
Then only the things, the notes that get upvote from both sides, the both wing, the upwing gets featured as the top vote. You have to actually convince the other side for your idea to be voted up. This is called the bridging algorithm.
One very concrete example aside from the Uber one, was the example around marriage equality in Taiwan. Because back in 2018, we had four referendums about marriage equality. Two sides were very strongly opinionated and one side simply said that same sex people should have the same rights and duties as heterosexuals, but the other side was very afraid that the family hierarchy would be disrupted and so on.
Using, again, these kinds of tools on the Join platform, the e-participation platform, people can have their opinions. There’s upvote, there’s downvote, but there’s no reply button, so there’s no room for trolls to grow. Then when we look at the upwing, the both sides voted up ideas, they’re at the uncommon ground.
When we legalized marriage equality in Taiwan we did it in a separate law, and that says only two individuals marry, but their families don’t marry. In Mandarin, we say 結婚 when two individuals marry. We say 結姻 when two families marry but this is only the individuals and not their families.
Because you have kind of a particular tradition where there is no culture of…
…saying that the family is married.
Yes. Right. Exactly, so for the rights and duties camp, This is a superior form of marriage, because your duty is less supporting the extended family or the conflict of interest, or things like that.
[laughter]
This is a better form of marriage. If you have a traditional family kin, because we have in Mandarin a lot of words to describe the extended family. So people were afraid that we’ll have to invent new words like I don’t know, like 兒婿 or 女媳 or which means…
Like mother-in-law, father-in-law.
[laughter]
Or something like that. It’s like mother-in-law, father-in-law gets changed and so on.
We also have two sons in law. We have a son-in-law, if we have a son.
Exactly. And so because then in Taiwan, when the two same sex persons marry then they only wed. Their families don’t marry, so it’s just by law but not the father-in-law, not the mother-in-law, not the in-law.
It’s a new design. Because of that, after the law passed, actually, both sides depolarized very quickly. Because they can see that their ideas are being reflected by this uncommon ground. It is important to have not just a referendum, which is the right democracy, but also deliberative democracy that discovered this uncommon ground.
We are where we are today in the world when we see a bit of a backslash when community notes were popular, but now with everything which is happening in social media, actually let’s say, liberals and progressive are very much afraid of technology like, because you see that it can be an oligarchy as well.
It can be the rule of a couple autocrats, who are just very much enlightened by knowing algorithms and the way how to work, could be also very rich. We can speak about Elon Musk. We can speak about what’s going on in Facebook. What is your take on that?
Also on a philosophical level because people have now for just the last half year, of course we were living the context of the war against Ukraine, but wherever you go, in the media, anywhere, people are just freaking out because of AI. You know they’re afraid, afraid, afraid. And with what Elon is doing online, people are just really freaking out.
People represent technology. And people think that this is how technology looks like.
What is your take on actually what is going on? How can you promote something else? What is your argument? Aren’t you concerned as well that that would be singularity? Instead of plurality because it’s for them. It’s not singularity. It looks like that singularity is enforced today.
Yeah. This is a great question. For example, just a couple of days ago I launched with the help of many other fellow advisors this platform with the California government called Engaged California with Gavin Newsom.
The idea here is that we are using the same technology we just talked about, the bridge making, the uncommon ground with the Californian people so 40 million people, more people than Taiwan on a simple issue, how to recover from the LA wildfire.
And how to, I guess, build back better. This is important because just like the Uber urgency or the pandemic urgency or other urgencies, there is no pro wildfire party. Right?
[laughter]
It is not a partisan thing. It unifies even a polarized constituency because people just had a very large scale experience of devastation, and now people are in their community spirit.
That is the fertile ground for plurality. Because then people see the different ideas, the divergence of different concerns and so on being temporarily put aside, and the idea of a shared security infrastructure around fire damage become top of their mind.
To your first question I think technology does not have to look like one single person dictating what to do. It can also be the other way around. Instead of one person broadcasting, feels like nowadays just one person broadcasting their ideas, it could be broad listening to have millions of people listen to one another, figure out the uncommon ground, and then turn it into swift action, for example, on a wildfire recovery.
