 I would like to invite everybody watching the live stream to also join me in the Q&A session. Some of you may have already scanned the QR code, but if you haven't, you can go to Slido.com. That's S-L-I-D-O.com and Slido.com and enter the numbers 0-0-6-1-7. So 0-0 and 6-1-7, that's today's date at Slido.com. So whether if you scan the QR code or whether if you are online, you can enter the questions and vote on each other's questions exactly like this. And as people have asked me questions, I will highlight them and the highlighted questions will become the topic of discussion. And after answering one question, I will just archive it and take it down so that we can keep interacting this way. So people raising your hand on this room of course have precedence, have priority over the online questions. So feel free to start asking questions now during my talk and just use the Slido platform to like each other's questions. So that was like the two minute beginning. Let's switch back to my slides please. Can I have my PowerPoint? So go back to the PowerPoint. Right. So my talk today is about finding facts in a world of disinformation, the search of collective solutions and emphasis on the collective. In open societies, everybody across different sectors have different roles to play. The government providing a safe and secure communication environment. The journalists providing investigations into what the facts are. And the civil society working on different issues, focusing on solving the issues in a way given different positions to find out common values. But this information crisis is a global threat to open societies exactly because it makes it very difficult for people to tell what facts are and participate in the collective fact finding process. And in Taiwan, we don't say fake news because in the Mandarin that we speak, journalist is literally news worker. So we have the same word for news and journalism essentially. So when we say fake news in Taiwan, it feels like accusing the journalist of producing bad journalism. It's very different from of course things that pretend to be journalism but really isn't. And misleading titles and all that. So when we say Jia Xunwen or fake news in Mandarin, it's very unclear what it's meant. And it feels like a thought on journalism. And because of my mother and father, we're all journalists. And because of filial piety, I have to pay respect to them. So I don't say Jia Xunwen. So in Taiwan, we say Jia Xunxi or disinformation. And disinformation in Taiwan, we have a legal definition for disinformation. It's not just a communication word, it's a legal definition. It's called intentional, harmful, untruth. And the harmful here is qualified to say basically harming the public, harming the public's ability to discover facts together, harming the democracy. It's not just harming the image of a minister. That's just good journalism, right? So it has to harm the public. And it has to be intentional, it has to be untrue. And that is the basis of our legal definition of disinformation. Now when we're tackling disinformation, we need to be very clear that Taiwan's core values are freedom of expression and the openness of society. According to the Human Rights Watch Organization, Civicus Monitor, Taiwan is the only totally open jurisdiction in this part of the world, actually all the way to Africa. And that is because whenever we see things like the disinformation crisis, we see it as an invitation for the sectors to work closer together instead of driving us apart. If we drive us apart, then there's a strong attraction for the government to infringe the freedom of expression using that as excuse, as we have seen in some jurisdictions. But in Taiwan, we always use it as an invitation to make the society even more free and open. Now I would like to explain our three methodologies to counter disinformation. The first one is called timely response. On average across all the ministries in Taiwan, whenever we detect a raising misinformation, it may not be intentional, it could be just a rumor. But if it's a rumor, it's not clarified within an hour, within the same news cycle, then the people who are intentional just manufacture disinformation out of it. So this one hour window is very, very important. When we see a raising rumor or misinformation, all the ministries are now equipped with dedicated teams to contribute our understanding of the context to the popular media in a way that is attractive, that is fun within one hour, so that people can tell the differences between the government message that has the full context versus a gossip which often lacks full context. But we're not taking anything down, right? We were just sharing our view of the world in a very timely fashion. So just use one example. And this is a funny one because this is our premier, our prime minister. So two photos of him. The larger one is when he was young and the smaller one is he is now. So he is now bald, but he has more hair in his youth, right? So basically the top says there's a popular rumor now. And the rumor is quoted saying, perming your hair will be subject to a fine of $1 million empty dollars starting next week, which is ridiculous, right? But we detect that it's been spreading. And so it says not true. And then the quote of a younger prime minister said, I may be bald now, but I will not punish people with hair. So it's very funny. And there's a smaller sentence that says what we have actually done is that by 2021, we're requiring the people who make perming and dyeing products to start labeling the ingredients in their hair products. That's all the government's policy. And it's very easy to communicate in just one sentence. But if you start with that sentence, nobody wants to read it, right? So you have to frame it in a way that's funny, right? And I didn't