Because if this is not trending, if this only has a replication factor, basic reproduction number of less than 1, then it doesn’t go viral. And so therefore probably not worth your time to do professional fact checking. But if it is going viral, then the great thing about the ...

So a good commons project like KOFact serves as a hub. So it’s not that we entirely rely on crowdsourcing, but rather it’s backed by sometimes professional, internationally recognized Pointer Institute level Taiwan Fact Check center or Michael Penn and so on. And they because have limited resources in each ...

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So Wikipedia is actually a very good example. There are many groups, meetups and so on that just narrowly focuses on, for example, heritage buildings or museums or things like that. So whenever you try to add something on Wikipedia or edit one of the existing articles, ...

But because of the lack of scientific consensus, it’s the perfect time for them to grow into an infodemic. And exactly like virus, but mimetic, the most potent one, goes viral.

Yeah, but there’s a word for that. From who? It’s called infodemic because there’s so many requests for information, the desire is so strong, but the science is not there yet. So this void creates very fertile ground. If there is a scientific consensus, then these ideas would not even ...

Do you have an example of that?

Yep.

Yeah, exactly. Oh, exactly, yeah. It’s a very interesting observation in how previously, because facilitation and deliberation takes years of training, it doesn’t tend to scale that much. But nowadays with language models and especially with kind of sense-making modules, people suddenly discover, oh, it’s becoming much more scalable and ...

That is, I think, a bunch of very dedicated and sometimes a little bit nerdy people who really find joy in this kind of thing. But just look at Wikipedia. I think it’s just 10% or fewer people doing the editing. Mostly we just help fixing typos or something.

This experience also inoculates the mind, sometimes for years, against polarization. So the first part is quite optimistic. It only takes a few minutes. The second part, like not everyone after they get inoculated become so good as to inoculate other people. That is not very easy. So I would ...

So I don’t think it takes days or weeks or something. If you have a good enough module, and that is point by point and evidence based, then it just takes a few minutes to inoculate a mind. And especially if it’s done in a group setting. Research has also ...

Yeah, that’s a great question. The first part is easier. We have seen from recent research that even just a few rounds of conversation with debunkbot.com which is a language model powered evidence conversation module, even if you firmly believe in the conspiracy theory because of the language model’s ability ...

It is not seeing the checked facts that inoculates a mind. So the process, the journey is much more important.

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 ...

It’s like a Wikipedia but for fact checking. And it is also part of the media competence training in not just lifelong education or community college and so on, but also in our basic education. Because in 2019 we changed from media literacy to media competence. Because literacy is when ...

Of course, let’s take a deep dive.

And second, pre-bunking always works better than debunking. But you can kind of make pre-bunking work even after the fact, if you have a good enough monitoring system and you’re able to respond within 60 minutes.

Because if you respond within an hour, then your response actually reaches more people more quickly than this trending information manipulation. It has a pre-bunking effect compared to the very laggy response. If you wait for 24 hours and then respond, that become debunking, which doesn’t work. The two main ...

But all of them share this same commons system. So that whenever people report, for example, even on end-to-end encrypted channels like LINE here, which is like WhatsApp, you can long tap something and report it, but the report goes into this multi-stakeholder, collaboratively maintained database, it doesn’t go to ...

Yeah. So in the Taiwanese example, the main repository that people can see what kind of information manipulation is going on, what is trending and so on, that is a common good. And because it’s a common good, it’s maintained by the civil society. For example, the collaborative fact checking ...

In 2025, Taiwan will officially enter a “super-aged society,” where one in every five people will be over 65. Caring for the elderly requires not just assistance but meaningful companionship and attentive listening. AI companion robots have emerged as one potential solution. However, since AI lacks emotions and isn’t human, ...

AI systems are becoming more human-like than ever. Recently, in the domain of audio processing, they have sometimes surpassed humans in mastering emotional expressions, non-verbal cues and vocal intonations.

For example, Google’s AI note-taking and research app, NotebookLM, introduced an “Audio Overview” feature in mid-September. This function can transform a ...

The Mozilla Foundation recently announced its “Rise25: Leading the Next Wave of AI” list, highlighting 25 individuals, and I am honored to be among them.