This is one example I’ll give. Also because I’m in the bridge and I just mentioned Gavin Newsom, I have also to mention the other side. I was last week also on the show of Laura Loomer, who is a famous MAGA, right influencer.
Laura was also very much interested in this idea of pro-social media because they also have different experiences of maybe Elon Musk or maybe the previous Twitter and so on silencing their voices because they were seen as fringe or extreme or hate or things like that.
Very interestingly, on both sides of the political aisle, we have people who feel that this singular broadcasting media is not serving the needs of their community, even though they’re very different communities, and they are now feeling the same urgency. And because both are using free software, open source, so on this side, maybe Bluesky is free software, like Diia.
On the other side, Truth Social is also open source, also free software. Technically, we can actually bridge them together so that people on Truth Social can see the uncommon ground from Bluesky, and people on Bluesky can see the uncommon ground from Truth Social.
Together, that, again, is plurality. It’s better than a single platform dictating what should be trending in the day, but rather what should be trending is the surprising validators across the political aisle on shared urgency issues such as wildfire recovery.
Can I ask a question about impact and how you make things impactful? I remember being impressed by your experience of involving comedians in spreading clarifications on vaccines and more.
Yes. Humor over Rumor.
Yes. Could you tell us a little bit how you or anyone else came up with this idea and how it worked?
Sure. The idea here is that we always moved to prebunking instead of debunking. People already know that if you, for example, have seen very polarized messages, it takes roots in your mind, and debunking doesn’t actually remove it. It sometimes just reinforces, unless it’s done in a very personalized precision way. I mean, you’re experts, so you know about this. [laughs] Maybe too well.
Prebunking works differently. One example because you also worked in pandemic, early on in, I think, February 2020 there’s different ideas about masks. The science around the efficacy of masks was not very well established back then.
In Taiwan, we have one side that says because we had experience with SARS so it’s a very toxic version of coronavirus. People know at the time, only N95, the highest grade of masks, are useful. Some people were saying only N95 are useful, and everything else actually is just a placebo. It doesn’t work.
The other side says this is actually about ventilation, about aerosol. Any kind of mask will hurt you, and N95 will hurt the most. So both sides are very polarized. They could easily start fighting with the Jada. But because we know they’re about to fight, we also worked with the uncommon ground and the participation officers around the ministries to figure out what is the uncommon ground between these two people.
Very quickly we rolled out this very funny, very interesting meme featuring a very cute dog, a Shiba Inu dog the Doge dog, actually, I guess. Then she was putting her paw to her mouth, saying that wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty unwashed hand from your face.
[laughs]
You laughed. It worked.
[laughter]
In Mandarin, we say 內外夾弓大立腕. We have songs about handwashing and things like that. And then we actually measure tap water usage. It really increased after this meme pushed out. When you see this very cute dog called Zongchai wearing this mask, putting a paw on her mouth, you laugh and then the tension is gone. You cannot be outraged anymore by those two polarized missiles.
You put a mask on this dog…
Yes. And we also put the mask dog and the paw and then put a red x to it. Like, don’t put your dirty hand to your mouth.
So it wasn’t about the type of masks. It was about the…
The mask is just to remind you to wash your hands.
It deescalates this culture war about mask. If I don’t want to wear a mask and you wear a mask, I don’t attack you because you’re just reminding me to wash my hand and vice versa.
There was another kind of competition because what I understand, there is something in human nature to argue as well, especially online, as we said, that you made a competition for the people about what vaccine is better?
Oh, yeah. There’s that too. There was also the vaxx anti-vaxx but that’s not 2020 because in 2020, there was no vaccine yet. [laughs] Later on we would have vaccine. The idea is that in the beginning there was AstraZeneca. AstraZeneca some people, especially elderly people, were seeing reports from Europe about early AstraZeneca responses.
Some of them lead to, I don’t know, blood related issues, clots and so on. So, basically the idea was that some people were very afraid of vaccines. And again, it could be a vaxx and anti-vaxx polarization war. That was 2021.