translate that to English, but the last part, the bald prime minister, what he's saying, the premier is saying here is that, but if you keep perming your hair many times in a week, your hair will fall off and become like me. So it's a humorous and expensive himself and it reached many, many people, right? Many people really just organically share these pictures just by the Facebook and Twitter and lines accounts alone. It reached a massive amount of people so that people become kind of inoculated. They still see the rumor afterwards, but their mind is already inoculated against the very existence of such a rumor. And we discovered that if we push this out within one hour, then it reached a balance. But if we only push it after 24 hours, then it's impossible. The rumor will already have reached everybody. So time is of the utmost importance here. The next thing, the second of the three, pro of counter-indice information is collaborative checking. So in Taiwan, the civil society, the social sector, there's a civic tech movement called GovZero or G0V. Basically, the social sector looks at all the government services that they find missing or bad or badly delivered. And because all the government services end in Gov.tw, so people in the social sector just register the same website but with something that G0V.tw. So if you change the O to a zero, you get into the shadow government that is done by the social sector. And so that is how people fork, meaning they're taking the government to a different direction, but it's always open source and free of copyright or patent restrictions. And so the people in the GovZero community develop this co-fact collaborative checkings like a wiki, wikipedia, where everybody can contribute that collectively identify the popular rumors and they work with the international fact-checking network through the Taiwan Fact-checking Center. And so this is a popular line bot. At the moment, I think 100,000 people have added a bot called Covax as a friend online. So the way it works is oftentimes this information works by provoking outrage, right? You see a picture. You think that you have to forward it out, right? So it basically says if you feel the urge of forwarding a rumor or misinformation, you can forward to the robot. The robot will not get upset, but the robot will rather go back to you and say whether this is actually clarified or not, whether this information or not, and all the clarification message is crowdsourced, meaning that people actually meet every week and talk in a way that is very friendly among the fact-checkers. And anyone is welcome to join. There's food, there's excellent drinks and things like that. It makes this information a interesting topic, just like people talk about their favorite Pokemon, right? They may talk about their favorite disinformation campaign of the month and contribute into clarifying it on a shared database. And this then connects to the Taiwan Fact-check Center, which is part of the International Fact-checking Network, that looks at the most popular flag to rumors on the co-fact network and then do a thorough investigative reporting style clarification report on it. And that is our second line of defense that is from the social sector. And so Align, the company, of course, took notice into this and actually supported a lot the social sector's work of essentially, just like you can flag an email as Spahn, you can now very easily flag an uncommon line message as potential misinformation or disinformation. So that's our second line of defense. Our third line of defense then is election and referendum law because the payoff is especially strong during the election season, right? So we see that there's a lot of people who want to influence through precision targeted on social media through all the sort of political advertisement. And because Taiwan has one of the most transparent campaign donation law anywhere in the world, we publish using machine readable format like a database or Excel spreadsheets, each and every campaign donation to a election campaign. So in the previous election, we have witnessed that people who maybe have, you know, influences on election using money, they prefer to go through advertisements rather than campaign donation because this is too transparent for them. But now we're not actually refraining from just saying starting next election, advertisements are going to be treated as campaign donations. All the advertisers are then required to disclose the funding source of their, regardless of whether their institution, traditional media, social media, paper media or whatever, disclose the source of the funding. It's like anti-money laundering. Every part have to reveal their true funding that sponsors them. And if any of them tracks to a external jurisdiction, then it's actually, of course, election interference then. And so this is our third line of defense and it takes effect only during election and making it a crime if there's a foreign-sponsored propaganda to do so. And so again, we rely on independence media. There's many independent media in Taiwan that just looks at the campaign donation records and very soon the political advertisement records and do a thorough media charting, relationship, finding all the different connections and so on. And it's the greatest thing about those independent media is that they all work collaboratively on GitHub, which is a website the open source developers use now sponsored by Microsoft. But in any case, what GitHub is doing is that it makes sure that the methodology, the tools that you make to make those analysis is by itself can be verified. If somebody makes a mistake in making the charts or things like that, everybody in the social sector can come in and look at it and find out what is actually the best way to present in a fair fashion the political