So the students can fact check the presidential candidates as they’re having a debate and so on. And once they feel they can contribute to the society in this way, then collaborative fact checking becomes much more possible. Because it is the journey of going through thinking about which source is trustworthy and so on that inoculates a mind.
Hello, I’m here with Audrey Tang. It is fantastic to meet you and today I’d like to discuss some of what we’ve been talking about recently. Your thoughts on the collection of information surrounding disinfo and monitoring mechanisms, especially those set up by the European Union. Your thoughts on how we can make those trustworthy to the public.
And if we did get polarized along party lines back then, I don’t think there will be much radical trust as you observe now. And the fact that we didn’t polarize along the party lines back then, and the fact that for the past ten years, a more… I would say, depolarizing norm of democracy has been adopted.
So this is something that MOFA is very comfortable with because we have to do it every year for many, many topics. And so if, for example, Freedom Online Coalition or OGP or anything is following a similar protocol, then any international expert is kind of automatically trusted by MOFA as somebody who travels in to help us to convene.
So, this had an impression on me in that, oh, actually the children can make important decisions concerning themselves and we should trust children to join also in public participation before they turn 18 because if you shield them from the democratic and civic process before they’re 18, they don’t magically become informed citizens when they turn 18.
Yeah, exactly. That’s what co-pilot does. So, it doesn’t really matter which license we choose, so we might as well choose public domain. And the second thing, exactly as you said, we want our citizens and our democratic network partners to trust Taiwanese code not because it’s from Taiwan but rather because they can independently verify.
In the Netherlands. I’ve been advocating for years, have been running events, and so on to make people more sensitive to those issues. Their feeling is that the government and companies are trustworthy . In all the polls, it’s typically at the bottom-end of Europe when it comes to feelings of security and privacy being an important feature.
Seeking out alternatives, giving out challenges on how to build pro social rather than antisocial social media that fosters trustworthiness that will be the call to action and a form to work will be partnering with existing social technologies such as the hackathons, right? In Taiwan, we have the g0v. In around the world, we have Code4All, and so on.
Are there any lessons that you think Taiwan can offer in terms of trust between citizens and government to a lot of – it’s also because I think in the current environment, the Internet has become this place that is very different from its original vision. Originally, the vision of the Internet is this place where you could share knowledge.
There’s a couple things. One is as I mentioned, this lockdown/takedown that fosters mutual distrust, I think that’s really the root. Whatever conspiracy theory and misinformation we see is just a symptom. Disinformation does to say intentional misinformation is just opportunists making the full opportunity of the crack in trust that’s already there in a society.
One of the very interesting result is that in the offshore island there was a nurse, a local clinic, that was not trusted enough by the local people. Always, they require flying helicopters to send their loved ones or their families that are sick to the main Taiwan island, even though it may be dark or it may be raining.
This conversation is between you and me. It’s just we agree to co-author a paper afterwards [laughs] that summarizes the points that we made for the public benefit. I think having this co-creative relationship also builds trust . Whereas, if I insist on putting a hovering drone that is 360 recording our micro expressions, that would be control.
At the moment, it is starting with remote islands because we already have good cases for them. When we use helicopter and so on, it’s very expensive, and also it takes trust out of GPs. It’s a very clear thing. We already piloted starting last year actually. It’s pretty good signature from the experience that we got.
Is there something that is unique about the way that Asia does it? We really wanted to dive deep into this, because what you’re saying here about civic participation, about creating an environment of trust , about using data as not just a playground, but actually a lubricant to inspire more conversation and innovation, I think it’s really exciting.
His new role in the BOST, I think is not to directly specify smart city protocols or things like that. It’s mostly to allocate sufficient funding toward defining the security properties and related regulations, and things like that that’s required to make this kind of application level things happen, as well as ensuring the infrastructure level is trustworthy .
I believe many trust your judgment in terms of what technology is feasible and what is not and you have a great amount of respect. If you could consider to give your recommendation to, for example, a minister to spend 30 minutes with us, worst case scenario, they learn a little bit more about what is happening in this sector.
Of course. In 2014, Taiwan’s people were already some of the most connected. I think there were already more Facebook accounts than the population. It was already hybrid connected. The government found that the communication capability was under strain, and public trust was very low, around 9%. The movement was a reaction to the loss of legitimacy of the government.
And so I think the idea here is again to radically trust the people and show the big tech companies that this is the measure that does not sacrifice freedom of expression. But the freedom of speech does not mean that we need to get foreign robots freedom of reach for free. I don’t think that’s in our constitution.
It is our pipeline from local experiments to national infrastructure. Each year ~200 projects from towns and agencies propose solutions (tele‑health, air/noise monitoring, zero‑knowledge credentials, zero‑ trust networking, etc.). The public uses quadratic voting: everyone gets 99 credits; 1 vote costs 1, 2 costs 4, 3 costs 9, 4 costs 16, etc.—so you seek synergies across projects.
Yeah, I think many of the most successful open source Commons infrastructure are reliant on offline communities, like literally people meeting every week. So that is why I refer to the meetups. So in a sense, the face to face nodes build the civic muscles, the trust between people, and then many of those different nodes link through weaker links online.