Then we published a scoreboard of people’s preference to vaccine labels. How many people in the 70s bracket in each municipality prefer AstraZeneca over, say, Moderna, or if they’re both OK. By far you can really go in that age bracket prefer Moderna over AstraZeneca. But then the younger people, some of them are OK with AstraZeneca.
When the new AstraZeneca shipment comes, it goes progressively to the younger and younger people, because the older people are saying, oh, we’ll wait for Moderna. There’s all in all, I think, four brands. There was AstraZeneca, Moderna, BNT Pfizer, and also the Homebrew, the Medigen.
Again, our Medigen is very polarized. There are some people who only would get Medigen and Gao Duan, and some people who would never get Medigen. We turned what could have been a vaxx and anti-vaxx into a competition, like my baseball team, better than your baseball team. My brand of vaccine is better than your brand of vaccine.
I got four brands just to make a case including Novavax. And I still survive. [laughs] Again, this is from the uncommon ground. The uncommon ground is that vaccination is good, and the fight is just between the brands of vaccines.
I would allow us to also share our experience because it was also pivotal. When we were setting up our organization, we were planning to work on human rights and how to reach out to the people on occupied territories. Exactly on that day is when we really decided to meet, the COVID pandemic was announced.
We started to speak about how you speak about the COVID. But by the way, not when vaccination started. Way ahead was about one of our cofounders Tetiana Peklun, who said, look. Sooner or later, vaccines would be invented. Sooner or later, they would be invented. It will be summer. We knew that there would be an anti-vaxx movement because it pre preexisted in Ukraine earlier.
Probably the Russians would invent their vaccine, because there was a discussion. Vaccines were not there. So we really, back then secured some funding for the research. It took us some time because vaccines were still not there.
Yeah. Yeah. I do remember.
It took kind of months as far as…
It took year, yeah.
And we did the point and the research. What do people want to know and what are their concerns about vaccination? And then we figure out that really by the numbers, around seven percent people believe in conspiracies.
Like chips.
Yeah. They believe. They believe. These are obvious. But the absolute majority, we’re really having a lot of real concerns, if I have a pregnant wife, if I have a small kid, if my mother has three diseases and she’s 96.
The problem was that the quality media very good media including like youngster’s media, also we’re already starting little by little do some kind of debunking and later figure out during the social media, during the focus group that this kind of like humor approach in a way when you mock the people who are anti-vaxxers saying oh, there won’t be problems if you take vaccine.
People felt offended because they said I’m not crazy. I don’t believe that there would be problems if there were a vaccine.
It’s not funny to them, so it’s not humorous.
But yeah. It’s not funny.
[laughter]
So really, if you make fun of them, it’s not humorous to them.
Yeah. So the point was that, actually, you really need, first of all, to answer the real questions to the real people. We’re not creative enough to think about, like how you make it in a humorous way or competition way. But the findings were quite clear. You really need to learn and most of the people are ready to agree on something. That’s every single one of our research…
I agree. So you don’t need to have humor or competition if you act early enough. If you prebunk, then there’s a lot of runway for you to get fact-based recording, personal stories, educational articles. So we’re not saying that humor or competition is the only way to reach uncommon ground. There’s many ways to reach the uncommon ground.
I’m rather saying that by default, we figure out that every single one of our research, that people are more moderate. Then it gives…
Of course. It was just a hallucination produced by the antisocial social media because that’s more addictive. If people feel they’re engaging in a very polarized fight then they get addicted to their phone, and they can see more advertisements. After all, that’s all there it is.
In 2015 many platforms switched from a shared trending feed, or a follower feed, to a for you feed, an algorithmic feed. The impetus was because they want to maximize the time people spend on touch screens, because touch screens were really new at the time.
The researchers found out, if you do sensationalism, polarization, algorithmic feed, autoplay on YouTube, and of course TikTok perfected that tactic, then people get addicted very easily, and then people will not be able to pull out of that addiction.
Then, from that point onward, it strip-mine the social fabric, into polarization and because people are in their own rabbit holes, they imagine the other side is much worse. When you ask them how polarized a society is, they start saying more and more polarized.
While actually, if you do individual polling or community network conversation, people actually stayed quite moderate, but the perception of polarization just skyrocketed in 2015.
