They produced such plastic utensils to prevent the outbreak of hepatitis B. They are socially responsible people. Nowadays hep B is cured. You take a pill, it’s gone, and so they are all ears about new materials.

We met with the young woman and we invited the people she named, namely the people who produce such plastic straws and chopsticks. They say that when they enter into business 30 years ago they were social entrepreneurs because hepatitis B was a problem in Taiwan. It’s very prevalent.

“There’s a petition website. Find something that people like.” [laughs] It turns out she’s really good at social media networking, and she cannot even participate in referendums, which is 18 years old. She cannot vote. That literally is the only way that she can shape public policy, and so she ...

In no time, like a few days, they got 5,000 signatures. All the ministers thought it must be a senior environmental activist to collect signatures in such a rapid time. Turns out, she’s just 16 years old and it’s her civics class assignment.

There’s a person with the pseudonym “I Love Elephants and Elephants Love Me,” raised a petition that says the government should ban the use of plastic straws, as well as any single-use plastic utensils that pollutes the sea and cause carbon issues, or whatever.

Around two years ago, when we first formed the PO network, there was a petition because we allow pseudonyms. You must use SMS to authenticate, but you can use pseudonyms.

We learned from there and built our own national petition platform. 5,000 people can demand minister to have a real dialog with the petitioner and with stakeholders, if necessary. Every other week, we just run such open collaborative meetings with petitioners.

Anyone who collect 5,000 signatures…We calculate that ratio based on We the People here, which is another petition platform that demands, for example, NASA to explain why they have not constructed Death Star.

People go there not because they can read 60 days of regulatory preannouncements just like they can do in regulation.gov. I’m sure it’s not the hottest section. [laughs] Nor because they can participate in the participatory budget of their city, although it’s somewhat more trendy, but because they can raise ...

Exactly. It’s not just me. The team in each ministry is also happy to talk with you on any issue that you care to talk about, as long as it’s not confidential or top secret. We rely, for example, on our petition and participatory budget platform, where there’s 10 million ...

Finally, as I mentioned, you can just talk to me on Wednesdays.

That’s right. It’s more deliberative in nature. As a nonpartisan myself, I think we arrived to this because in the Taiwanese cabinet there’s more ministers who are independent than ministers of any party. We’re in a kind of party political neutral zone in which to make such policies. It’s a ...

They can bill themselves as clarification but not as fact check. It’s two very different things. LINE Today features clarification as well as fact check.

It’s all independently funded. The public service announcements, of course, are funded by the original fund for public service announcement. We just change the format. Individual politicians and individual campaign offices are sponsored, of course, by their party or by individual donors or whatever.

That’s right.

They have an actual rock star as their MP. [laughs] MP Freddy Lim, he really knows how to make such clarification messages and have them go viral. We don’t have a monopoly on this as the administration. Anyone can do that.

This is not reserved to the officials of state. People in the opposition party, they can and have done the same. Actually, the New Power Party is maybe even better [laughs] than we are.

It loses them clicks and advertisement, they will not actually partner with us. It means that our production level is at a level comparable with content farms, that they would choose us as content partners.

It’s also educational, so edutainment. This is by far the more interesting way our premier, our deputy premier, and the president is doing public service announcement now. It’s really funny. It went viral. It’s genuinely fun. That’s why our media partners like the content.

The Minister of Interior, for example, just say that if your house is still like that, there is government policy that helps you rebuild it. [laughs] During the video game session, you get like six ministers all doing public service announcements. [laughs]

In any case, I have no additional commentary. Just saying that a deputy premier played that game as a kind of show of solidarity, and people follow along. Our premier chime in. There’s a real dialog going on. Easily half a million people watched the deputy premier. It’s a kind ...

No, it’s not misinterpreted. It’s just you don’t make a video game containing the word “Winnie the Pooh” in the PRC territory. It’s a joke that they cannot afford to make, which is unfortunate.

She does. Our deputy premier played a video game called Devotion. That went viral before it’s taken down from Steam, because they contain a small scroll containing the word “Winnie the Pooh.” I think it’s pretty harmless. [laughs] I have nothing against Winnie the Pooh. [laughs] In any case, they ...

Yes, they now livestream all the time.

We notice disinformation. We create a public notice. Our social media partners help disseminate the public notice so that people learn something and see something funny, even when they are not aware of the original disinformation. That is the second LINE of proactive action.

