Previously, when only minister-level participants starred in these viral clarifications. It’s OK, but it kind of only touched the people who were already sympathetic to the ministries.

We treat it a little bit like cybersecurity incidence response, except requiring more creativity. Also, the premier and our president is very willing to serve as the actor, or actress, as the model for the model, right?

Great question. In each ministry there’s a cross-functional team of at least five roles of graphic design, of text, of political acumen, analysis of the connection to the career public service, existing database of frequently answers questions and open data, as well as one coordinator that talks with every other ...

Yeah, how do we even know it’s trending?

If we rolled it out five hours after the fact, the traditional news cycle, that doesn’t work at all. It must be 60 minutes or flop, so that is the first LINE of defense. Am I making sense? OK.

We do have numbers too to back it up, and we also have numbers to say that if we roll this out, even like 120 minutes after the fact, it’s not as effective.

Quite a few ways. For example, we have partnerships with LINE, with Facebook, with Google, and PTT. Facebook, in particular, have a collaboration platform with the Internet Fact-Checking Network, the IFCN, and then the IFCN has numbers around the reduced virality of the profiles that FactCheck has classified as false, ...

Yes?

People who have seen this clarification, we have numbers to back it up, almost never click the Share button when they see the disinformation afterwards. It serves as a very good vaccine or inoculation against the viral nature of disinformation, just by humor.

It’s good humor. He makes fun of himself, not other people. It’s genuinely funny, so it really did went viral. More people saw the clarification message than the people who saw the disinformation.

This is the mimetic engineering. The second image of our premier as he looks now says, “However, if you keep perming your hair many times during a week, even though there is no fine, it will damage your hair and you may end up looking like me.” [laughs]

And a fine print that reads, “What we have actually done is we have introduced labeling requirements for hair products starting 2021.” very simple. That’s the clarification, but it’s not the mimetic engineering.

Within the body the text must be 200 characters or less. You see a younger version of our premier that says, “I may be bald now, but I would not punish young people with hair.”

This is a typical clarification message. There’s the so-called triple two rule. The title must be 20 characters or less, like “Perming your hair many times within a week will be subject to a one million dollar fine, it’s not true,” so 20 characters.

The first one, which is very intuitive, is that all our ministries are now equipped with sufficient personnel, budget, and mimetic engineers to roll out a viral clarification one hour, at most, after each trending disinformation is detected by our system. There’s no exceptions to that. Our prime minister then ...

I’ll go through, very quickly, the three reactive ones that only triggers when something seems like disinformation begin to emerge.

That would still concentrate power on the social sector and the journalists themselves, and democratizing journalism as we go. That is the three reactive and three proactive LINEs of defense.

I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. I’m saying all our nearby jurisdictions are considering that, to a lesser extent Japan, but mostly only Taiwan is devising a set of solutions that does not make a minister’s words worth more than a journalist.

In any case, that means that any minister’s words is, by definition, stronger than any journalist’s words because you can make the other media correct that journalist is, strictly speaking, not a takedown notice thing, but it really does concentrate more power into the administration.

They must publish the correction. Also, must their fellow institutional media, and social media, as well. They say that this even extends to telegram. I don’t know how that even works.

There’s various ways to tackle disinformation, many of which assumes more control in the public sector in concentrating more power to the administration. As the end of this month we will see, in Singapore, for example, an administer, that’s like me, can issue a general correction order to any media ...

It must be harmful to the public, it must be untrue and intentional for it to be considered outside of the protection of the usual freedom of speech as protected by our constitution.

We have a legal definition on disinformation and it’s coded into law now. It’s intentional harmful untruth where the harm is to the public, like public health, public democratic processes, and not harming the image of a minister, which is good journalism.

There’s no words differentiating between news and journalism, which is why in Taiwan we never use the F word to describe news, because that would also be an affront to journalism, which is why we stick to disinformation. Because both my parents are professional journalists, so I cannot even say ...

In Taiwan the word news and the word journalism translate to the same word, 新聞. Someone who work in the news, a journalist, is a 新聞工作者.

Disinformation is a global threat to authentic journalism and to open societies.