How do you think? Your personal view, I really wanted to ask about the ideology behind big techs. I mean, is it money? Is it just pure capitalism? Or is there a lot of ideology behind doing that? I mean, you’ve just explained, of course, it makes more money, obviously. But people like Musk it’s obviously not only about money.
I don’t think it’s purely about money, but I think competition for people’s attention is a big part of it.
For example, when YouTube first switched to autoplay, or when TikTok first switched to shorter form videos it just grabbed a lot more attention from peoples, so that their competitors, even though they know the pollution it will cause to their mental health, they cannot help but switch to a similar arrangement because they were afraid of losing people’s attention.
If you look for the Facebook files they knew about the consequences, but they feel because of competition they cannot do otherwise. That is one part. The other part was that there’s this collective trap.
A year and a half ago, there was a study that says, if you ask an undergrad in The US using TikTok to quit TikTok, you will have to pay them around $60 per month. They lose that much utility, fear of missing out, FOMO. But if there’s a magic button you press and everybody around them quit TikTok together, then they’re willing to pay you $30 per month.
[laughs]
How was it measured? It was just a…
Yeah. It’s a poll survey. It’s very rigorous. This is even a higher degree of collective trap than, say, a luxury brand. Like, if you’re in a certain social class, everybody has a LV or something then you can feel if I don’t have that I lose out on status, so I have to buy it, but I lose money because of that.
If there’s a magic button I pay half LV price to make sure everybody don’t use LV anymore, no luxury, and it’s actually better, but this is sometimes seen in luxury goods, but this is seen in a very deep degree on TikTok.
How then you compete in this competition if you are a government, if you are a public interest journalist, public broadcaster? How do you, I mean, even enter this competition?
Yeah. Two ways. One is you acquire a TikTok like platform, and then you turn it into free software, into open source, so that people can freely choose, which software to use to consume that content.
The EU, for example, passed a Digital Markets Act that says if you send a message on WhatsApp, for example, WhatsApp cannot say you can only receive it through WhatsApp. It has to interoperate. It has to bridge with other instant messengers. People have the freedom to choose instant messages, so that people don’t have to pay the formal price when they move away.
When they move away, they still keep contact. They can still keep the messages. Something about that interoperability is very powerful, because then it avoids the collective trap altogether when people can migrate to different things.
When I was a child, when you had a bank account, you could only get cash from the ATM of that bank. So for a new bank, it’s impossible to compete, because all the good ATM places are taken over by other banks. Then the government intervened and said, you can charge a transaction fee, but all banks’ ATMs need to accept all other banks’ ATM cards.
It’s called 金融卡, so that is convergence between the different bank systems. Or if you switch to a different telecom, you should be able to carry your number with you.
There’s a question, for example, for some journalists and broadcasters. X former Twitter has become just unbearable. We will leave it. You think, the strategy should be the other way around. You should be there, but just act differently.
Two ways. As I said, one way is just to buy Twitter or buy TikTok. Elon bought Twitter but did not really turn it into a decentralized platform. Some other team did, and it’s called Bluesky.
We’re now also trying to help people to buy TikTok. There’s a people’s bid by Kevin O’Leary, Frank McCourt, and so on, putting on a $20 billion bid. If they get TikTok, they promise to make it decentralized, interoperable, so that people are not trapped into the logic of that app anymore.
We’ll see whether it goes through but buying TikTok and turning it open, or building a Twitter alternative like Bluesky and keeping it open. Those are the two routes. Interoperability, like number portability, is the core in both routes.
In most cases, it’s kind of a macro level. Something else, we hear in Taiwan. When I was also listening to quite a few new interviews of yours there was one which was very peculiar for me because the anchor of a very classical media station was very much pushing you on political issues.
Like, I know you are nonpartisan, but can you really express your opinion on China, on things, on that? Still what I wanted to say is that when we are coming here as Ukrainians, we speak to people in Taiwan and they are saying it’s a very polarized society today, there are issues happening, they are concerned about the Chinese influence.
First of all, it’s a country. There are existing parties. There are existing political views. Sometimes for others also, it’s tricky. Who are the agents? Who is a paid kind of troll, what is a campaign, and where is…
Who is a political opponent?