contributions, whether it's campaign donation or advertisements. So again, independent journalism that talks collectively to the social sector is of utmost importance. Now I talked about three defense. Now I want to talk about three proactive actions that we are also doing. So one of the proactive action is actually just open government. I'm a minister that across all the different ministries and I can talk about any ministry's issues as long as 5,000 people petition online to talk about it. So we actually travel to you if you can get 5,000 signatures online. And we have a team in each ministry to talk to people who petition even for cross-ministerial matters. And I personally, this is my office by the way, I personally in the office in the social innovation lab in Taipei City provide office hours. So every Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., anyone can come and talk to me for 40 minutes. I'm very easily reachable on Twitter and so on. And so anyone can really have a real conversation and ask what are things going. And what I have found that it is much easier if we explain the why of policymaking, the context of policymaking instead of just policies. And so every meetings I chair even internally, I publish the entire transcript after two weeks of co-editing of all the meeting participants. And so everybody can go to the website, the address is archive, A-R-C-H-I-V-E, archive.tw and see that since I become the digital minister I have talked to 4,000 people about 200,000 speeches and that everything is transcribed just like the legislative and the judicial branches. And the great thing about that is that then people don't have to explain the same thing twice. Everybody can see the context of policymaking that reduces the rumors and the budget and everything is also open for everybody to have a conversation about. Now the second line of proactive action is that we work with the popular messaging companies. Line I think is also pretty popular here and they just announced that they're part of the digital accountability best practice. So they're starting next month I believe they will take the co-fact bot and the time and fact checking bot and two other bots, the four social sector clarifications and built it in into its own product so that everybody can just very easily long tap or signal a message and send a message into the fact checkers. And so you don't have to manually add co-fact as your friends. Line will facilitate that by having a function in itself. And line also many of you maybe know that has a separate section called line today. It's like its own small media. And in line today there will be a special column just for popular clarifications. And so people can go to line today and see what the trending clarification is. Basically making clarification a fun media message that people can just proactively check before they see the disinformation on their end to end encryption. And the great thing about this is that the state doesn't have to read your end to end encrypted message because it's technologically not good to do so. It's just a rumors. But when people start suspecting that there's a disinformation campaign going on they can just flag it directly online messaging and for the clarifications from the independent fact checkers to appear online today. And so that is our second active contribution. So this is our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen talking to the line bear. So I have two more minutes and then we go to questions. So I think the third thing is that we also use public funding to film a series of very impactful and highly acclaimed. I think it's 95% on IMDB and even higher domestically, a TV series. And a TV series called The World Between Us talks about how the media framing works. Talks about how people in the media and doing journalism is caught between the need of real time reporting and the racing against the tabloids and gossiping and things like that. Difficulty of doing proper investigative journalism. The usual framing of social issues into controversies and things like that. And it's really, really well made. It's supported by public money in the public television and it's very popular. And after that the discussion around media literacy become much easier. And so much so that starting this August we're making into our K-12 curriculum. So starting from the first grade, from the primary school, the students will learn about critical thinking and media literacy, not as a class, not as two hours every week, but across all the different classes. We have handouts to all the different teachers, whether you're teaching geography, mathematics, or sociology or whatever. You can work with the kids on how to discover independent information online. And also on doing the media literacy, referencing the public television into the idea of a collective understanding. So this is the film, The World Between Us. It's 10 TV series. It's really good, it was 10 episodes. So I hope that someday it gets translated here. And so just to recap very quickly, basically you will understand that I see the disinformation through a epidemic metaphor. And I personally have worked back 20 years ago in working to counter spam and junk email. So I see it in a very similar situation. The spam and junk mail was solved not only by government regulation or infringing on free speech, but rather by everybody like Gmail and Outlook, Hotmail, everybody agreeing to add a flag as spam button so that people can donate voluntarily junk mails to a spam house, to the domain blocking list, to all the different social sector, any of us, so that we collectively understand the pattern of junk mail and do academic research on it so that we have facts about disinformation. And this is the same direction that Taiwan is going. And the public media, the social