…That can resonate with people. Because then when people hear about it, they have feelings that are more pro-social, because everybody wants to think better for the child, right? But if you argue what is marriage, they are very anti-social. Very polarized.

Exactly. As I said…

Yeah, it’s relaxed.

Yeah, so as I said, we chose specific examples within the marriage equality case. So, we didn’t talk about the definition of marriage, that would never work. But we talk about the welfare and the rights of the child that’s not yet born, right? So, we will all think about ...

We have since the vTaiwan project, brought vTaiwan into the cabinet, and run similar processes in the joint platform. The difference is vTaiwan is g0v, is civil society led, and Join is government led. And on the Join platform, we talk about even more things than emerging technologies. For example, ...

In our experience, if we talk about abstract things, like sharing economy, gig economy, then this tool does not work. This tool only works when you talk about the specific case, for example, somebody with a driver’s license but not professional driver’s license, picking up strangers, they meet on an ...

Yes, this is democracy. And we invite Uber and taxi union on the table and say, look, the people want you to work together like this, do you want to commit to it? And they say yes. So, Uber has been for years now a legal Taiwanese taxi fleet, because ...

So, when people learn that everyone across the party aisles actually do agree on these things…

And very quickly, we saw on the Uber conversation, that everybody actually agreed on most of the points. There’s just one that people don’t agree. Whether to call it sharing economy, or geek or extractive economy, that’s different ideologies. But actually, everybody agrees there should be insurance, there should be ...

It’s used for town halls in Bowling Green in Kentucky. In many places, if you check Pol.is website, you will see. But mostly, they are for municipalities or districts and so on. And we take those small-scale technology and make it national, so that everybody can chime in.

Yes, it’s been used in other countries as well. But I think Taiwan is the first one that uses it on a national scale.

So, the idea is that the bandwidth of democracy, how much you can express, and the latency of democracy, how long to wait until you can next voice your opinion, need to improve as the emerging technologies. So, like in the Uber case, we ask all the taxi drivers, all ...

Yes. So once every four years in Taiwan. And every time you vote, even after we have referendum, it’s once every two years, right? So, referendum, election, referendum, election. But even if it’s once a year, let’s be generous, still for every citizen, it’s until one year later can they ...

Sure. Yes. The idea of V-Taiwan is that for emerging technologies like Uber, the technology changes so fast that the normal democratic channels are very slow in comparison. A vote, for example, is once every four years in Taiwan. Of course, more in Israel.

2014… So, almost 10 years ago now.

In 2014. Yes.

vTaiwan?

And we found it’s not the fact check reports that protects the mind against polarization. It’s a process of going through fact checking that inoculates a mind against polarization. So, if all the students can get the experience, like a journalist do, right? Checking the sources, checking the biases, making ...

No, this is called Cofacts. It’s also a g0v or GovZero initiative. But Cofacts is entirely in the social sector. It’s civil society. It’s not government run. It’s not government funded. But they are the Cofacts people, like Wikipedia, but instead of editing articles, they edit fact checks.

They can report it to the collaborative fact checking community.

The difference is that literacy is when you’re consuming the information. With critical thinking, maybe, but still a consumer. But competence is when you’re a producer of information, when you make information. So, the idea is that every junior high school student should be free to fact check the three ...

There is that. What you’re talking about is literacy or critical thinking. That’s what you’re talking about But in Taiwan, I was part of the basic education curriculum committee before joining the cabinet. Our new curriculum, new as of 2019, we took out all the words literacy. So, no media ...

Or I would say “users”, right? There’s some other industry also has users. The industry that sells addiction, of course.

Yeah. I think it’s the polarization that is the main difference compared to even 10 years ago, because on many online platforms, polarization sells more advertisement. Polarization delivers more clicks and people become addicted to polarization. And that’s the main problem.

We will just provide clarifications. And the clarification will come, as you said, within two hours, 200 words, two pictures. But it’s a clarification. It’s only when there’s a foreign cyber-attack, a foreign information manipulation, we would say that’s FIMI.

No, no, no. I will not say anything like accusing the journalist.

No, I will never say that.

Yes. And we never blame the journalism, right? So, when we say FIMI, it means specifically foreign information manipulation and interference. And it may not be fake, right? It could just be they hacked into a signboard and post a message there. And the message may not be fake. It ...

Exactly.

So, we use the word FIMI because a domestic journalist can never be FIMI, right, by definition. And if you say fake news, it confuses the two.

Yeah. And also, journalists, I think… journalism really is the perfect antidote against FIMI. Journalism to FIMI is like epidemiology to coronavirus. So, I hold journalists to very high esteem. Both of my parents are journalists.

Yeah, because especially in Mandarin in Taiwan, if we translate fake news, sometimes it translates to the news that the politicians don’t like. And that’s not a good posture with journalists.

Yeah. And you are a journalist, so you get to use the F word, but we never use the F word. We never say fake news in Taiwan. We say FIMI or Foreign Information Manipulation Interference, F-I-M-I. It’s the same word that the European Union uses.

Yes. We’ll just talk about… And in our experience in Taiwan, really, there’s nothing off limits, I will share everything. But I don’t yet understand your politics well enough to comment on your PM or MPs.

Yeah, we’re not interfering with domestic politics.

I mean, there are questions that my staff says I should minimize my answers, like commenting to your PM or MPs.

I think we can do it normal flow.

Yes, I did.

Exactly. Humor over rumor.

Yet… It’s not a bomb… yet. Wait until someone hacks into it.

Maybe we do our interview first while they check the availability?

Because it took 20 minutes to do the photos.

Yes. I don’t have a meeting after this, so we can just go on if you don’t have somewhere else (to be)…

Thank you.

of course. Yeah, we agree to leave time for the photographer.

And so, of course, one side would see each other as maybe progressive, the other maybe as conservative. But the beauty of Taiwan is that we’re committed on just trans-cultural democracy that let us work out those common values in plain sight.

That’s very sweet for both sides, actually, of them. So that is to say, even in the traditional polarized topics in Western jurisdictions, in Taiwan, we still manage to collaborate across differences.

Right, and they’re fine with each other, actually in close proximity.

But there was an image from the Taiwan Pride Parade last year, in which you can see that there’s someone holding a banner saying that I’m a normal person against gay marriage, but with these gay couples.

Taiwan is a trans-cultural republic, right? So trans-culturalism means that, for example, on marriage equality, you are always going to have people who are pro, who are against that.