Who is a political opponent, and where is a genuine sentiment? How do you put maybe for yourself some red lines? What is for you is being nonpartisan navigating in this environment, but then also it’s I can say, I mean, in Ukrainian, there is a threat of China.
I know with every Taiwanese almost we speak, they all speak, they’re expecting or being afraid of the invasion and they’re concerned that there is disinformation, you speak so much about cyber attacks all the things.
For you, how do you define this? What is for you being nonpartisan? How did you navigate in the political environment? And were there red lines? How you define all the facts? Being a Taiwanese is like, it’s your country you built, you fought, you do, you live for it. You really understand that there are some partisan things. We don’t want to have a war. We don’t want to have an invasion.
Yeah. I think there’s broadly speaking, two red lines.
First, I think if you remove fundamental freedoms, that is not accepted. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the state removing the freedom of expression in the name of security, censorship, or whatever, or a foreign actor crowding out the conversation around democracy with 200 million robots posing as humans, posting advertisements, and so on.
I mean, this is not speech anymore if you have fake accounts, paid advertisements, micro-targeting people and just crowding out normal democratic discourse because in our constitution, although we have freedom of expression, we never protected robots from having freedom of expression [laughs] . We never protected robots from having freedom of expression.
To me, that is a red line. If the exercise of such astroturfing, trolling, or things like that crowd out actual speech, then to me that is actually a kind of censorship. It’s not censorship in the sense of cutting subsea cables, although they do that too. [laughs] It is also censorship in terms of disabling actual freedom of speech and association. It infringes upon fundamental freedom. To me, that is a red line.
The other red line that I can see is that it makes it difficult for people to associate. Even if individuals have their freedom of speech and so on, if you destroy the social fabric, so that people distrust each other, hate each other across not just political lens, but also religion, urban/rural, intergenerational, gender, you can name it.
In many jurisdictions around the world people are just so polarized that one polarizing political topic can also polarize along all these dimensions. Even though, OK, they all have freedom to express, but there’s no social solidarity anymore, no connective tissue anymore. To me, attack on that social connective tissue is also a red line.
Fortunately, even though in Taiwan, we are all very vigorous in our political conversations, we are the least polarized when it comes to urban/rural, when it comes to different age, when it comes to different genders, and things like that. I think that is our connective tissue.
Our spiritual traditions again, we have many major religions, but none of which over 51 percent. This plurality in other nonpartisan dimensions keeps us connected as a society, and it’s actually difficult for the adversaries to break through all these connective tissues. I think that is very important as well.
In other talks you…No, but I just then would say what do you do from the security point of view? Because you’re speaking a lot about all these attacks like the real attacks, because yes, cyber is the way of waging the war.
There are other things you need to, I love the phrase you said that we are an earthquake country, so you’re always expecting something that’s because it couldn’t be planned on the question like, what do you think will happen with China? You see, like we’re living here and the earthquake will come without any announcement.
What is important for Taiwan to be prepared from the security point of view, from the digital security point of view? I’m speaking more from now, we are now concerned about the dependency on Starlink. That kind of thing. That was something new. It’s a new concern, which was not there in 2022.
It’s both a civilian and military concern.
Yeah. I see. In Taiwan, we, of course, want a plurality of providers. Not just subsea cables, but also microwave and satellite. Not just low earth orbit as you just mentioned like OneWeb here, but also mid orbit like SES and high orbit geosynchronous. The idea is that it’s very difficult for a single adversary to disable all three orbits at once. It’s like physically in different places.
They’re diversifying it.
Right. Even in low Earth orbit, we also want to work with different providers. Also, in terms of hyperscalers, I understand, for example, that Microsoft works very closely with your digital transformation ministry to put the services like the Diia and so on, to the cloud.
You also work with Google on that, and we also work with these two, but also Amazon, so that if the subsea cables are cut, the regions of those hyperscalers in Taiwan can move freely among those three different cloud providers.
Again, you have to destroy all three in order to deny us communication. Another good thing about this is because then you don’t go to the same vendor for all the different parts of the stack.
