Taiwan’s Fmr. Minister of Digital Affairs on AI, Elections, and China

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Now, when it comes to any election, technology is the main tool that’s used to share important information. So, how can it be leveraged to tackle fake content? Our next guest is an expert in this field. Audrey Tang, Taiwan’s former digital affairs minister, has used a wide range of strategies to address this problem with a book called “Plularity.” It deals with how the internet, which is a divisive space for so many, can also provide immense opportunities for bridge building and collaboration. Tang explains how to Hari Sreenivasan.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Christiane, thanks. Audrey Tang, thanks so much for joining us. You are the former minister of digital affairs of Taiwan and you’re the co-author of a new book called “Plurality.” It’s an open-source book. First, what is plurality? Why this title? Why this idea?

AUDREY TANG, CO-AUTHOR, “PLURALITY”: Plurality means collaboration across diversity and the technology that enables this kind of collaboration. Think about 10 years ago when Uber first came to Taiwan, there’s this pro-taxi part, there’s this pro-Uber part, but instead of repeating the divisions, we coded up open-source technologies to that let people see the bridges across the different camps. And so, we very quickly settled on a — I wouldn’t say compromise, a co- created solution that made it problem solved with the society’s input. So, that’s plurality. And it’s open-source, just like the technology we use. So, anybody can take a copy online and download at plurality.net and contribute.

SREENIVASAN: You mentioned this sort of tension between Uber and taxis. How did technology build a bridge or highlight bridges between what would otherwise be two divided camps?

TANG: In democracies with a lower bitrate and a higher latency, meaning that you have to wait for four years and to cast a vote, which cares, maybe three bits of information. Sometime you see one side winning for four years and another four years has passed and another side wins, the other side loses. And so on and so forth. There’s very little room for co-creation. But in Taiwan, we use this system called Polis, which is a Wiki survey. Like survey, it asks you a bunch of (INAUDIBLE) questions. Like Wiki, these questions are your fellow citizens’ feelings. So, everybody can say that, oh, I feel that surge pricing is fine, but undercutting existing meters isn’t, or that I feel that insurance is very important regardless whether the driver has a professional license and so on. And so, for each and every of these statements, you can unlike you can like, but you cannot reply. So, people’s attention is not sucked into this online flame wars, trolling, dunking, or things like that, but rather it promotes people, because there’s a real-time scoreboard that shows the people’s statements that flows to the top, because they’re embraced by both sides. So, very quickly, we settle on a very neat package of like 10 recommendations and put that into law. And so, just by gamifying it a little bit, instead of the one that’s more distracting, highlighting the one that is the most bridging. And the same algorithm also inspired community notes on x.com, previously Twitter, so that you can also, you know, participate in a community notes repository. But it’s open-source. And the notes that end up becoming displayed are the one that speak across the device.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that you outline in the book is how — it’s called sort of G-zero, V-zero, gov-zero. Explain what you were trying to do with that in Taiwan.

TANG: So, for example gov.tw, that’s the Taiwan government’s website. If you change the O to a zero, then you get into g0v.tw, which is this open- source civic tech movement. And the reason why is that, for example, 10 years ago, it was the budgets that was very hard to understand. They were locked in PDFs and so on, or the legislator’s debates and so on. So, part of the promise of the gov-zero movement is this radical transparency, making sure that the everyday people, when they feel that they want to know more about government function, about democracy and so on the information, even if it’s not on their fingertips, they can change the website and change the O to a zero and get into the shadow websites that explains things better. And because it is open-source, sometime the government is shamed into merging back this new design. So, that the service experience is better. So, that started from 2012. And after I became the digital minister in 2016, I have systematically merged all those innovations into the government, including, for example, contact tracing, visualization of mask availability, so on and so forth during the pandemic.

SREENIVASAN: All right. So, something really important happened between 2012 and 2016, and that was the demonstrations, the Sunflower Student Movement. And tell the audience a little bit about what your role was during that time.