sector, everybody has a role to play in it. So that's my 20 minutes of contribution. And let's switch to questions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Your Excellency. Audrey Chan. Can you please join me in the middle of the stage? Or you'd like to take a look on smartphone at the same time? Thank you very much, Minister, for your enlightening ask with what you have done. Can you just move to the middle of the stage? Yes, yes. So what would you like me to do to ask your question and integrate with the questions asking you? Okay, so let me flag up some questions. Okay. Yeah. You told us about your channeling of conversation, talking with people, and you tried to pave the way to encourage government, Taiwanese government, to have more conversation with citizens. How is it going? And what's the most asked question in ask authorization? Right, that's a great question. So I think the government is now having a lot more confidence. It used to be when we helped occupying the parliament in 2014 that people were very afraid of talking to 5,000 citizens. They fear that it will escalate and they will get misquoted, that they will get a lot of burden just by talking to citizens. But now, because the government itself has a system of, as I said, a radically transparent system of capturing the context of conversation, there is less fear about quoting out of context. There's less uncertainty because people have already voted on each other's questions, just like Slido. People are voting on each other's questions so that we only tackle the one with the most consensus already among people. So it makes sure that we don't waste our time answering a question that maybe only one person has, but rather focus on our energy and think that everybody cares about. And one of the most asked questions in our e-petition platform is about human rights. It's about how Taiwan can protect more of the human rights, like the referendum law that we just had a referendum, a real referendum. People have an e-petition that says, oh, you shouldn't have a referendum that impinge on the minority's rights. And when we find a petitioner, he is just 16 years old. Our environment is also very popular. A couple years ago, we have a very popular petition that says you should ban plastic straws in the takeout streams and things like that. And it's reached 5,000 people very quickly. And then when we meet with the petitioner, she's, again, just 15 years old. And caring about the plastic waste and things like that. And so I think the social justice environment are the two most popular things. And does it turn out that you also encourage other ministers in the parliament to be joining in a conversation and to respond to the questions from people directly? Yeah, very much so. I think that is why we have participation offices. So those are a team of people in each ministry in charge of talking to their ministers and figuring out a way to talk directly with people in a way that responds to people's e-petitions and people's ideas and things like that. And it's working really well. We have many ministries voluntarily sending people to my office to learn this art from me. It's not everybody, right? In town, we have 32 ministries. At the moment, I have 22 colleagues. So not everybody, like the Ministry of Defense have not sent anyone yet. But the ministry, they want to talk publicly and openly like culture, education, interior communication, justice, finance, and so on. They all have sent people to my office. And would you say that this is leading to open government of Taiwanese government of what you have been doing? Yeah, I think so. I think open government is not just about the government being open about getting ideas from the citizen, but fundamentally it's about trusting the people. If I trust the people, if people generally feel the government trusts them on getting their input, then they can trust back, right? So the government has to trust the people first. That is the idea of the government in Taiwan. And one line of your speech, you said that perhaps the government is so afraid that open society is become threat to the government. So how does that sentiment been reduced after you've been doing this quite a while? That's right. So I think if anyone here works in public service, so all my parents and grandparents actually work in public service, so I know something about how public servants think. So it's roughly speaking three things, right? The people in public service think about efficiency, how to make it more efficient to deliver service to the people. People think about reducing risk of how to make sure that their ministers don't get attacked from the population by some mistake in their policy. And finally, they also care about credit and personal honor, right? About doing the work greatly and getting recognized as great public servants. And before radical transparency, it's actually very difficult for the public service to truly innovate because if things go right, the minister can take all the credit. And if things go wrong, the minister can always blame the public service, right? So it's not in a very good position. But after radical transparency and direct conversation, if things go right, everybody recognized, the journalists recognized, the person who came up with the innovation and solution because it's part of the record. And if things go wrong, you can always blame Audrey. And so in this way, people are actually encouraged to innovate. So open and transparency also encouraged to have more trust in the government. Yes, it's radical trust, that's right. So let's now integrate with the live questions. The first one, what's your view on fighting fake news in our Asia style and the Western style, what's the difference? Okay, that's a great question. I think journalism in Asia and journalism in the