The different vendors, they will have to talk interoperability, again open protocols. You’re not locked in by one single vendor. If your computation, your communication, your storage, or authentication all go to the same vendor, and that same vendor someday turns against you. Or maybe not against you, but was cyber attacked, then you’re gone. There’s no redundancy.
But if each stack belongs to a different vendor, then you can always step in and plug and play LEGO blocks to different vendors. The plurality of providers is essential in our communication and computation resilience.
You mentioned that Taiwan is learning from Ukraine. I want to understand more. Is it like learning because you saw something happening and you know that’s what we should do? Or you’re really seeing clearly some particular things which Ukraine is doing?
Are you learning both from our mistakes but also our solutions? As it’s written in one of your platforms, how do you generally feel about what’s going on with our war against us? How do you feel about it?
I mean, I went public several times saying that I stayed up at night just refreshing the “Kyiv Independent” [laughs] website, trying to get every scrolling text of what’s going on. I think that really taught us the importance of keeping independent media flowing to the overseas community during times of escalation because only real time input can fill the vacuum of the information ecosystem.
If you don’t have trustworthy, robust, independent media reporting, then all those deep fakes, all those generated stuff, and so on, no matter how low quality, would just flood the information ecosystem. Once people go there, it’s difficult to recover.
We always plan for our resilience for earthquakes, natural or unnatural, the dedicated bandwidth for emergency response teams, including the correspondence from international media and so on. That was always on our highest priority list. That was one very concrete thing we learned from the Ukrainian experience.
The other thing, of course, is the backup of the critical systems, the core communication networks, and so on to the cloud, to the hyperscalers so that it becomes location-independent. That is the second thing that we have learned.
I think all in all we see so much of ourselves in your situation. I don’t think there’s any anti-Ukraine party in Taiwan [laughs] . Everybody is supporting Ukraine. We very much expressed our willingness to support.
I personally also think I recorded something for a Lviv like, press conference not long after I became the minister to support the power generators, support the laptops, support the communication equipment, and things like that. We can offer only civilian support after all but I think communication and societal resilience is also a key part in your ongoing process.
And thank you for that.
Yeah. We really, really appreciate it. It is felt.
Maybe one of the last questions because I can see that we should be letting you go soon. In terms of challenges to Taiwanese democracy again where do you think the most challenges lie?
We’ve been asked many things. For example, we’ve been asked what if China invades and there are pro-China people and they will greet the Chinese here? How do you persuade people to come to the other side? How do you talk to these people which in case of invasion could act like that?
Again, that’s potential speaking. In reality, when the invasion took place in Ukraine, it looked very interesting. Not all people who spoke Russian and went to the Russian church agreed with the Russian people. But what do you think in the shadow of this potential scenario of China invading?
First of all, I think internally, if you ask our people, there’s no anti freedom faction. People who are very loud about this political issue, that political issue, none of them are against freedom of speech. What would that even mean? [laughs] They’re all very pro freedom.
While there are differences of opinions in terms of culture, language, whatever people to people ties they have with the pure culture across the street. Nobody wants to go back to the martial law era of censorship, of top down clamping down on freedom of speech. I don’t think there is a single faction in Taiwan that is saying, we have too much freedom let’s just not speak. It’s not possible.
However, if you see the situation within the Beijing regime, their journalists starting around 2013 or so, they enjoy less and less freedom. Previously, around more than 10 years ago now there was a very thriving blogging community from within the Beijing regime. People thought for a while that this blogging thing could be a new decentralized independent media, public interest, and so on.
But then, because of social media, I guess, and the Beijing regime felt the threat of I don’t know, people associating horizontally. Then they start pushing out this so-called harmonization, or now they call it 清朗. I don’t know how to translate, but anyway, harmonization attempts. And so the press freedom, the speech freedom becomes less and less.
I think in Taiwan, we have an uncommon ground domestically, which is this pro freedom stance. I think that is the message we also want to send to the world. If people around, for example, the US, the left and the right, I think the one thing they can agree on is this freedom. Technology should advance freedom and advance security. That’s the thing they can agree on. Across the Atlantic, the same.
