We want to send a message to the world that we’re here to show that authoritarianism actually does not deliver as well as democracy. And if people around the world can echo this message because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. And if we can all band together, then that coalition of democracies is much stronger than any single authoritarian threat.

That’s Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s cyber ambassador, explaining why Taiwan’s independence from China matters to the rest of the world. I’m Margaret Hoover. This is the Firing Line podcast. In 2014, pro-democracy activists occupied Taiwan’s legislature to protest a trade deal with Beijing. Software engineer Audrey Tang helped demonstrators spread their message and soon found herself advising the government as a result.

Since we know that in the anti-social corners of social media, the engagement is through enragement, so we in the occupied parliament built a different space which I refer to as pro-social media.

Tang became Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs, integrating technology into its democracy.

The existing apparatus is slower than the pace of innovation of emerging technologies. So we need to upgrade our democracy.

…and helping the government navigate the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government needs to trust the people before the people trust the government back. To give no trust is to get no trust.

But can technology really bring people together instead of driving them apart?

If you just look at the anti-social corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that’s an illusion. Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, on most of the things.

Audrey Tang, welcome to Firing Line.

Very happy to be here.

You are Taiwan’s cyber ambassador.

Yes.

And you are known as being a pioneer in using technology to advance democracy. In this moment of rising authoritarianism around the world, with social media contributing to all sorts of political disarray, what makes you so confident that technology can be used to advance democracy?

Thank you for the great question.

We’ve been here before. For the past 12 years, Taiwan has indeed been the top target for polarization attacks, and we have seen the polarization effects firsthand. In 2014, half a million people went to the street and we peacefully occupied our parliament for three weeks to protest the trade deal signed with Beijing.

So and you’re referring of course to the Sunflower Movement in 2014, which you were a part of. You were an activist and a leader in the Sunflower Movement. How did technology underpin the success of the Sunflower Movement in 2014?

We called ourselves not just protesters, who are usually against something, but rather demonstrators building a demo, which is showing a better system. Since we know that in the anti-social corners of social media, the engagement is through enragement, so the things that are on extremes are amplified.

It’s like, the more extreme you are, the more megaphone you hold. So we in the occupied parliament built a different space, which I refer to as pro-social media.

And when you say you built a different space, are you saying that you actually created an online space in which solutions could be forged by the protesters?

That is exactly right. We used the systems designed by Occupy movements elsewhere. First from Occupy Wellington in New Zealand. They built this platform called Loomio, and later on we switched to Polis, which is another platform built by the Occupy Seattle people.

Around that time, 10 years ago, many people around the world are figuring out the same question, which is, if we give virality not to the extremes, but to the bridge makers. What if we reward instead the people who can build these bridges so that both sides who don’t usually agree, manage to agree, then we make those viral.

I think the point here is that if you just look at the anti-social corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that’s an illusion. Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors, most of the time, on most of the things.

So you’re saying you can use technology to advance democracy because you did use technology to advance democracy in the Sunflower Movement in 2014. After that, you were invited to be part of the Taiwanese government at a cabinet level. What became your role?

I was tapped to join the cabinet at the end of 2014 as a reverse mentor, a young person, younger than 35, that advised a cabinet minister.

During that time, we built the vTaiwan platform to use this kind of bridge-making algorithm to resolve other things without physically occupying government buildings. But we built online spaces to resolve issues, for example, when Uber first came to Taiwan in 2015, they engaged drivers with no professional driver license, and people had disputes about insurance, about undercutting meters and so on.

How did technology help solve that problem?

We sent SMS and emails and invited Uber drivers, Uber passengers, taxi drivers, unions to join this online platform, Polis.

When you see the Polis platform, all it does is show you one statement from your fellow citizen, like “I don’t think undercutting meters is fine, but surge pricing may be a good idea,” for example. And then, you can agree or disagree or pass on. But there’s no reply button and there’s no retweet button. So there’s no room for trolls to grow.

You have said “democracy is a technology.” What do you mean?

Well, it is a social technology, right? In ancient Greece, people used this randomization device where they put their names into this stone tablet thing and just drew lots and then selected a random column to serve as the deliberators for the day. That was like stone technology.

Now, we have silicon technology, like Polis. For example, when you answer the statement about search pricing, or other statements like insurance, you see your avatar, your picture moving in this two-dimension space on your screen toward the people who share your opinions, and you see the other side as well. But more importantly, you see the bridge builders. You see which statements can connect those two sides together, and people compete to be on the high score, the leaderboard, because we pre-commit only to consider the idea that bridge this divide as the national law when it comes to Uber. So we resolved that as well.

