On the other hand, if the government sees the citizen as not trustworthy , maybe because they buy into conspiracy theories, and impose very stringent top-down lockdown, takedown, shutdown procedures, then that actually makes the conspiracy theory even louder because people, understandably, see that this is a move toward grabbing state power.
Underlying both into the Taiwan model is an idea if the government trusts the citizens, then there is no false dilemma between freedom and human right on one side and public health, either mental or physical, on the other side. This false dilemma only appears if the state wants to do everything.
This is not about blindly trusting the NHIA’s numbers. This is about a machine-to-machine publication. With more than 140 tools, including voice assistance, chat bots, and so on, even people with blindness or other difficulties, handicaps, can access these real-time numbers and be part of this distributed ledger.
The infrastructure of trust , again, there’s bits of pieces of Taiwan model that you can freely take. The daily press conference, certainly. The medical mask, or whatever mask, worn as a social signal of washing your hands properly and not touching your face, and not appealing to any collectivist, altruistic incentives.
IRI works on disinformation, and particularly around elections all over the world. It has been really striking to me that Taiwan has been able to build up this ecosystem that includes civil society, government, and the technology companies working together in a way that seems to also be relatively trusting and open.
If your friend only answers your email once every two months, and only on the part they choose to answer and ignore everything else, then of course you will tend to believe rumors about your friend. The basic trust , I think, is one of the key things to counter, to disarm disinformation.
When more people do that, the more the authenticity becomes established. This example, you’re saying, this peer-reviewing the academic setting and this is, ultimately, an academic matter. People, of course, trust the academic community more than the governance or the news workers’ community. It depends on the case at hand.
One of the teams last year in the Presidential Hackathon worked with the Green Island, it’s a smaller island where the local people didn’t trust the local clinic that much, so that when their family members are injured or sick, they insist on helicopters carrying them to the main island.
Using high-bandwidth telepresence, we can build maybe 20 percent trust . We track all those different ideas and feed them into this AI-powered conversation, which we also use with the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT)—which is the de facto embassy here—to collaboratively build agendas that work for both sites.
I’m here to deliver the opening remark, to share with the world that Taiwan has built a way to counter disinformation, to make sure that everybody have digital broadband access by relying and indeed trusting more on the social sector, rather than concentrating power on the public or the private sectors.
These are the places where we see the most inventions of self organization, mostly because if people already know each other they trust each other more to introduce more experimental digital apparatus, whereas if it’s 23 million people, of course you take a referendum or something to make a drastic change.
No, I don’t think there is a tension here. I think cybersecurity and privacy are the foundation stones on which participation is made. If you don’t have cybersecurity and trust of the cyber system, that is to say the protection of privacy, it is impossible actually to do genuine participation.
Disinformation, though, that’s another thing altogether. It’s not attacking the fabric of technology. It is attacking the fabric of trust so it’s a different thing, completely different thing. I gave a talk around this topic in the Taiwan US Global Cooperation Training Forum just before I fly to Canada.
All these things are essential for the government to function and all these things are essential for people to trust each other when we share this to every other ministry. Any public servant can use this system for free, and they can also write new applications to run on it for free.
I personally translated several interactive games from Nicky Case. One explicitly talks about how disinformation spreads, one about how social media destroys trust , one about segregation, and one about the framing effect of media and how media messages kind of perpetuate the world views by itself. I personally translate some of these.
By revealing their authentic selves, they become constructive participants in the community not necessarily with me, but with me as a focal point, so that people can see, when you see ad hominem attacks or whatever inflammatory messages, it’s possible to respond in this way that increase public solidarity and trust .
It’s radical trust in addition to radical transparency. It really works really well. That’s how we get these huge projects like Perl 6 to run. The main lesson there was that the designer, in their language, computer language, but language needs to be humble because language is larger than us.
Then the CI, the civil IoT, is progressing without worrying about privacy. Basically, we build the standards, the technical expertise, the trust between the civil society, private sector vendors of those sensors, and the ministries involved to try to convince the minister it really generates better social impact if we work together.
It is by itself a show of mutual trust between the civil society organization and the government in Taiwan at the highest level. My office, we sent two people to the OGP. OGP is generally aware that Taiwan is not only a qualified but an outstanding contributor to the open-government values.