TANG: In 2014, many students feel that this sudden passing of a trade deal with Beijing regime makes it very difficult for people to understand even why that is being passed because it’s just being rushed through. And so, people thought that we need a real deliberation on each and every aspect, instead of just a single package. So, for example, we were building then new 4G core network and whether allowing Huawei or ZTE into that 4G core network. Is that a good idea? That’s probably warrants a debate, right? And so, people just stormed into the parliament during the night when there was nobody there. And I was there supporting the bandwidth required to live stream this entire event. And so, I would continue that role with the gov-zero people for the next three weeks. And because every corner is live streamed, it had two effects. One there’s no violence around occupied parliamentary area. And second, it actually converged instead of like most occupied, which diverged over time. Because if you go to the occupied site, if you enter your company’s tax ID number, you can very easily see how exactly does the trade deal affects you and then join one of those deliberations going on. And because it’s all captured in live stream, summarize, read out the next morning, every day we inch a little bit more toward rough consensus. At the end of it, people can live with it with a lot of agreements, just like the Uber case. And so, the head of the parliament eventually said, OK, if that’s what people want, we would just do that. So, the end result is that people do not agree to sign the cross-trade service and trade agreement. People thought that anything like that should be treated as a treaty with a foreign government, instead of a special constitutionally defined government. And also, people understood that there needs to be more transparency in the legislative process itself, the party- to-party negotiation and so on needs to be live streamed. There needs to be a lot more accountability in the entire process and so on. And so, a lot of that ended up becoming the Open Parliament Action Plan, which you can look up in Taiwan’s governmental website.

SREENIVASAN: OK. So, through this process, through this demonstration, through these protests, you get to a point that, where you’re saying, look, the people of Taiwan shouldn’t sign this trade pact with China. How did that sit with China? The idea that this was not just meeting resistance, but in such a digital and transparent and public way.

TANG: With half a million people on the street and many more online, this demonstration is more than a protest. It is a demo. It shows how democracy can evolve as a social technology. I cannot speak on behalf of the Beijing regime, of course, but we have seen that they — their reactions towards social media is quite different, whereas we embrace the pro-social media we just talked about. They seem to, around that time, 2014-ish, think that it is something of grave danger to their polity, that if people organize this way, with half a million people on the street through social media, the stability of their control on their population may be greatly threatened. And so, they invested a lot of money, a lot of resources into so-called harmonization of the internet and making sure that the civil society space online shrinks year after year ever since 2014. So, I think — yes, I think this demonstration in Taiwan also showed everyone else what social media can do, but authoritarian regimes responded quite differently from Taiwan.

SREENIVASAN: I do want to ask a little bit about what you were able to implement during the pandemic. What were some of the policies that you were able to implement, you know, quickly, that kind of set the tone for how Taiwan was going to manage this global pandemic that literally across the Strait was doing just incalculable human damage?

TANG: A key is that we responded very, very quickly. So, 10 days before WHO, the World Health Organization, took decisive action. And we ensured that people knew very early on that mask use is critical. But at the time, people were not very sure about aerosol or mask efficacy and so on. So, our communication strategy is rather different. In addition to daily 2:00 p.m. press conferences, in addition to a hotline, 1922, you can call to ask any questions, there are also ways like what we call humor over rumor, making sure that there’s a very cute spokes dog, a Shiba Inu, that puts her paw on the face, saying that wear a mask to block your dirty unwashed hands from your face or something. And it’s very funny. So, it went viral. And so, making sure that whenever people hear something that they don’t quite understand, instead of debunking the rumor, after the rumor already appeared, we pre-bunk the rumor by ensuring that people understand where it’s coming from and how to react to it with a more relaxed attitude or even humorous attitude. For example, there was a young boy who called 1922 hotline saying, you’re rationing out masks now, which is fine, but all I got was pink ones, which is not fine. I’m a boy. I don’t want to wear pink to school. The very next day, on the daily pandemic conference, every ministers, director generals, everyone wore pink regardless of their gender. And it’s become very fashionable. All the fashionable brands and so on turned pink. So, imagine if we had to debunk, if the minister of education went on and I say, bullying is bad, that won’t work, right. But by having pink being the most fashionable color, it actually worked and increased people’s interest in wearing rainbow mask or all sort of mask that massively increased mask use. So, is it all of society effort.

