I’m not thinking it’s a short-term job. Neither did Council for Continental China Affairs, I guess for similar reasons, but Foreign Service did send someone after a year of this operation, because they understand now that there are parts of public diplomacy where they want as many people know as ...

My office is one volunteer from each ministry. The ministry of defense never send anyone to my office, nor am I forcing them to. Maybe someday they will wake up to it, but anyway. [laughs]

Mm-hmm.

That gets corrected really fast. I think it’s not really comparable to the Hong Kong case, where people have a concentrated action to bring action right now. Nowadays in day-to-day operation, it’s mostly health-related like this.

That ends up being the most viral on the LINE network. This is used to fact check not really news in the sense of journalistic output, although there are news outlets that produce real-time news by translating “The Onion,” not understanding that The Onion is not a news source, it’s ...

It’s mostly people who care a lot about their families, on the LINE channels, and they really feel they owe an obligation for their grandchildren, or their grandparents, let’s not to be discriminatory, their families, extended family members to understand the importance of not let their micro ovens explode or ...

These are the everyday messages that’s been crowd and fact checked. It has nothing to do with politics.

That’s right. If you don’t finish your food in a tin can, and you put it into the refrigerator you will suffer from tin poisoning, [laughs] a lot more. If five-year-olds play video games non-stop, one of their eyeballs disappear. What?

We can look real examples, what people feel like must be speedily checked. They of course relate to public harm, but my point is that it’s not necessarily political. For example, using your cellphone next to a microwave will cause an explosion. OK, that’s public harm. [laughs]

As I said, these are professional journalists and volunteers, respectively. They are interested not only about political news, in fact if we look at the Taiwan Fact-Check Center, political news isn’t even that popular.

The movement, by itself, has something like that, a crowdsourced fact-checking effort going on, but then of course heavily biased by the fact that all the participants are already identify with the anti-ELAB movement.

They have also a shared dashboard of all the informations that they receive, and the sources, and whether it was really a nurse or protester that got her eyes damaged, or whether it was a real, well, minister, well in the Catholic sense that stopped a gunshot, or whether they’re ...

Sure. Hong Kong mostly runs on Telegram, which is not exactly end-to-end encrypted by default, but it could be, opt-in end-to-end encrypted channel. It’s also running on LIHKG, which is a Reddit-like bulletin board system. In Taiwan they’re counterpart would be the PTT. I think in Hong Kong, a lot ...

There are researchers doing this analysis right now, but because the feature of that LINE is really know, new as in two months ago, so we don’t yet have sufficient data. There is a lot of research interest in that regard how social order responsible somebody feels as a flagger. ...

Then we get a really good dashboard, you can see the LINE, digital accountability dashboard, of what exactly is going on right now in their end-to-end encrypted system, basically showing people who voluntarily donate to the spam database.

On the app now, you don’t have to add that robot as friend anymore, you can just long-press any message on the LINE system and say, “Flag as spam,” and it will automatically send that to CoFact to the TFCC, to Mygopen, to Rumor and Truth, to all its fact-checking ...

These two together, the crowdsourcing site as well as the journalism sourcing site, serves as kind of two-stage filter to make sure that disinformation is discovered in a timely manner, and everyone can participate in the flagging of disinformation, so much so that LINE has then agreed to build in ...

In any case, their evidences, or their corroborated categorization eventually gets triggered into the Taiwan Fact Check Center, which are run by professional journalists, and they use professional journalistic standards, and they accept only crowdfunding, not any political funding and report their fact check steps to the wide public on ...

Then collectively fact check it, and contribute more sources to prove or disprove parts of it. A little bit like a book club really, is just a voluntary, hobbyist club that really takes their work really seriously, actually.

It’s just simple. The bot sends everything that two or more people have reported into a public URL list, so you can see the trending reports. People who meet every Thursday face to face for fun, is like a book club, but they read new rumors instead of books. [laughs]

Yeah, that’s by behavior analysis. The LINE system is very simple to use. The CoFact, which is a g0v project, started out as a simple chat bot. Whenever you see a disinformation, you suspect a disinformation you flag it as spam by forwarding it to the bot, and that’s it.

Or it’s a real person and their freedom of speech must be protected. That’s what stopped the Internet community from blocking the entire block of African country that I will not name from sending email, is because people there have freedom of communication, too. You can’t have collateral damage, just ...

What is at the end being put into the artificial intelligence of that era, called Bayesian network is the behavior pattern, not the actual content itself. The actual content itself is just kind of raising a signal, that something people don’t like, but at the end it is professional network ...

Yep, that’s a great question. How do we prevent hostile takeover? Back in the spam era, people also worried what if we just flagged all the political opinion we don’t like as spam, and they become junk mail senders? The solution really is that we look not at the content, ...

It’s a way for permissionless innovation as we like to call it. It also, because it’s free of copyright, if the government thinks it’s a good idea, we just merge it back and make it part of public service. It’s a really interesting way to turn against or pro-government into ...

