So I think it’s not about specific age groups. It’s about everyone, all of Taiwan, having access to the information and, as you mentioned, social interactions online. And so in our ministry, the moda, Ministry of Digital Affairs, we’re all about building digital resilience and trust for all.
But the other administration, the Administration for Cyber Security is all about safety. And safety is not just protecting cyber systems, but also protecting our minds against polarization, against the force of authoritarians using AI to attack on cyber trust and so on. Information integrity - now people are calling it that.
And so then the trust in institutions grew gradually because of the reason being that we open new spaces so that people don’t have to wait for this once every four years, once every two years, to vote only, but rather can continuously start petitions, participatory budgeting, many other things.
Well, yes and no. Right? Back in 2014, before the sunflower movement, there was a real fatigue. Like people did not believe they can effect a real change.And right after the sunflower movement, the trust in institutions was really low, like 9% or something of the administration from the people.
We just spoke about zero trust . That’s just one subset of the types of attacks that you’re trying to protect yourself against DDoS, as you know, data theft, information manipulation. Especially information manipulation because you do make a point when you say that, “Hey, cyberattacks is not just DDoS.”
The main reason why is that, we trust the citizens. The citizens come up with good ideas. Then we amplify those ideas, is not anything top down. In the COVID, virus mutates so quickly. There is no expert panel that can catch up. You have to rely on the collective intelligence.
I see a general understanding, especially in Europe, of the ideas of data altruism organizations, data coalitions and trusts , many other names, joint controllership, and things like that where people understand that they can form some sort of social configuration and bargain together with the existent surveillance capitalists or surveillance state.
To take care of the other two-thirds of people who do not habitually use an app, or the 20 percent of people who do not have any experience downloading an app, a app redesign based on everyone’s favorite QR code and SMS like a trusted format is very important.
Fact checking alone is not enough. It doesn’t scale well. The digital platforms, while they work with the fact checkers, do not do a very good job of integrating fact checks into their products in such a way that users are truly empowered to know trustworthy sources versus untrustworthy sources.
All these things are social innovations arguably, and then, the municipal government actually allowed those drinking bars and nightclubs to then open. When even the nightlife workers can join the fight, then the prevention efforts would garner more social trustworthiness . That’s just one anecdote, but it illustrated the entire point.
Sure. The ideas of building trust through social innovation, I summarize it in three pillars, and that’s fast, fair, and fun. The fast part is very easy to understand. We have the daily Central Epidemic Command Center, CECC, press conferences where they answer all the questions from all the journalists.
It’s not as a drifting from the original vision, but rather the original vision has always been a grassroots trustworthiness -based polity. The technologies back in Wild Lily days or back in ‘96 was not sufficient to realize enough of that. It’s mostly text-based and occasionally photo-based.
We are fighting a lot for privacy, freedom of information, and also trying to avoid the government to like introduce e-voting – at least at this stage. Because we do not see how it can be done in a way that you can also trust the results in the end, especially…
It’s only when we trust the people with all the good news and bad news do people actually understand that we are in a democracy, in a polity. In that sense, the democratic spirit is strong and it’s becoming much harder for somebody working on propaganda to sow discord.
If we don’t do anything, our nearby jurisdictions will think that the only viable way is to infringe on journalistic freedom. If we develop useful ways, effective ways that builds more trust into the journalistic community, then our nearby jurisdictions will just run a workshop in Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.
They automatically report it to the Internet. This team also did the AirBox, which is very successful here, to measure air pollution. I talk about it at Republica, and they use distributed ledger to make sure nobody can change each other’s numbers, as a way for social solidarity and trust .
You wouldn’t trust a lawyer, or accountant, or a psychiatrist, if they are not acting in your best interests. This best interests’ doctrine is what we’re seeing when it comes to private data. We’re always publishing as much as possible the statistics for academic use and for analysis.
It’s not something to be sold, but rather a fiduciary duty. The data operator need to prove and earn the trust by acting in the best interests of the data domains, the data commerce, and things like that. That is where we have a head start compared to nearby jurisdictions.
There’s many people -- for example, just recently, in Thailand, in both parties, and also Future Forward -- they have visited Taiwan and indeed learned from Taiwan about peacefully transition, in their case, back to democracy, to trustworthiness between the governance system and its people, meaningful youth participation, and things like that.
The output of such collaborations is in the public domain for the science and academic communities. Finally, it increases trust . If one country is willing to share its public water pipe usage data to another country, to me, that is much more practical and useful than other ways of bilateral agreements.
