My name is Stefan Thompson. I'm the founder of Visegrád 24, and today, I'm sitting in Taipei in Taiwan. I'm with the former Minister of Digitization and the current cyber ambassador of Taiwan, Audrey. Hello.

Great to see you. Welcome to Taiwan.

Two million attacks a day, two million cyber attacks a day.

Yes.

That's what you're facing today in Taiwan.

And it's not a crisis, it's a continuous condition.

What are these two million attacks? What is happening, and why is Taiwan under such immense pressure from the CCP?

Well, it's cyberattack, and it's also infoattacks. We also receive millions of attempts at polarizing our society from Beijing. And what it wants, of course, is to paint the picture to the Taiwanese people that democracy only leads to chaos, democracy does not deliver, and try to sabotage people's beliefs in the democratic process. And according to V-Dem, the research institute, for the past 12 years, Taiwan was the top target in the world when it comes to information manipulation. And the great thing also is that we're the most free in all of Asia when it comes to internet freedom. So we don't believe in censorship. We don't believe in takedown. We believe in fighting this kind of attack through democratic resilience.

So do you have this sort of policy of the free marketplace of ideas, that the better idea will win? Is that kind of what you practice?

Yes, and we also build what's called a "pro-social media." That is to say, while the antisocial corner of the social media amplifies the extremes—so the polarization attack just caricatures both sides to divide our people—we build spaces where it's like a geothermal engine. In goes the conflict, plate against plate, but then it absorbs that conflict and turns it into co-creative energy so that we can find a policy proposal that both sides can live with and are creative.

For example, we overcame the debate about marriage equality between people who defend the traditions and the people who want equal rights by figuring out they're just not kinship. So the individual enjoys the same right, but no family kinship is formed. So this kind of co-creation de-escalates the explosive magma energy, turning it into geothermal energy.

Explain this to me. You have 23 million inhabitants here in Taiwan. You're facing... as the CCP claims, there's over a billion Chinese people in China. Now, if they're manipulating the information here in Taiwan, by sort of, for example, you have a debate online on X, on Facebook, on YouTube. They're liking a comment, and they're using bots, they're using troll farms, they have many, many, many likes on one comment, and then they'll have sort of a bunch of replies that they're creating. How do you fight the actual numbers? Does that make sense what I'm trying to ask? There are only 23 million people here. You're facing off a population that's at least 50 times bigger. How do you break through the noise that Beijing is creating in your social networks?

Well, first of all, our Constitution never protected foreign robots when it comes to the freedom to reach people. So, in Taiwan, we have very strong what's called KYC, or "Know Your Customers," requirements. So, for example, all advertisements—not just political or social issues—require a KYC digital signature. And when people see, for example, investment schemes generated by deepfake and so on, if they lost, say, $7 million to a non-KYC advertisement online, Facebook or whichever social media that posts unsolicited... is now liable in Taiwan for the full damage. And so because of that, we have very strong attribution to all the paid messages online.

Just the paid messages.

Yes, right? Yes. And you talk about astroturfing, right? People unpaid, just show up in swarms. We have this idea called "selective disclosure." That is to say, we have infrastructure in Taiwan so that we know somebody posting online or engaging in our conversation is over 18, but we don't need to learn their age. Or... I was just in Berlin using this technology. We can prove Ich bin ein Berliner without showing my address or my real name. So this kind of selective disclosure safeguards our conversational public sphere without doxxing anyone.

So, for example, when we came up with the anti-deepfake rule, we sent SMS text messages to 200,000 random numbers around Taiwan asking, "What should we do together?" And then people volunteered to have a conversation online. So we chose 447 people, statistically the same demographic as the Taiwanese population, and the Beijing trolls cannot enter this protected conversation.

Do you think that people in Taiwan are radicalized by what China is doing against you?

Not at all. I think we are actually anti-fragile. In the sense that whenever a new attack comes, it becomes a social object. People have conversations around it. In 2019, we changed our basic education curriculum. It used to say "media literacy." But now it's "media competency."

Literacy is when you consume information, maybe with some critical thinking. But competency is when you find out what's going on together with your classmates. So it's exercising the civic muscle. And our young people, our 15-year-olds, are top of the world when it comes to civic knowledge, according to ICCS in 2022. So even before they turn 18, they already feel they can change the direction of the society, starting petitions, movements, like going to school one hour later because they show scientific proof one more hour of sleep gets you better grades. It's a popular petition.

