I’m honored.

Yes. It’s like mask, vaccine and cure for the infodemic.

You need to prebunk. We learned that lesson 10 years ago.

Two weeks ago, I attended the AI Action Summit in Paris, where open models like Mistral and uncensored inference models based on the R1 series (including subsequent iterations like Open R1 and R1 1776), dominated discussions. At the summit’s conclusion, sixty-one nations jointly signed a declaration committing to develop technology ...

Thank you. Live long and prosper.

Well, thank you, and thank you to the people in the chatroom for being civil. I see just now Flydog777 says it was informative and interesting, so that makes me really happy.

As I mentioned, the authoritarian narrative is not just about censorship but about pushing the idea that freedom only leads to chaos, that it only leads to infighting. This idea is repeated by many people, not just the CCP, and basically encourages giving up hope that absolute freedom of speech ...

My hope is that we could try it out with TikTok through the People’s Bid, if we get that with McCourt and O’Leary, or with smaller platforms like Truth Social or Bluesky. Once people see it really works well, it transfers into legislative action.

Imagine the same for social media, so that instead of Meta or X hoarding all the content, if you want to view it on Truth Social or Bluesky or some other smaller experience, you can do so freely. They can’t close the fire hose. They can’t keep the speech from ...

Well, first of all, if something is shown to be technically possible and even preferred, then people will put pressure on legislators to make it happen. One idea I have is to make platforms interoperable, like Type-C connectors. One good thing the European Union did is say you must use ...

In Taiwan, we have this idea of decentralized wallets, an infrastructure that allows people to digitally sign without revealing personal details. I can sign saying I’m a Taiwanese resident or even a resident of Taipei City if it’s a discussion about city budgets, but it doesn’t reveal my name, address, ...

Yeah. To go back to the Romania example your vice president brought up in Munich: I think what happened there is not a simple meme but rather a way for one person to control thousands of accounts, as if there are thousands of different people with different political views “trolling” ...

So how do we do that? The people’s idea was that if it’s an advertisement claiming it’s from Audrey Tang, then it needs my digital signature endorsing it. That’s it. If Facebook, for example, does not secure my signature and somebody gets scammed out of two million dollars, then starting ...

Those are great questions. In Taiwan, for example, we sent 200,000 SMS text messages from the official 111 number to random Taiwanese citizens, asking what to do about trolls, deepfakes, and attacks on information integrity online. People shared their ideas. Then we basically asked people to volunteer like a jury. ...

As I mentioned, the ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) is a set of AI models that safeguard against illegal material and so on, but the great thing about open source and free software is that people can tune it to their community’s liking. If your community has different standards ...

Yeah. Again, it’s similar to asking about community moderation. My answer is the same: if AI is in the hands of the people and individual communities and families, that’s a good thing because people can steer it however they want. If it’s just in the hands of one or two ...

My direct answer is that free speech is not just speech to broadcast; it’s also about broad listening. It’s the freedom to listen across differences and then respond in real time. If we have that freedom, it’s much harder to caricature the other side, and it’s basically easier to resolve ...

I think it’s quite important we have direct conversation, because only direct conversations can build true bridges. If people only read one snapshot or one clip from the other side, awful-but-lawful speech may look like it represents an entire community, but there’s no real dialogue.

Yes, people are commenting, for example, that my pronouns are “whatever,” so they find it interesting. There’s someone asking about my support for safe spaces for women. Of course, I’ve always supported that.

Yeah, as we speak, there’s a robust conversation going on in the Rumble chatroom, which I’m reading, and I think it’s really good that we have ways to directly address people’s questions. When people say—

To your more serious question, I do think absolute freedom of speech and mutual respect can coexist. The main problem in broadcast-based social media is that only the most viral ideas or “takes” go viral, and people do not actually think there’s another common-sense, middle-ground idea that could bridge different ...

Well, I was born with the condition of very low testosterone, so it is true that I am somewhat in between, naturally. But I’ve never let that bother me. My pronouns are whatever; if people use any pronouns, in Taiwan we say tā/tā/tā, it doesn’t really matter. So in my ...

I believe it’s March 9, and I’ll be posting on Truth Social and X.com and Bluesky and the usual places.

Sure. I think the message here is that technology must advance freedom—something we really believe in Taiwan. We believe that America can also amplify this vision and make it a reality, so that people do not need to trade off between freedom on one side and safety or security on ...

So the idea of ROOST is, again, decentralization, so that even small-time content hosts can very easily detect such unlawful content automatically. It doesn’t require a community vote. But if you want to tune or update it, you can—without violating an NDA with Big Tech or any law. I think ...