Taiwan will be truly in danger if our friends in Europe and in the US fracture domestically and also across the Atlantic. If they manage to at least agree on the importance of freedom, then Taiwan is safe. If they become so polarized that they become even polarized around the freedom issue, then that’s the point where we become truly impairable.
They’re working hard. They don’t forget what it is. They are short because we have the roles with Angelina. She’s really sometimes concerned, and I’m always this optimist.
I wanted to say the other things, and formulate the question differently. Not about the concerns of Taiwanese democracy, I actually want to understand why democracy works in Taiwan, why this society, after 37 years of martial law, made it.
Not everybody. Not every society. There were societies which were democratic and went the other way. But somehow, there are not so many. There was something that worked.
And also with remarkable, a few amount of violence, that is the other part. Taiwan was able to do democratic transition largely without a lot of bloodshed.
There’s two things. One is that people don’t want to go back to the non democratic autocratic past. The second is that we made this transition with remarkable peace. These two are related. Because in some jurisdictions, when there is a very violent uprising, there’s then a part of society that feels left behind, feels wrong, and so on.
In Taiwan, we always make sure when we do this transition, the people who work with the previous regimes, they’re not entirely left behind. That there is a bridge from where they are, they were, to where we are now. And there’s this emphasis on the younger generation leading the change, and that is one of the key part of this.
No matter whether it’s the Wild Lily movement or Sunflower movement or many other movements in Taiwan, it was always people who are 18 or even younger than 18 that is spelling out the direction. If they’re younger, that means that they’re not part of the old, us versus them, binary partisanship or fight or things like that, but they represent a novel direction.
I think the systemic improvement in Taiwan’s democracy stems from we being a very young democracy, yes, but also a democracy that is built largely with the young people instead of, just for the young people. Again, with the young people.
And because Internet personal computing is also big here, and appears roughly at the same time. Personal computers and democratization, roughly the same year. The world wide web, the browsers, and the direct vote of president, largely the same year, ‘96.
To us technology always served democracy, not the other way around. Not technology dominating democracy. The young people are very good with technology. That’s true everywhere in the world. The young people feel they can contribute. That is the difference. Because when technology serves democracy, the young people are also the servants of the public service.
If it is the technology destroying democracy, the young people are pitted against the democratic institutions. In Taiwan, we don’t say that, and we don’t do that, which is why our 15 years are top of the world when it comes to the feeling, the agency they have to change the society.
And my final for an advocate of sleep as a person today who slept very little and because of that was rude to the colleagues, unfortunately, a lot of them. I know how harmful it would be.
Can you give us advice? How do you make this eight, nine sleep? How do you organize your day? Of course we can always complain, like we live during war, a raise, young mother, but you promote this philosophy of sleeping wise. Tell our audience and listeners.
Yes. By the time you publish this my short documentary about my life, “Good Enough Ancestor” will be online. And so…
YouTube?
Yeah. Vimeo, I think. Yes, I’ll post it to many platforms, including Truth Social and Bluesky. The point is, I was born with a heart disease. The whole of my heart means when I was four, the doctor told me and my family, this child only has a 50 percent chance to survive until surgery.
I got the surgery when I was 12, so I’m good now. For the first 12 years of my life, I went to sleep. I don’t know whether I will wake up. So I always feel there’s a coin flip. If it lands wrong, I don’t wake up. I have this training in my mind. It’s called publish and then perish, so that I have to record what I learned that day.
When I was four, it was with a tape recorder and then gradually with keyboard, and then with Internet, and so on. I just document and hopefully publish everything before I go to sleep. Then if I don’t wake up, that’s fine, because in the public domain people can then use it. Which is why I call this title of the film Good Enough Ancestor.
I only have one day’s time. I don’t have time to be a perfect ancestor, and perfection is boring anyway. It takes possibilities away from future generations. I’m just good enough. So this Good Enough Ancestor means that you don’t need to reach perfection. There’s a crack in everything, but that’s how the light gets in. And then you can sleep very well.
It’s a very much similar philosophy of Natalia’s because I’m the one who is always taking time to make it perfect and she’s like it’s good enough. Just let’s roll.
Do it.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much. Thank you for taking the time…
It was so refreshing for us. We really enjoyed this conversation.