Exactly. Even the logo itself is free of trademark or copyright. For example, when people in Italy said oh, it’s such a good idea, they just registered a simple domain name, g0v.it, so g0v it. Anyway, [laughs] then if you go to g0v.it, you see a carbon copy of our ...

That’s right. It’s entirely a voluntary sector thing. Some career public service do participate in hackathons, sometime anonymously, but most of time it’s just civic hackers. People who care about those public data and want to understand in a more interactive way, they step in whenever the government shouldn’t or ...

They have, and by they I mean we, have systemically forked – that means taking to a different direction – around 2,000 government services, around a hundred of which has been then adopted back to the public service. It is a way to fork the government, so to speak, phonetically ...

Instead of gov.tw, just change the O to a 0 on your browser, like this. Then you go into the shadow government which is always open source, always interactive, and always more fun.

The legislation, LY, the executive Yuan EY, the participation platform join.g0v.tw, and so the idea of g0v is that for each government website that people don’t like, instead of going to the street, they’re just going to build, for example, an interactive visual, budget, of the budget website of government.

G0v is spelled g0v.tw, is a very simple domain hack, is a hack as in ingenious, creative thought. Very simply put all the public service in Taiwan websites, and is something in g0v.tw.

We convinced LINE to adopt the same button, and by we, we don’t mean the government, actually, the social sector, the g0v movement in Taiwan which systemically look at everything the government has done wrong, or haven’t been doing, and built alternate government services to deliver on those public service. ...

We are all free to go through the junk mail if we have too much time, but it does solve the spam problem by making it no longer economically viable to expect return when you send unsolicited email to con people, basically.

These two, together, solve the spam issue, because voluntarily donate their supposedly private messages into the public to analyze for people at Spamhaus which is the international coalition of people that tracks the sender’s patterns, and if the sender matches those patterns, the next time it doesn’t lands to you ...

We solved that not with laws, of course there was the CAN-SPAM Act and so on, which helped, but really it’s solved by a simple invention as the Flag As Spam button, if you just look at your email box at the moment, you will see a button that looks ...

He suggested that we start charging a postage stamp each outgoing email, otherwise spam will ruin the Internet. Indeed, at that time, half of my inbox was people who are royalty with $10 trillion if I only pay a few transaction fee.

We took a page from counter spam. I remember 20 years ago Bill Gates was saying that most of spam is unchecked, because sending email is free of charge.

It’s a very familiar behavior pattern, so if we can know what is trending as disinformation on the LINE, end-to-end encrypted system, then we have noticed of what disinformation operators is about to use, basically, because they source their material from there also.

They will actually first look at A/B testing on the various conspiracy groups in LINE, and see which misinformation, not necessarily intentional, are divisive, that sows discord in a kind of organically viral way. Then they take the best of those crops and add more engineering around it, and then ...

They only know the stickers that people send to each other, because they sell those stickers. Otherwise, they have nothing to reveal about the content of the messages. However, we have witnessed that people have used LINE as a testing ground, a proving ground, for disinformation before they will pay ...

First of all, Taiwan, almost everybody has an end-to-end encrypted chat channel called LINE, it’s like WhatsApp. It’s end-to-end encrypted, it’s not even running out of hardware in Taiwan, it’s a Korea/Japan venture, and they say they have no control whatsoever, there’s no backdoor to the encryption.

Let’s move right on. The other question that was asked is that how do we know it’s trending, and how do we know it’s trending in a timely fashion? Because if it take us five hours to detect it’s trending, it’s gone.

Definitely not.

Both sides are demanding that the president being more open about her dissertation and she replied swiftly, and indeed offering everything for public to download. That, I think is one of the rough consensus of the Taiwanese political culture, is if you’re the president you need to be more transparent. ...

I think that the point here is that of course people are going to look at the presidential actions and works for inconsistencies, but for us the only remedy is always radical transparency and more transparency, instead of the other way around. That’s been a consistent demand, even between the ...

So far, our president has been really consistent. She has been accused of not actually submitting a dissertation thesis to the London School of Economy, a very popular conspiracy theory for the past couple years, and she responded by more transparency, by donating the entire thesis to the National Library, ...

Then systemically reevaluate and see that on social media if you do exactly the same thing, you get judged exactly the same way, as you would have if you shout in a public square. I think we’re not adding any new laws for that metric, for public harm, we’re just ...

The harmful is based on existing codes of law that looks public harm in the physical space without digital technologies, many of them written before social media.

If you’re harmful to the public, for example during an epidemic like SARS, mislead people about the diseased areas and inviting people to come to places that actually has SARS, it’s demonstratably harmful to the public health, and we have existing laws to punish such behaviors regardless whether it’s online ...

However, when the prime minister and the president started featuring their photo in such clarification messages, it touches everybody. That is the difference of the level of political buy-in that we got since the previous regional election. Yes?