The selected individuals share a commitment to “equity,” working across various fields with the spirit of open source to address issues such as racial, gender, ...

A new book that I co-authored with economist Glen Weyl, <em> Plurality: The Future of Democracy and Collaborative Technologies </em> (Plurality.net), has recently made waves in Tokyo.

One of the book’s key concepts, augmented deliberation, demonstrates how AI can be harnessed to enable broad listening. This idea resonated with Takahiro ...

We’ve grown accustomed to social media constantly feeding us interesting posts and ads, but we rarely consider that current algorithms are actually steering the world towards anxiety.

Parents of children addicted to smartphones feel this anxiety most acutely. The digital world in which children are immersed from a young age ...

After May 20th, I have been on a whirlwind EU tour, with a speech at VivaTech – Europe’s largest tech and startup event in Paris, France. At the forefront of innovation, everyone is still talking about AI. But this time, there is a noteworthy phenomenon: many Europeans are not entirely ...

Thank you.

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Sure. With my coffee?

We bring digital and plural, which is the same word in Mandarin, shu wei, together. A digital democracy is a plural democracy.

Yes. Across the diversity, across the generations, the ecosystem, the environments, maybe other planets can be part of democracy and in making sure plurality collaborative diversity as a philosophy can work to serve the people, not asking the people to serve the technologies.

We start with human beings that are adults, but then to younger people, to even younger people, to representatives of future generations and eventually to the entire ecosystem. It’s infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

When we say plurality, that is collaborative diversity. We mean not just this transcultural republic of citizens that we have here. It’s a start, but we also think that it is one of the potential models for the future, for the entire planet, for people, but also animals, rivers, and ...

In Taiwan, we have those ideological earthquakes constantly, but with the resilience in our democracy. The Jade Mountain, the highest point in Taiwan raises by a couple of centimeters every year because of these tensions that brings co creation.

A vast majority of people nowadays agree with that no matter how they voted on the referendums. That is the deliberative spirit. The more diversity you have, the more tolerance, no inclusion that you enjoy from the co creation of inspiring creative solutions, I liken it to the tectonic plate ...

When the constitutional court ruled that marriage equality needed to happen, the legislation finally took the form after two referenda that the individuals wed as individuals, but their families don’t. Enjoying the same rising duties without confusing their confusion can ship idea. This eclectic solution is what I call good ...

At the end of the day, the conversation turned into this kinship relationship where some people think marriage as families wedding to families. The individual are just representatives for the essence through spirits and lineage, and the text that is about the individual rights and responsibility and so on.

When we have deliberation about, for example, marriage equality here in Taiwan, it is the matriarchies of the indigenous community, or the Paiwan community which doesn’t care about gender in choosing leadership, that offers valuable perspective to this conversation.

I get this, like if you’re all Confucius worshiping robots, but we’re not. [laughs] In Taiwan, we have 20 national languages and a lot of diversity including the sign language, many indigenous languages, the whole of Gan Hakka and so on. Each community tend to think of the society and ...

Community policing?

Means that nobody need to be a top down censor, but rather people can take care of the quality of public discussion through voluntarily supplying context to discussions and reporting the most viral disinformation and conspiracy theories so that professional journalists can dedicate their time to debunk those.

In this, we discovered, I would say, a cure for the disinformation crisis because collective fact checking is like community policing.

When the middle school students can fact check our three presidential candidates in real time as they’re having the debate on platform 2020 election, well, that brings them into the mindset that renders them immune detox from the outrage that is the share button and the retweet button.

In Taiwan though, we learned that if people participate in civic journalism, if people learned the art of source checking, of proper narrative framing, of making sure that there’s context behind each report, this act of fact checking, of reporting likely disinformation or misinformation, the same thing as you would ...

They were so scared by the color revolutions and so on, the counter power potential of the social media, so that they would even take away what used to be some journalistic freedom that they have online.

On the digital arena, in around 2012, 2013, in authoritarian regimes that used to have some freedom of speech and journalism back then, they decided that the retweet button, the share button is too potent a virus, that they have to apply professional people to police the speech.

Sure.

We don’t need so many gun carrying polices on the street to keep the street tidy and safe, because in a sense this community spirit is even closer to home, quite literally speaking, when it comes to policing against the behavior that may harm the community.