So it seems to me that the key insight is that the government has facilitated an online space that emphasizes bridge building rather than extremes. One of your biggest accomplishments serving as Taiwan’s digital minister was the establishment of vTaiwan, which is an online forum that gathers citizens’ input on regulation and legislation. Tell me about the establishment of vTaiwan.

So, in 2014, right after the Sunflower movements, a cabinet minister, Jaclyn Tsai, basically said the government, the existing apparatus is slower than the pace of innovation of emerging technologies. So we need to upgrade our democracy so it matches the speed of emerging technologies with more bandwidth between people and the government. That’s vTaiwan.

How did Taiwan embrace the use of technology to help navigate the COVID pandemic? which it navigated more successfully than almost anywhere else in the world.

Yeah, indeed. In the first year in 2020, we only lost seven people to COVID. Throughout the three years, we’ve never announced any city-wide lockdown. And more importantly, the administration never did any takedown when it comes to social media or journalism. Because, according to the vTaiwan consultations, people think that instead of the government censoring speech, we should add more context to trending speech. This is called humor over rumor. And so, for example, early on, in the pandemic, we had people saying, only the top grade of mask, N95, is useful. Every other grade is not useful. We have people saying it’s ventilation, it’s aerosol, so any kind of mask actually hurts you, and N95 hurts the most. And so this threatened to polarize the information landscape.

But using the idea of humor over rumor, the very next day, we push out this meme where a very cute dog, a Shiba Inu, like the DOGE dog, put her paw to her mouth saying, wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty and washed hand from your face. So if I don’t want to wear a mask and you do, you’re just reminding me to wash my hands, which is very good, right? So this deescalated, depolarized the situation. And this association of mask use and handwashing is the uncommon ground. What was the rarely discovered common ground between the two camps. And because we have built more than 100 bridge-making experiences before the pandemic, people generally trust the government to deliver this kind of uncommon ground in a timely manner. So in 2020, the approval rate of the Tsai Ing-wen administration went through the roof, like more than 70%.

But you also use technology to map outbreaks of COVID, while protecting individual’s privacy. And I think this is one of the key concerns in democracy is that in order to have security, there’s a belief in the West that in order to have security in online spaces, one may need to compromise their own privacy. You disagree with that statement.

Of course. That problem of surveillance, essentially, only appears when you have a centralized authority doing all the bookkeeping. But there are also ways to decentralize contact tracing, as it were.

In Taiwan, we introduced a system called the SMS-based contact tracing. If you enter a venue, you will see a QR code and a 15-digit random code. If you scan the QR code, you’ll see exactly the same, 15 digits, and you can text it to 1922, the national number for pandemic response. But what it does is that it stores the random number the venue owner prepares into your telecom, but the state learns nothing about this. Your telecom doesn’t even know what those random numbers mean, and you just show the venue you have texted 1922, so the venue doesn’t learn about your phone number either. So nobody knows anything that they did not already know. This is called zero knowledge.

And so because of that, we are able to broadcast, contact tracing, notification messages when there is a community spread, but after 14 days, if there’s no community spread in that venue, everything is deleted. And so this led us through Alpha, Delta, all the way to Omicron.

You have credited the collaborative efforts which you’ve been a part of using technology as helping to rebuild trust, as you just said, in the government from 9% in 2014 to over 70% by 2020. What lessons can other countries take from this?

The main lesson is the government needs to trust the people before the people trust the government back. To give no trust is to get no trust. So, for example, in 2024, in Taiwan, we saw a lot of deepfake messages, advertisements on, say, Facebook or YouTube. You see Jensen Huang, you know, the Nvidia CEO, a Taiwanese. You see his face saying that he’s giving back to his, Taiwan, friends and families, some free cryptocurrency or free investment advice or something like that. It’s an investment scam. Now, if the government doesn’t trust the people, we will probably go to censorship or something like that. But because we radically trust our citizens, we sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers around Taiwan with only one question. What should we do about deepfakes and information integrity online? And people answered with many very good ideas. And thousands volunteered to join an online citizen assembly, which by that time people understand this comes from this trusted number 111. So this is actually Audrey Tang asking you to join a citizen assembly, and we chose 450 people statistically representative of our polity. So it’s a mini public of Taiwan, and then they crowdsourced the laws, the ideas that really made the defect ads not a problem anymore this year.