That is very important, not only just to discredit the disinformation, but also to make sure that clarifications reach a wider population by default in those channels. This is what we call a notice and public notice.

That is our partnership with LINE Today. Facebook and Google and so on also sign on the same counter-disinformation agenda by basically making the fact-checked-as-false things less viral and by making these kinds of clarifications more viral whenever they can help it.

It’s good because it gives us really good visibility. Clarifications reach more people before they even receive it from the end-to-end encrypted channels. Also, they are genuinely funny, so people would organically share them. Also, it’s a kind of entertainment and gossip, as well. [laughs]

Instead of being a content forum that spreads disinformation, LINE want to be a content forum that spreads organic, healthy food. [laughs] Basically, LINE Today is the news section of LINE. The top one, the section that’s on the top, is entertainment and gossip. The second section is real-time clarification. ...

The slightly lower-budget item, which involves President Tsai being named the model digital citizen of LINE Corporation [laughs] , perhaps because she is not asking them to turn over their encryption key [laughs], is essentially LINE now saying, “Your clarification messages is too funny. It’s newsworthy by itself.” [laughs]

Education, always important, yeah, that’s the cover photo of the TV series, “The World Between Us,” or literally “The Distance to Evil.” That’s the highest-budget item.

We spend huge amount of budget as part of our new curriculum on this kind of education material. It’s one of the nine core competencies of our new education system.

We also partner with the likes of Google and Facebook, who then partner with our social sector, like elderly care association and so on, to translate the digital literacy materials into something that their age group can understand, maybe as an interactive board game.

Not only for people in primary school, but all the way to the long-term healthcare centers, and the college universities and people who are around 70 or 80 years old. My grandparents, all my four grandparents, love this kind of public education material.

At the end, this public awareness that there are information operations happening, that there are truths and half-truths on the Internet and there are creative and critical faculties within our brain that we can use to further democracy is very important.

We are now reshaping the teacher’s role into introducing interactive, playable games into the high-quality TV series of having the students form their own hypothesis and just experiment on those hypotheses.

You just frame it like your primary school teacher said it, and people automatically believe. That is very dangerous to democracy.

This curriculum, unlike the one 10 years ago, puts teachers as just facilitators of learning, of co-learners, instead of holders of any authority or any perfect answer. Because that authoritarian education scheme of how much do you agree with your teachers view of the world determines your score, actually it’s ...

This is also good business. In any case, this forms part of the material that our primary school teachers are now using as our new K-12 curriculum, which rolls out this September, and I was at a committee I was a co-designer.

This I think is a very powerful tool, it’s entirely publicly funded. It’s a product of our public television, and we allocated a huge number of special budget just to get these done in a highest quality possible, and export to everywhere that suffers from media literacy and trust crisis ...

This is, at the end, the only thing that can counter the manufactured addiction of the social media age, that people stop and think, am I contributing to evil or not?

This is a really good tagline, really good title, because then people start asking each other when they share a random sensational, provocative message on social media, are we being closer to evil? This is conscience, right?

Yeah, yes. Yes. It’s exported everywhere. I think it’s trending on Japan now. Literally, the title as translated to Japanese and the original Kanji is “The Distance Between us and Evil.” So how close we are to evil.

It’s really good drama, and people really liked it. Even young people and very old people are fans of this TV series.

Everybody who have watched this 10-part TV series, understand framing effect, the polarization effect, how institutional social media coincide how things like, the plot is very intriguing, it’s a mass killer with his sister now anonymized working in the TV station reporting about mass killing and the capital punishment controversy.

Huge amount. [laughs] That was the three defensive LINEs, and here are the three proactive LINEs. The first one, and the most important one, is to make an IMDb 95 percent, HBO Asia trending TV series about media literacy.

Yeah, that’s my favorite topic.

It can tell the difference between a photo and my phone taking the photo on a display screen. These kind of technologies are on the rise in Taiwan, but I think we already have the kind of mental preparedness of deep fakes.

There’s much more effort being now put on ensuring that all the candidates have the blue mark, or the gray mark of authentic identity, of ensuring that everybody have two-factor authentication, of ensuring that if I post a picture there’s technology such as Truepic that takes into account my phone, ...

If it’s a hundred times more long, of course you start to check about internal consistency, common-sense writing style, and so on, but if it’s just a tweet there’s no way to tell authentic versus inauthentic.