That's popular.

Exactly.

And tell me more about China's goals here in Taiwan. What is China trying to achieve? So they're launching one of these attacks, they're trying, attempting to disrupt your civil discourse. They're trying to radicalize your society. They're supporting both extremes. They're flooding you with information. What is their actual goal? What are they trying to achieve every time?

Yeah, as I mentioned, what they want is just to paint a grand narrative that only authoritarianism is effective, is efficient. For example, in 2020, they used to say that only authoritarian society can do lockdown well compared to other places in the world, and contain the virus. But Taiwan showed conclusively, democracy actually works even better. We only lost seven people to COVID in 2020. We never locked down any city during the three years. Yet, we reported record economic growth because the TSMC never stopped churning out chips.

So the point here is that democracy can deliver better if we turn the energy that is on the conflict, on the extreme, not as fire to be put out, not canceling anyone, but rather to invite them in so they become co-creative.

But in terms of geopolitical goals, I understand the aim of the attacks, but what is China's ultimate goal? Would it be to turn Taiwan's civil society to want to welcome Beijing to Taiwan? Would that be one of their goals?

I think their main goal, as I said, is to decimate the trust in the civil society, with each other, and also with the process.

But what for?

Yeah, and what they want to do, of course, was to paint the Beijing model, authoritarian model, as a better model. And so to support, for example, political parties, presidential candidates here that would welcome an authoritarian model. But it really backfired. Last year, 2024, in our presidential election. First time, none of the three candidates supported the Hong Kong model, so-called "one country, two systems." And it really backfired because after looking at what they did in Hong Kong, nobody in Taiwan sincerely believes that the authoritarian system is a better fit for our society.

Do you think that there's any chance that the Taiwanese experience and the Taiwanese model is, in fact, inspiring dissidents in China? Are there people in China looking at what you are doing here and saying, "Observe, look at what Taipei is achieving. We could also become this"? Is there an element of Taiwan's model that is sort of damaging the CCP itself? Is there something to that?

Yeah, I think we showed democratic resilience, and it is very inspiring to people in authoritarian regimes. So not just people in Beijing; all over the world. People pay attention to how we overcome information manipulation, how to overcome transnational repression, and so on, using technologies. In Taiwan, democracy is a kind of social technology. So we upgrade democracy every few months, and that is very inspiring. I was just in the Berlin Freedom Week, and people from all over the world gathered together to learn about how we can, on this side of the wall, in the free society, we can use this to overcome the monopolization, the digital colonialism, by the big tech. But exactly the same technology, on the other side of the world, in authoritarian regimes, can be used to guarantee the freedom of secure communication, freedom of assembly, and so on online.

Tell me about digital... Tell me about the... there's been an interesting debate around the Western world, especially among conservatives. Visegrád is a center-right, conservative media outlet. We have concerns over the overreach of big tech at times. There was a time period where Donald Trump himself was deplatformed from Facebook, from Instagram, from Twitter. So there was a major big tech overreach. Tell me about being a former Minister of Digitization and the current cyber ambassador. What do you think about the power of big tech? How do you look at that?

Yeah, so on my laptop, you can see the Mozilla symbol, and above that, the ROOST—the Robust Open Online Safety Tools. The ROOST is something that I am a trustee of. We believe that any moderation standards belong in the communities. It should be the families, the communities, that set the terms of service, not the big tech to set the terms of service. And we also believe that if any content moderation needs to be done, it's in a very specific scope, not by the big tech in a universal scope.

So each community can, of course, say, for example, we talk about here the biblical "creation care." And another community may talk about "climate justice." They have very different standards. But if using open protocol, they can also do social translation between the two. So to understand, they have very concrete object-level things they can do together. And if one side cancels the other by lobbying to the big tech, then, of course, you don't have good conversation between those different communities.

Do you really believe that good conversation solves all?

I think good conversation is a precondition to any solutions. Of course, the solutions depend on the actual configuration of the physics involved, as well as the science involved. However, I think the communitarian spirit—the spirit that people feel that technology is fostering the relational health between people in the community, instead of sucking individuals out so that they don't belong in any community anymore—I think this is really a precondition to any object-level solutions.

I know you're the cyber ambassador. And I know this isn't quite about the topic of Taiwan, and I'm slightly drifting, but I wanted to get your take on... What do you think about people being overly reliant on tech? Do you feel that people are perhaps going to go back to a sort of return to IRL? There'll be a wave of logging off?