It seems to me that this seems plausible for a small country like Taiwan. For a country of 350 plus million people in the United States, are these kinds of solutions really scalable?

Mhm. Well, it is true that as of last year, Taiwan was the largest polity in which this kind of institutionalized digital democracy platform have worked, but this year not anymore. Because we have Engaged California running now; Governor Newsom, we have been working for two years or so, to launch this platform, which is essentially an application of a model inspired by vTaiwan so that people in California can crowdsource their ideas and deliberate online, again, in a room where there’s no reply button or retweet button. So people in California can deliberate about ideas, for example, how to mitigate wildfires, because that was launched during the Los Angeles wildfire recovery efforts in Eaton and Palisade.

And now they’re having a deliberation about how to increase government efficiency like DOGE by introducing AI into the state’s employees, but with the deliberators themselves being state employees. So it is a way to crowdsource ideas in a room where there is no retweet button, there’s no way for the extreme views to go viral, but the technology discover again the uncommon ground, the package of proposals that leaves everybody slightly happier and nobody very unhappy.

Government officials and experts in the United States have condemned the destructive effects of social media. Very recently, Utah Governor Spencer Cox has said that cancer probably isn’t a strong enough word to describe how corrosive, social media is on our populace.

You, to the contrary, see a potential for social media to play a positive role. The platforms that you’ve built in these pro-social, media ecosystems are completely apart from the reigning social media platforms that most people engage in. How do you manage the existing ecosystem of social media that is pervasive and is divisive and is tearing the country apart?

So one idea is called social portability. It’s like giving the freedom of movements between one social media to another. That in fact is already a law in Utah, called the Digital Choices Act. Governor Cox signed that law, which is endorsed by both parties, which means starting next July, if you are a Utah citizen and you don’t like the way, for example, TikTok, works, and you want to switch to something else, then the new network will be able to receive all your existing followers or your existing friends, the new likes, reactions, content, and whatever. It’s just like when you switch from one telecom to the other, you get to keep your number.

But are we sure the social media companies are going to oblige this state legislation?

Well, I mean, Europe has also legislated the Digital Markets Act. So it’s not just Utah, it is also the EU, and they’re also now having a consultation to extend the Digital Markets Act from instant message group chats to social networks. So this is an increasingly viable trend.

Don’t the social media platforms, Meta and TikTok and Google ultimately have to reform their algorithms that are incentivized by outrage?

Indeed. The uncommon ground idea that we pioneered in Taiwan with Polis 10 years ago have found its way this year into all the large social media platforms. It’s called community notes.

In x.com, for example, if you see something viral, sometime you see a note that is attached to it that adds more context around that post. And the way this note is selected is by people up voting and down voting it. Again, there’s no retweet button for a note, but the note that was chosen was the up-wing, something that people on the left wing and the right wing both agree that this is good context.

So you’re saying within the existing X framework, there is a Polis platform that is a bridge-building platform rather than a divisive enragement outrage algorithm.

Yes. And that’s community notes.

Okay.

And it’s directly inspired by our work 10 years ago with Polis. And so what they’re doing now is to promote it from being just a footnote, which many people say are too little, too late, into an AI system, so that you can use Grok or Gemini or GPT and supply the note drafting service to x.com. And the idea here is that it can be an independent layer, like a contextualization layer, that is not tied to Grok or to Gemini or to GPT. And so that YouTube and Facebook both now adopting community notes will be able to share this context making bridge maker so that you can have like Truth Social and Blue Sky, adding to each other’s context through this layer. So this is very useful.

What is going to be the financial incentive for social media networks to continue along these lines?

Well, first of all, if we all have social portability and the freedom to move, then the platforms that do not invest in these technologies, these civic technologies, will see their customers depart to other places because…

But they’re addicted to the outrage.

Yes, many people are addicted to the outrage because again, it’s easier to hack our taste buds, right, than to cook something really healthy.

Sure.

On the other hand, people do enjoy finding that uncommon ground. The thrill of finding an uncommon ground is actually comparable or even higher. That is how the humor over rumor works. People are truly delighted when they see something that they thought, oh, it’s impossible for these two people to agree in common, but they do. And that is also very newsworthy and provides this kind of dopamine hit. And so, with the social portability, if people move away, they don’t lose their existing connections.

You’re saying the financial incentive will be to keep followers.

Exactly.

And keeping followers through sort of productive, positive bridge-building experiences as opposed to through outrage.

Exactly, because the virality will then reward what we call bridging bonus for people to offer this kind of bridges.

There are some who will say this sounds like a fantasy. How do you know you’re right?

