Welcome to Zoom In Zoom Out , your global look at news from Taiwan. I’m your host, Alec McDonald. All of us use it, but not all of us enjoy it. It’s social media. Once thought to be a strength for democracy and to build human connections, research has continued to show that social media harms human relationships and can hurt democracy.

And now social media faces a new challenge as artificial intelligence threatens to turbocharge problems like misinformation, scams, and deep fakes. But can social media work differently? Can it be a source for good? Our guest today, Audrey Tang, says yes. Audrey is Taiwan’s cyber ambassador at large and a senior adviser for the Mozilla Foundation.

Audrey, welcome to the show.

Very happy to be here.

You’ve recently joined the Mozilla Foundation as a senior adviser. For those unfamiliar, can you introduce the Mozilla Foundation and what your role there will be?

Mozilla has been around for more than two decades now. For many, it’s the steward of the Firefox browser. For people working in AI, it hosts Common Voice , a dataset that includes more than 200 languages. Anyone speaking any language can contribute their voice to help AI systems, so the frontier models anywhere in the world can benefit from diverse ideas, cultures, and local languages without being constrained by just a few major languages.

It includes not just Taiwanese Mandarin or Taiwanese Holo, but also Taiwanese indigenous languages. Through this participatory input, Mozilla aims to prove that the internet becomes safer as it becomes more open. Just as in Taiwan we say we’re making the state transparent to the people—not the people transparent to the state—Mozilla fights digital surveillance and builds tools that make the internet more robust through participation.

For example, Roost is one of the projects I help advise. It makes it easy for anyone hosting any content site to scan for child sexual abuse materials, non-consensual intimate images, and other harmful content in a way that preserves privacy and avoids reliance on a central provider. People can contribute to safety—like with Common Voice —by donating threat intelligence gathered locally without compromising privacy.

You and your Plurality co-author, Glen Weyl (who was on the show last year), recently co-authored a paper on pro-social media. You talk about some of the design issues with today’s modern social media. Can you describe these problems and your proposed solutions?

The idea of pro-social media is inspired by platforms like Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, you see the main article (the common ground) and the talk page (where ongoing debates are documented fairly). This bridging and balancing of content helps depolarize conversation.

Extending that to social media, there are initiatives like Community Notes on X.com, YouTube, Facebook, and others, where people can add missing context to viral posts. Only notes that receive bipartisan upvotes get shown—encouraging bridging rather than polarizing content.

A real-world example is Bowling Green, Kentucky, where around 10% of the population engaged in a pro-social media experiment. Rather than extreme voices dominating—as in traditional town halls or antisocial corners of the internet—bridging ideas went viral, producing nuanced statements. Reports show over 70% of statements were highly agreed upon, proving people are less polarized than they appear on traditional platforms. Taiwan has deployed such pro-social algorithms since 2014, now spreading globally.

Sometimes tragedy fuels hostile conversations online. How does your platform address hostility?

In antisocial media, algorithms prioritize addictive engagement, often amplifying extreme voices. Pro-social media reverses this: we give virality to bridging ideas, not extremes. Community Notes and polls function this way—rewarding uncommon ground and dampening hostile takes.

What about anonymity? How do you protect identities while ensuring trust?

Pure anonymity invites malicious AI swarms; pure real-name policies deter vulnerable voices. The middle ground is meonymity —partial identity disclosure. For example, someone can prove they’re a California resident without revealing more. Platforms can set topic-based thresholds, ensuring real deliberation without storing personal data.

Could meonymity help fight scams, deep fakes, and disinformation?

Yes. In Taiwan, starting this year, advertisers on Facebook and YouTube must pass KYC (Know Your Customer) checks. Ads without meonymous digital signatures disclosing origin are fined under the crowdsourced Anti-Fraud Act, which involved 450 randomly selected citizens.

You’ve joined the AI Advisory Group on Elections (AI AGE). What are the greatest AI risks to elections?

Interference is shifting from disinformation (fake content) to malicious AI swarms (fake people). These accounts post genuine-looking content and engage organically, conducting “vibe attacks” to subtly shift public perception.

The AIAGE connects election officials, policymakers, and AI experts worldwide to share best practices—like meonymity and provenance—without resorting to surveillance states or falling into AI swarm chaos.

What AI safety tools are you working on?

At the Paris AI Summit, Mozilla, Project Liberty, the Eric Schmidt Foundation, and others launched Roost (Robust Open Online Safety Tools). It’s open-source foundational work enabling smaller operators to detect and monitor online harms, including CSAM and deep fake intimate images—threats amplified by modern AI capabilities. As harmful content creation decentralizes, so must defenses. Open source is key.

Despite widespread pessimism about the internet’s future, you seem optimistic. Why?

Taiwan went from high polarization and low trust 10 years ago to one of the least polarized societies across many dimensions. We treat external pressures like vibe attacks as challenges that strengthen our democratic resilience.

Globally, more communities are pivoting from antisocial to pro-social algorithms, building bridges and rejecting extreme polarization. People are ready to move on.

Audrey, this has been wonderful. Thank you for your time.

Thank you—very happy to be here. Live long and prosper.

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