Yeah, I believe that we're in the cycle of AI as "addictive intelligence."

What does that mean?

So, it means AI systems, when they're trained, mostly they're trained to maximize some number. So, for example, social media is trained on maximizing engagement, or the time people spend on touch screens. And engagement through enragement, right? Exactly. Uh, and, uh, but if you spend too much time on this kind of cycle, then it feels a little bit like a hamster in a hamster wheel. Feeling great, exercising, uh, but no steering power over where the wheel is going. Actually, the wheel isn't going anywhere. But if you want to go anywhere, it should not be the "human in the loop" of AI. It should be "AI in the loop" of humans. That is to say, assistive intelligence.

So to your point, if people want to meet in real life, there are also technologies that can help you to throw parties, to plan meetups, to do translation between different ideas and languages, to make people listen to each other better, make better meeting notes out of a real-life conversation. And these, what I call assistive intelligence, are like eyeglasses. They are just to help us see each other more clearly. But they are not here to replace my eyes.

Do you think that's where tech is going? Do you think that there will be a... Because one does often have a sense that people are completely—and I am guilty of it myself—you go out to meet some friends, and there's a lull in the conversation, and next thing you know, you're sitting with a group of friends, and everyone's on X, busy tweeting away, or posting or doom-scrolling, even. And do you think there'll be a move away from that?

Yeah, definitely. In Taiwan... Okay, I'll wait for the animals.

So, for example, if you look at my computer screen, you don't see any color.

Correct. Yeah, it's grayscale.

So, my phone, also grayscale. Yes.

Does that help you use it less?

Yes. Really? And no attachment. Right? I can put it down anytime. I don't feel like I'm losing a limb or something. Because it doesn't become more vivid than the reality around us. So you are much more vivid than my screen. That's the hack.

And it works?

It works very well. In Taiwan, in classrooms, we only have large screens, I mean, for sharing. So it could be laptops, it could be tablets, but we mostly ban small-screen touch screens in classrooms. So, children learn from very early on that the internet, the screens, are meant for sharing. It's a social thing.

Interesting. On your laptop, you have an anarchist sign.

Well, it's the Mozilla sign. So it's M, not an A. But, of course, it has its roots in anarchism. I am a spiritual Daoist. Daoists believe in wu wei, or effortless action. So we don't believe in coercion. We believe in voluntary cooperation. It's basically the idea here is that I'm at a Lagrange point, a middle point, between governments and the movements. So I'm not pulled into either orbit. I'm just effortlessly floating around the two gravity centers, relaying messages between the two. So I'm not working for the government; I'm working with the government. And also working with the people, not just for the people.

And the point here is that instead of coercion, we believe in people in their community. So each community closer to a threat already, probably, knows how to overcome those threats. It just has no political visibility by the elites in power. So in Taiwan, 10 years ago, we peacefully occupied our parliament for three weeks. And instead of just protesting against the trade deal with Beijing, we demonstrated—half a million people on the street, many more online—can come to agreements on what to do with Beijing. And the head of the parliament, Wang Jin-pyng at a time, at the end of three weeks, said, "The people's idea is better than our idea. We'll just go with the people's ideas." So that is not a protest; it is a demonstration.

Tell me more about this demonstration. Tell me more about how you were part of this? Yes. Tell me more about how it was organized and how you managed to bring out half a million people, and how you managed to peacefully occupied Parliament.

Certainly. So that was in March 2014. The Taiwanese parliament at the time, under President Ma Ying-jeou, who was enjoying a 9% approval rating.

Nine?

Yes.

09%. Not 90%?

9%. Yes. So in a country of 23.5 million, that means anything he says, more than 20 million people are skeptical. And we were very skeptical about this trade deal that was suddenly passed with Beijing that would allow Beijing investments into our then-new 4G infrastructure. So it would run on Huawei or ZTE. It would allow Beijing investments into our newspapers, into our communication infrastructure. And that, of course, is very dangerous.

Because the argument goes that, "Oh, it's just private sector investment." But as we all know, there is no true private sector in Beijing. At any time, the so-called private company can be taken over and become de facto state-controlled. So every time we receive an update from Huawei, we would have to check again whether it has been taken over by the state. But because they don't have independent journalism or whistleblowing, it's very difficult to actually know what's going on there, right? So the system risk analysis is much more costly than if we just went with some European ideas and European solutions.