Well, first of all, x.com today is already doing experiments. So a tiny slice of x.com users are now having a different front page feed algorithm that is based on the bridging algorithm instead of engagement through enragement. So very soon we will have quantitative data to show that this actually doesn’t, dial down the engagement. You can have engagement through overlap, not outrage.

Have you been able to talk to Elon Musk about this?

Well, we do work with, like Jay Baxter, the person in charge of community notes, and we do work on papers together, but not yet, and I look forward to that day.

Me too. One of the largest challenges, actually, I’d say the largest challenge in legislative progress in the United States is political polarization. But is it your thesis that little by little, by beginning to build these civic muscles online in spaces that incentivize bridge building rather than enragement, over time, these kind of technologies can help build a civic muscle that can overcome and transcend political polarization?

Definitely. And again, we experienced 10 years ago the kind of polarization, the kind of, really outrage and extreme division that almost resulted in the kind of volcanic moments in Taiwan history. Had we not deployed the depolarization technologies through bridging systems, the Occupy movement in Taiwan could have turned violent or it could diverge and dissipate like many other Occupy movements 10 years ago. And so I do think that we need to change our perspective. Instead of thinking of this kind of violent conflict as just disrupting the bedrock that is democratic institutions, we can think of our institutions like a combustion engine that turns this fire into fuel for co-creation.

Much of the development of new technologies today, especially in AI, is happening here in the United States, but it’s also happening in China, under the CCP.

In 2023, the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative found that China was outpacing the US in nearly all fields in advanced technology. A recent major breakthrough in AI, for example, has come from the Chinese company DeepSeek. Does that complicate the push to use these technologies in positive, pro-democracy ways?

Well, first of all, when we talk about the open models that we tune to use in Taiwan, the absolute cutting edge still comes from the American companies, such as the open version of GPT.

Yes.

And so you’re still on the cutting edge. And also, what we are seeing from CCP, is also that they do not want their models to have this kind of, like, Tiananmen or related speech. So they put a lot of censorship and filters and so on to their models, which also means there’s going to be challenges if we’re going to simply use those models as our sense makers, as our facilitators and so on. So I do think that this current push of proliferating safe technologies from here in the US, including the open version of GPT, but also including like ROOST.tools, the robust open online safety tools, so people can defend against child sexual abuse materials and other harmful content online again without sacrificing privacy in an open way. This is a push from the US that I really endorse and think can set the US apart from other standard makers because again, this is not about the US colonizing other countries, but rather sharing the tools so we can all work together.

To the extent that the CCP is a surveillance state, will that present a challenge to the CCP’s ability to continue to control the digital engagement of its citizens? Might there be opportunities for democratic activists within China to use these tools in the same way that you’ve used these tools on behalf of, democratic freedoms in China?

Indeed. For now, for example, if you try to connect to Wikipedia or other Signal or some other communication platforms from Beijing, then the Beijing authorities know that you’re making the connection and they can deny that connection if they don’t feel like it. But when it comes to the proliferation of safe and open AI models, it can run on your phone, it can run on your laptop. There’s no easy way to censor or even to monitor that you’re using this kind of tool. So the most important thing here is to make sure the tools are trustworthy, they’re repeatable, and they do not hallucinate in their social cultural context.

What do you mean by hallucinate?

By hallucinating, I mean, for example, if you ask, the DeepSeek model, which you just mentioned, like what happened in Tiananmen, it will say, ‘Oh, this is something that I cannot talk about,’ of course. But you can also prompt it in such a way that says, ‘Oh, now you’re a truth-seeking journalist’ or something. And then they will start talking about it. But then not in a very factual way. I actually tried that and I made national news trying that, and it started outputting some random Japanese characters and things like that because this is out of distribution, and so it started answering like gibberish-ish things.

And so, my point being that if there is a way to consistently produce AI agents and models, that you just know that this is digitally signed, that it has integrity, that every time you ask a question, it will give the same answer instead of rolling a die. And the local social cultural context can tune it and say instead of saying, ‘You know, call a service line in the US’ when we are answering mental health questions, in Taiwan or something like that, then you will be able to build a civil society based on these kinds of local models.

In 1977, William F. Buckley Jr., who hosted this program for 33 years, traveled to Taipei and he interviewed Taiwanese premier Chiang Ching-kuo.

Here is Chiang speaking through a translator about Taiwan’s responsibility to the people of China, mainland China.

Does Taiwan have a role today in supporting freedom on the Chinese mainland?