Yeah. I was also in Paris for the AI Action Summit, where we launched the “ROOST,” the Robust Open Online Safety Tools. Part of the ROOST idea is that the defense against attacks that are clearly unlawful should be open source and decentralized as well. For example, child sexual abuse ...

Sure. It’s called <em> Good Enough Ancestor </em> , and it tells the story of Taiwan’s democratization. I was born into a family of journalists—both of my parents are journalists—and they had to work within the martial law era’s rules, which were very censorious. By the time we truly democratized ...

There you go. It’s in the public domain, so there’s no copyright—feel free to remake it as you want.

Part of the paper is to imagine a different funding model where communities can fund shared common experiences—so that people see shared posts that bring different communities together. In the example I just gave, if there’s a post or a piece of video that could explain the more conservative angle ...

Yeah. Over and over again, we’ve seen that in the advertisement-driven field model, only advertisers—especially very big advertisers—get to see the social fabric: the people who liked the same content, shared the same content, and so on. But that information isn’t made available to individuals; it’s just made available to ...

The main technical question we’re facing is whether individual platforms, such as Truth Social—which is, by the way, free software, open source—and Bluesky, also free software, open source, can build relevant bridges so it’s not just community notes (which already happens after something very polarizing or very angry has gone ...

Yeah. I have just registered on Truth Social; my first post was reposting you, and I do feel it has more of a community spirit where users feel they have more control and are less likely to abandon the platform when they don’t feel decision-making is censorious. That fosters genuine ...

…and that there are also different perspectives among libertarians, and so on.

I think for authoritarians, their main idea really is to spread this narrative that freedom only leads to chaos, that freedom only leads to infighting, and that freedom never delivers. That meta-narrative is their justification for locking down, shutting down, taking down stuff. To combat that, we need to build ...

By very quickly positioning ourselves as demonstrators, not just protesters, that is how the energy was different and resulted in the Sunflower Movement being one of the very rare “Occupy” actions that concluded with the Speaker of the Parliament basically saying, “Okay, the people’s ideas do have a point. Let’s ...

Well, back in 2014, I believe we were even more divided and angry. The approval rating at that time was 9% for the president. In a country of 24 million people, anything the president said was not agreed by 20 million people. One contrast I would draw is that we ...

I think J.D. Vance’s speech outlines a direction. The technological idea here is that we need to ensure that communities have moderation in their own hands, instead of just making sure one single state actor or one single Big Tech actor does that. As long as it’s centralized in one ...

Many of the European audience members are basically trying to come up with what we have already discovered in Taiwan, which is a more robust, more open, and transparent way of making sure people understand what’s going on. Additional context is actually better in terms of defending against such polarization ...

Well, the Romania case that he shared with the audience is also a case I often bring up, which is the need to strengthen democracy so it is not easily overtaken or overwhelmed by bots or polarization attacks from authoritarian regimes. On that message, I think we’re very much in ...

The second thing is that it is based on more speech rather than less speech. In our system, you simply see more labels—what ideas are gaining common ground in your community and what ideas remain divisive, and how they are debated. But these labels are not taking anything down; they ...

In two very important ways. One is that we are replacing top-down decisions with a community-based, bottom-up approach. Instead of a secret panel where you really do not know who they are deciding who to silence, the idea is that each community can decide what content they value. So this ...

To your other question about the role social media plays today: I’m advising the Project Liberty Institute, and we’re redesigning ideas around communities online so that we can build upon what’s called open source or free software, decentralized systems. If you’re not happy with any particular policy that a social ...

But in Taiwan, we have found that if you make sure the communities themselves do the moderation work instead of delegating it to experts or some third-party people controlled by Big Tech, it results in much more robust resilience. Instead of not seeing the attack or polarization, people learn to ...

I think in Taiwan, because we’re the freest in all of Asia in terms of internet freedom—including freedom of expression and so on—we do not believe there is a trade-off to be made between security on one side and freedom on the other. In many jurisdictions, they believe that in ...

I spoke at a Munich Cyber Security Conference, which started one day before the main Security Conference. But I did, of course, like everybody else, listen to your vice president’s speech.

At the end of that year, I was invited to basically play that role but online, building the systems where people can have unfettered access and conversations without getting censored by social media—Big Tech at the time—so that we could determine policies together. We not only resolved issues around Uber, ...

Certainly. So I joined the cabinet as a special adviser in 2014, actually. That was more than a decade ago, and it followed an event in Taiwan’s parliament at the time. Many people who were unhappy with a trade deal with Beijing—one that would have invited them into our media, ...