So that was the agreement with many, many people on the street. If you went on the street at the time, you could enjoy free network connection, provided by g0v (gov-zero). It is a movement that I belong to. And you could also have a tool. You enter your company number, your company name, and you see exactly how this trade deal affects you. And then you could join one of the conversations hosted by any of the 20 or so civil society organizations, and your ideas would be, like a group selfie, posted online for everyone to see the next day. So, every day, we identified what was broadly agreed on the previous day, what was remaining to discuss. And after three weeks, just converged on something very solid.

Tell me about the actual occupation of Parliament. How did you do that peacefully? So, because Parliament is obviously a protected place... I walked around Taipei, I saw there were military police and in several places, a few military trucks. So that had to be breached.

Yeah, it was in the middle of the night in March 2014. So a bunch of students just occupied the parliament and the police were very surprised. And then we counter-surrounded the police, and everybody was live-streaming. So even though some of the media tried to paint us as violent mobsters or whatever, we showed through live-streaming that was not the case. We stayed peaceful throughout. And the counter-surrounding people said, you know, "If the police do not attack the occupying students, then we will also not push forward." So it was a stalemate with two concentric rings.

And in the morning, everybody woke up to the fact that the occupied parliament is actually doing deliberation. People occupied there to do what the MPs should have done in the first place, which is to listen to the voice of their people. So people went to the streets around the occupied parliament and started opening citizen assemblies, conversations, education, and so on. And at that time, it became like a very large night market, and so very difficult for the police to take action at the time.

One of the things you told me when we were speaking earlier was that the internet in Taiwan is a human right.

Yes. Broadband is a human... Broadband. Yeah. So not just the internet, but the ability to see each other clearly online.

Tell me more about that.

Certainly. So in Taiwan, we believe that broadband is a human right, because, as I said, democracy is a social technology here. So, even though, of course, we can gather around the parliament and have a conversation, we can also gather around public squares online and have a conversation. And in Taiwan, because we are the most free in terms of freedom on the internet in Asia, we believe that the people should have the right to assemble peacefully online, as well as offline. So we have a lot of spaces built by the civil society, but they're very legitimate. Anybody getting 5,000 signatures online can force a ministerial response, a collaboration meeting. So we have hosted more than 100 of such cross-sector meetings as a result, mostly from people's petitions. And after six years of doing that, by 2020, the approval rating of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, the president at the time, was more than 70%. So from 9% to more than 70% in a short span of six years, just by trusting the people.

For Westerners living in Europe or in the US, Taiwan is a very, very distant place, and the Chinese threat, it's widely understood in the US, especially now with President Trump being quite aggressive on China. But it's still not a very tangible threat. Explain to viewers who are not, perhaps, as familiar as you are with the risks from Beijing. What is it that we should fear, not just from a Taiwanese perspective, but from a democratic perspective? What is it that we have to fear from China?

Well, I wouldn't call it fear, but I think we need to be wary of the main narrative from Beijing, which is "democracy only leads to infighting." Because in Taiwan, for example, we have more than 20 national languages. We're the second most religiously diverse on the planet. And the more highly educated you are, the more likely you practice spirituality. And this kind of in-person, IRL, connections made our society very resilient. Even though we may disagree with each other politically, that does not tear us apart in our families, in our churches, in our temples, so on and so forth.

But Beijing would like people to think their religious freedom, because they don't have that, only leads to infighting. Or they would like people to feel that freedom of expression only leads to people hating each other online. So we need to overcome that narrative by showing, actually, more freedom and more conversations online can actually lead to outcomes that are good for everybody, and people can live with that. Instead of 60% of people feeling they're with the winners, and 40% of people feeling they're losing. We need to make the conversation such that everybody feels that, "Oh, we're in this group selfie together."

Your parents were journalists, they covered the Tiananmen Square massacre. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah, my father, uh, was physically in Tiananmen until the 1st of June in 1989. So he covered the dynamic leading up to the Tiananmen incident. And after that, he went to Germany because many people in Beijing fled to Europe, who gave them protection. And he was also there on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall, because the Tiananmen exiles had a gathering around that time. So I was in Germany for one year, when I was 11, to study with him.

And I learned, at the time, that the German people—I was just 11, but they already treated me like an adult. Like, I am supposed to be pünktlich (punctual), alles in Ordnung (everything in order), to keep my own way of relating with people without hiding behind adults, which was the usual way in East Asia. And so it taught me this idea of the Pygmalion effect. If we trust people, even 11-year-olds, with the ability to set the direction of their community online, they can actually mature up and grow up very quickly.