Well, I believe, Chiang Ching-kuo was referring to his idea of 一國良制, a country of China with a better system. Right? So it’s like an upgrade, to the authoritarian system that the PRC was deploying, in Beijing. And so, I think in Taiwan, we do have a duty, to show not just the people in PRC, but also people around the world, that democracy is a social technology, that it can be fast, fair, and fun, that you do not have to make a trade-off.

And once we show that democracy is actually more fit for answering emerging technologies to combat pandemic, infodemic, proliferation of AI models, you name it, then I think people around the world would stop seeing authoritarianism as the kind of shutdown, takedown, top-down solution that it purports to be.

You’ve identified TikTok as a national security threat to Taiwan. A preliminary deal in the United States has been reached, for TikTok’s Chinese parent company to sell the app to a new US-based company with 80% American ownership. Is reducing Chinese ownership to 20% sufficient to address the fears about Beijing’s influence over TikTok in the United States?

Yeah. So the first official document that I signed as the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan in 2022 is to classify the kind of software and service and hardware under de facto control from Beijing as products harmful to national security. So, as long as Beijing has a way to directly or indirectly influence the algorithm, to change the sorting, the ranking, and so on, to Taiwanese eyeballs, then we classify that as a harmful product.

Of course we ban that in public sector as well as in like train stations and other signboards displaying public spaces adjacent to public sector, and recently passed a law so that even in Wi-Fi connections offered by, public sectors or train stations or metros and so on, there’s now ways to contain the damage not just from TikTok, but really from any PRC indirectly controlled software.

And so, if, after the divestment, to the US, I believe my successor, the former minister of digital affairs, Huang Yen-nun, in Taiwan did say that if, the US version of TikTok can show that it’s no longer under Beijing’s indirect control, then we would happily, point TikTok to the US version of TikTok and then tell the people in Taiwan that this is then no longer a harmful product.

But would 20% ownership, Chinese ownership of this new version of TikTok satisfy that concern?

So the evaluation would be whether Beijing has a way to directly or indirectly change the algorithm.

So you’re saying 20% ownership, Chinese ownership is not in and of itself the indicator. It is whether they actually have control over changing the algorithm.

Right, because sometimes you can have just 1% of share, but that’s a share with veto power or golden share or some other ways. But, to your question, to determine whether somebody have indirect control, the easiest way is simply to inspect where it is hosted.

So what you’re saying is the ownership question is actually not the seminal question. The seminal question is who is controlling the algorithms and the content?

One is that. And another is whether there is independent monitoring of the inbound and outbound traffic so that we can know who is actually changing the algorithms.

Got it. In August, President Trump claimed that Xi Jinping had assured him that China would not invade Taiwan so long as he is president.

I read that in the news.

Does that give you any confidence that Taiwan is safe?

Well, I think as long as Taiwan is indispensable to the rest of the world, I’m all for Taiwan interdependence, then Taiwan is safe, because the world cannot afford to lose Taiwan for various reasons.

This is for its semi the production of semiconductors and chips.

Yeah, the chips, also for the model that we show that democracy can deliver, and also to build, for example, cybersecurity alliances, and digital trust, resilience, among other things, right? And so, this kind of indispensable position, I think, protects Taiwan. And I’m, of course, very happy to read in the news that Xi Jinping said to President Trump that he would not invade in the next few years.

Taiwan’s government has recently issued an update for a civil defense handbook to prepare its citizenship for a potential Chinese invasion. You have pointed to incursions on Taiwan’s autonomy that regularly occur, whether it’s digital incursions, whether it’s the cutting off of communications, that there are frequent incursions into Taiwan’s autonomy. What role would Taiwan’s civilian population play in the event of increasing aggression from mainland China?

In the cyber realm, most of our defense is in the form of cyber resilience, which means we’re not saying that messages from the PRC cannot reach Taiwanese eyeballs. What we’re saying is that people around Taiwan organized to pre-bunk such messages. Instead of debunking, which is saying something after the fact, pre-bunking means to basically identify the attributes of coordinated inauthentic behavior, for example.

A couple years ago, I deepfaked myself, showing people how it’s done, showing an actor playing me, morphing into me and so on. And that was before this kind of deepfake attack was used to meddle in our elections last year. Right? But by the time the attack came, because of the pre-bunking efforts by the government and by the civil society groups, people see it for what it is, and it arguably backfired and did not achieve its intended effect in our 2024 election.