SREENIVASAN: Wow. Well, when you talk about pre-bunking misinformation or dealing with the kinds of challenges, it seems that it’s gotten much more difficult since COVID in part, because technology has improved where now it’s not that hard for me to create a deep fake of myself or of you. And I wonder in that — in this new era that we’re heading into, how do you inform and make sure that your population is digitally literate enough where they might not have to be sort of first line fact-checkers for everything, but how do you prepare them for this new reality?

TANG: What we did in terms of pre-bunking went way before this election, this January. Already in 2022, I deep faked myself in front of a monitor showing exactly how it’s done and share it to the people so that people know that although currently it takes 12 hours, very quickly, this would just take 12 minutes and very quickly, just 12 seconds. And now, we’re at the milliseconds range, which means that deepfake can be in real-time talking to you now, right? But we have prepared people’s minds against this possibility. And I really think the key is not just literacy. Literacy is when you consume. But starting 2019, we changed in our curriculum all words, digital literacy, media literacy, data literacy into competence. Competence is when you co-create when you contribute. So, instead of just viewing the news with a critical mindset, you can contribute to the fact-checking. So, these are the what we call societal resilience ideas. So, that even if you’re a junior high school student, if you’re really diligent and you want to contribute to fact-checking, you can actually be a like a Wikipedia avid poster and add a lot of contexts to what’s going on. And because many people uses that, it let us see in real-time which rumors are trending, which ones having a basic reproduction number of more than one, which lines are literally going viral, and we get them to ignore the rest and not to spend too much time on it because it’s self-limiting.

SREENIVASAN: Audrey, I’d like to ask you maybe a personal question. And, you know, you identify as transgender and non-binary and I wonder — it’s non-binary not just in gender, it’s really in everything. And I wonder how that informs your outlook? I mean, we literally have been talking in this conversation about, you know, ways where you’re building bridges between different parties and so forth. And I wonder if somewhere the work that you’re doing today is influenced, informed by who you are and how you see the world.

TANG: Yes. So, I just recently learned that iPhones, the contact book, there are the pronoun fields. And when a friend asked me to fill in my details. And so, I said that I filled in that my pronouns are any, or, and whatever. Meaning, that I can’t get offended. And so, that’s really like that in my mind. I don’t think half of the population is farther away from me and half is closer to me. On the HR form that I filed in 2016, when I first became digital minister, there were no digital ministers before in Taiwan, right? So, I had to come up with my own job description and so on. So, I filed not applicable to the gender field and not applicable to the party field. So, I have no party affiliation. I consider all the different parties, just, you know, parts of the fabric that we can weave trust. And so, I think it does affect my outlook, because if, at some point, I feel that, oh, these people, the taxi drivers, they’re closer to me and the Uber drivers, they’re far away from me, I would then tell myself, I need to spend more time with the other group so that I can also see the world from their eyes.

SREENIVASAN: The book that you’re talking about and the idea that you’re talking about of plurality, how’s it possible for these ideas to improve the relationship between Taiwan and China? I mean, right now, there is an incredible source of tension from the United States and lots of European nations and China right now over Taiwan. And so, if we were able to, you know, take the ideas from your book, distribute them widely to people who are on kind of different sides of this equation, how can they use that to bring the temperature down?

TANG: Well, first of all, I think it will depolarize effectively a lot of the conversations in the democracies, in the allies that does support Taiwan. But, you know, sometimes because of election dynamics and so on, the PRC sometimes says that democracy only leads to chaos or democracy never delivers and so on. They don’t quite come out and say that directly, these words, it’s my words, not theirs. But they certainly seem to suggest that the authoritarian way may be more harmonic in many regards. But if we have implemented plurality widely across democracies, just like Finland, who have also asked what the Finnish people think, and almost 1 million votes are cast on the Polis platform. So, people can, at a glance, seem very clearly what are the bridges, what are the device in the country, in the society, and then take real actions to address those, then I think it will make democracies much more plural and much less polarized. And once we have depolarized ourselves, we would have more capacity to also de-escalate many of those international relationship issues.

SREENIVASAN: Audrey Tang, the former minister of digital affairs of Taiwan and a co-author of “Plurality,” thanks so much for joining us.

TANG: Thank you. Live long and prosper.