I was asked to talk a little bit about disinformation. Just maybe one-tenth of my time is spent on this issue, so I’ll be really quick. If I’m using too many acronyms, just stop me and start asking questions.

This is one of the few ways that we’ve been improving the trust from the government to the citizens, trusting the citizens more instead of demanding trust from the citizens as in authoritarian societies.

The fact that it’s radically transparent, meaning it’s published to the Internet, is also good. Otherwise, I’ll have a lot of lobbyists visiting me, talking about only their private interests. Because it’s going to be radically transparent, everybody who visit me in the space talk about the global goals for ...

It’s like if you have a friend that you go to movies every Wednesday. If you hear rumors about them, you will not easily believe them. You will just say, “Hey, let’s talk it over.” [laughs] That’s good.

This is very interesting because by itself it’s a really good way to counter disinformation already. When you have a minister that you can just reach out to every Wednesday, a lot of room for rumors just disappears because you can check me next Wednesday. [laughs]

This place is where I hold office hour, where every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM anyone can come and visit me and talk for 40 minutes at a time, provided that they agree to have the transcript, after 10 days of coediting, published to the Internet, to the ...

This is my office, the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei.

Thank you. I would like this conversation to be as interactive as possible. Please do interrupt me without raising your hand at any point. Just say whatever.

If you’re interested in my work as digital minister, today marks the day that I published the 1,000th meeting transcript.

All of this will be anonymized in a sense that there is not even Speaker One, Two, Three, Four. It’s rather all “Audience Member.”

Everything can be co-edited for 10 days, so that we can simply see the whole transcript online in a system called SayIt.

Yeah. Just to be clear on that, it’s Chatham House Rule-ish in the sense that none of you will appear with a personal identifier. Rather, the speakers will just be marked as “Audience Member.”

Three years.

Coming back to your question of how a social movement or a protest can turn from a protest to a demonstration in a sense of a demo, the idea here is first showing something feasible, and then talking out with all the stakeholders that the protesters initially thought would be ...

They then developed quite a few new lines of business by catering to people who prefer a zero-carbon, plasticless way of making straws. After trying it out in a sandbox for a year or two, starting this July, indoor plastic straws are actually banned. People felt that we were ready ...

Now hep B is solved, so they’re also looking at the more value-added way to contribute to society, so they actually brainstormed with the 16-year-olds—our Gretas—to use sugarcane wastes or whatever other zero-carbon ways to make straws, or even just reinforcing straws, literally, [laughs] to serve in cold drinks, and ...

What we have done then is take the consensus points and invite the people who make plastic straws [laughs] to the table, and they said, “You know, we were in the business of making single-use utensils 30 years ago, because we were social entrepreneurs.” At that point, hepatitis B was ...

Because of that, the protesters then can form into coherent reform movements that also get the civil society and the public sector on the same page. There are a lot of public service people who actually agree with most of the advocacy, like two years ago when a petitioner mobilized ...

Wherever there is a protest, people then learn that there are existing coordination-based technologies that can get people’s demands met in a much more feasible way that shows the support of the most feasible ideas without squandering resources on the ideas that obviously don’t work.

Because of that, every year, we also have two dozen interns who basically come from a civic tech background to work with our office, but not for our office, to improve digital service however they feel is necessary and go back to the civil society after two months. That also ...

Because we work out loud, everybody, all the delegates from every ministry in my office, can easily see what they are working on. What are they focusing on in the moment, and who is online? Basically, we plan our work exactly the same way as the civic tech movement plans ...

We basically took photos of all the restaurants near the administration so that we can very easily plan trips [laughs] or order lunchboxes together. They ride it without worrying about cyber security or about single sign-on, because the underlying architecture has been proven by the cyber security.

Even during protests, people are using exactly the same tools that we’re building here because they know that they can’t host it themselves and it’s not part of the government’s apparatus. Because of this, even the most mundane—actually, there’s a very active app developed by our public service, which is ...

Because it’s open-source, this is also used by protesters. We’re not saying only gov tech get to use it, because we build gov tech on top of civic tech. It means that whatever we contribute, we contribute back to the civic tech.