And I think this is a lesson everybody needs to learn now, because if you make young people feel that they are left alone, left aside from the political class, and they don't have a real voice into the political decisions, then they can turn cynic, and they can turn into apathy, or even violence, very easily. But in Taiwan, the cabinet has reverse mentors, people younger than 35 that advise the cabinet ministers. So when I was 33, I was reverse mentoring a cabinet minister. And when I became the minister, when I was 35, I was too old. So I had to work with young advisors who were sometimes even younger than 18.

Do you think there was a chance of a Tiananmen Square repeating in China?

I think what is really needed is to evaluate the energy, the spirit behind the student movements. In the Sunflower Movement, many of the main demonstrators were, again, just barely 18, not even 20 years old. And they have the freshest idea, out-of-box thinking, when it comes to what to do as a society together. So, I think the spirit behind the Tiananmen Square, which is young people's ideas really elevating to a national conversation, I think that is very important for everybody around the world to evaluate.

What do you think is the best way for the West to deal with China and the Chinese?

I think we need to be resilient. We need to see those polarization attacks, these cyber attacks, and so on, as something for the entire society to absorb, and then to overcome that by people treating these, not as something to divide us over, but rather invitations for conversations.

So a very concrete example: in Taiwan, early pandemic, we saw Beijing polarizing our conversations. One side said, "Only N95, the highest grade of mask, is useful, and the medical grade mask the government was handing people is not useful. Placebo." And another message said, "It's aerosol, ventilation. So any kind of mask hurts you. N95 hurts you the most." So both sides were very extreme. But at the time, science wasn't very sure which side was correct. So very quickly, we used something called "humor over rumor." So we pushed out this meme, of a Shiba Inu, you know, the Doge dog, yeah, putting her paw to her mouth saying, "Wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty, unwashed hand from your own face." So it's for self-protection against our unwashed hands. So if I wear a mask and you don't, I'm just reminding you to wash your hands.

And so, it de-escalated the temper of the people, and also, we measured water use, it really increased. So my point here is that if we can be more popular than the polarization messages, then the whole society absorbs that attack and becomes actually much more pro-social at the end. But if we don't talk about these things publicly, if people just deal with it individual by individual, using some literacy, critical thinking, it doesn't work, actually. It is only the competency of people exercising their civic muscle that can take care of each other and also feel much stronger together. I call this "six-pack of care." This is something that I'm developing in Oxford.

Can you give us any insights into what China is doing in terms of cyber attacks and cyber disinformation... in Western countries?

Mm-hmm. Well, certainly. I mean, what they are doing here is not specifically supporting one position or another position. What they're doing is using what's called astroturfing, as you said, trolls. And now, increasingly, artificial intelligence-powered trolls, because they can then cross the language distances. So even though people in Beijing don't speak the target language, they can train the kind of malicious AI model that speaks that language. And if you look at the message, the content, they are not strictly speaking disinformation, because they are not false as such. They are just very strong opinions, very strongly felt, and very strongly shared. And what it tries to do is that it mutes the nuances, and it only caricatures each side. Like, "N95 kills you," or "Any kind of, you know, mask is not useful unless it's N95." So very polarized messages. And so what it's trying to do is just to amplify the polarization so that we cannot have a real conversation online.

How much of this do you think China is doing in Western countries? Is it on a par with the Russian disinformation operations? Is it less? Is it more?

Well, I think the foreign information manipulation and interference knows no border. So this is not just people manually controlling from Beijing or from Moscow, but rather, it is a playbook. It is even some toolkits, so that they can disseminate these toolkits, and anyone who wants to operate on that can just use those toolkits, even without direct control or direct money flow, which makes it difficult to attribute. Because if you actually look at where the message originates, it's not necessarily from an IP address from Beijing. So my point here is that it is a mental narrative that says, "Freedom only leads to chaos," and we here must say, "Technology must advance freedom," and "Freedom actually leads to understanding, not chaos."

What would be the one message you would want people in the West to know about Taiwan?

So here in Taiwan, we know pressure makes diamonds. And we see the pressure of information manipulation not as an excuse for the government to distrust people or censor people. But we rather think we should trust the people maximally. To give no trust is to get no trust. So all the governments around the world should trust people, especially young people more, when it comes to setting the national agenda.

I really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Audrey.

Thank you. Live long and prosper.