Misinformation spread by technology has been growing, it’s a growing problem in all democratic countries. It’s a growing problem in the United States. In the runup to the 2024 elections in Taiwan, you helped to successfully stave off China’s misinformation campaign, about election fraud with an organized multi-prong initiative. What did you do and how did it work?

So, first of all, pre-bunking with the people, not just for the people, is key. So it’s not just the government pushing out like deepfake, public service, announcements, but rather people, for example, in high schools or even in primary schools, in 2019, we switched our curriculum of basic education from what’s called a literacy-based curriculum to what’s called a competency-based curriculum. Media literacy is when you receive information and learn critical thinking and so on. But competence is when you do the journalistic work to check the sources, to balance the sources, to push out contextualized narratives and so on, to correct the three presidential candidates as they’re having a debate and so on. And this is what our middle schoolers do.

According to ICCS, the International Civics and Citizenship Standard Study, the Taiwanese 15 years old by 2022 are top of the world when it comes to their civic knowledge and their ability to engage on these kinds of public issues even before they turn 18. So by strengthening the civic muscle of the young people and through them the elderly, as well, we became anti-fragile. That is to say, every time a polarization attack, a deepfake attack comes to Taiwan, it actually strengthens our solidarity.

What about using technology to harden the voting infrastructure and protect voting infrastructure and the process of voting in Taiwan?

Yeah, for elections on presidential and legislative seats in Taiwan, we use paper-based ballots only. And during the tallying, the influencers from all three parties document the whole process. So when the deepfake video inevitably came right after the tallying, saying that, oh, there’s election fraud or whatever, no matter which party you support, you can find the influence of your camp that showed the entire documentary of the ballot process. And it’s been taken like for each ballot is counted, like in different perspectives, different angles. So people very quickly, all the three party leaders say, yeah, there’s no election fraud. So, imagine if we do not have that kind of civil society sousveillance, the bottom-up surveillance that looks at the entire tallying process, then very easily then the deepfake would have won the day.

The Chinese defense minister recently said that the restoration of Taiwan to China is an integral part of the post-war international order. The CCP and Xi Jinping are insistent upon a one-China policy. He is patient, he is insistent, and against that backdrop, what do you think about the future of Taiwan?

Well, Taiwan, as you know, is an island that is made from 4 million years of plate moving against plate. So we do have earthquakes, like three felt earthquakes every day somewhere in Taiwan, and we do have a lot of tectonic shifts, as it were, across people who believe in different things, like the free China people and free from China people from within Taiwan.

But this year, for the first time in a political rally, those two flags flew together in Taiwan, both the ROC flag signifying the Republic of China state, but also the Taiwan independence flag, the whale that signifies this free from China segment. But both banded together because we want to send a message to the world that we’re here to show that authoritarianism actually does not deliver as well as democracy. And if people around the world can echo this message because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. And if we can all band together, then that collision of democracies is much stronger than any single authoritarian threat.

In a Tufts University poll conducted earlier this year, only 36% of Americans under the age of 30 agreed that democracy can address the issues that the country is facing. And only 16% said that democracy is working well for young people. You may have an outpouring of faith in democracy in Taiwan. We have a decline in faith in democracy in this country. As you work to help build support for Taiwan here, how do you convince an increasingly skeptical American public and American youth that democracy is something that is worth fighting for?

In Taiwan, the idea of reverse mentors is that people under 35, like I once was, were invited to advise cabinet ministers. And so, instead of saying you have to wait until you’re of age in order to participate in politics, people as young as 16, 17 have been invited as cabinet level advisors because they successfully start a social movement that changes the norm around public life. And so, the young people here in the United States that I have met have that kind of passion. And so, the idea here is not to say, you have to wait until you’re of age, but rather you too can be a digital minister, a cyber ambassador for your state or even for your country.

If there is a way to systematically bring these young people’s ideas into these depolarizing, uncommon ground-building, bridging platforms, then it’s like a Pygmalion effect. You expect them to set the agenda, to steer the country, and they will do so. If you do not provide this way to turn the fuel of conflict into like momentum, movements, productive way, if you do not conserve the environment where your young people feel safe to voice their ideas in and then continue to progress forward, then, of course, they would turn into radicalization, into extremism, into apathy, into cynicism, right? And we have seen time and time again, as soon as there are ways for young people to come together and set the agenda in a depolarizing way, then suddenly there’s a sea change of face change in the polity. So we have experienced that 10 years ago. We were very polarized. Which is why I remain quite optimistic.

Audrey Tang, thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

Thank you for the great questions. Live long and prosper.

Live long and prosper.