Western world don't have any fundamental differences is about collective discovery of facts. However, in Asia, when we talk, for example, in Mandarin about gongshi, about consensus, it is actually of a different nature. And that is, I think, the main difference. Gongshi in Mandarin means roughly common understanding. So this is not something that is so strong, like a consensus you can sign your name on. But just something that is kind of, we agree to disagree, but there's something we can all live with. There's a general, you know, less violent debate. So we talk about deliberate. We don't talk about debate. And we talk about finding our rough consensus, not very fine consensus and so on. So we have a softer approach to consensus. And I think that helps, for example, the co-facts team, because in the co-facts social sector, of course there are people of different political inclinations, different fields, different expertise and so on. If they're seeking a very fine consensus, basically online, you know, the people with the most time wins, right? You can just keep trolling, right? But because what we are seeking is just a common understanding. So there's more tolerance in the common understanding of rough consensus. And I think that's then helps the journalists to add their own perspective into it. So this idea of a more, you know, rough idea of consensus, a more tolerant way of consensus making, I think is really good in Asia to get collective action going. Can we have more questions, please? Sure. So what do you like to deal with? How do you deal with media that spread fake news? Right, so everybody is media now, right? If you have a mobile phone, you are the media, right? So as I think it was McLuhan, right? That said, don't hate the media, be the media. So if we see media, like social media or popular YouTubers or so on spreading information that is mistaken, we call out them on it, of course. I think the idea is not, we don't go to takedown. In Taiwan, takedown is something that is seen as a judicial branch thing. If there is a really infringement of copyright or whatever, there may be at the end, we saw in the takedown after filing lawsuits and so on, but it's seen as a judicial thing. And we're in the administration, so we're not doing takedowns. What we're doing is what we call notice and public notice. So when people notice us that there's this information going, you can see our premier doing very funny pictures to call them out on it, or our president going on stand-up comedy, or our deputy premier going on a popular live streaming, playing a video game, or things like that. So basically we become media. We're not taking anything down from the administrative branch, but we deal with media by having our own social media and self-media going on in the government itself. But information is very powerful, Minister Audrey. And the government must have known that they hold power in terms of spreading information. Have you found the case of state produce or sponsor this information campaign to benefit the government? Right, so I think especially during elections, there's always a problem, right? Because when, for example, our president now running for her second term, right? The separation between the judicial branch, which always have to be entirely impartial, and the administration, which of course need to explain what the president really has done in the past four years, this line need to be very clearly marked. And so if the government actually have any information in Taiwan as any institutional or social media that is directly or indirectly paid by the government, we have a law that says it has to say government advertisement on it, so that people understand that this information comes from a government funding source. So when we say in election, we have to ask everybody to declare their funding source in political propaganda and so on, we're not holding a double standard. We hold ourself to that standard, and now we're asking everybody else to the same standard. It means you really need strong and objective judicial system, the whole institution. Yes, very much so. Yeah. Also, what's next? How to raise public seriousness about this information disorder? Okay, so because I said people who raise hand have a priority, I have to be accountable to my words, so you can have my microphone, okay. How's that? Can you hear me now? Yeah, sorry. I don't want to be undemocratic and grab it from the floor, but no, one thing I want to ask you about is I've read extensively that Taiwan is a major target of disinformation from mainland China. And also heart cyber attacks, it's not a secret. Yeah, so how would you quantify the disinformation threat from the mainland and how can you deal with it and how do you see it developing in the run up to the next election? Okay, great question. So the reason why of course we have to pass the political campaign advertisement act is of course even Facebook itself has disclosed that they receive massive amount of funding from the PRC government on those period of time, right? So it's not a secret, everybody can analyze the money that they spent during that election period. And so I think the disclosure of honest advertisement is the direct response to that. We are of course also facing heart cyber attacks. It's not just disinformation which is more on the content level and can be dealt with actually relatively easily by the social sector. Heart cyber attacks is much harder to counter by the social sector alone. We really have to have a really good idea of where the cyber attacks comes from and a good relationship with white hat hackers. And so white hat hackers, which is a technology that's like a jargon, it's people who can break into a system, but they tell you about it. Black hat hackers is people who break into a system but they don't tell you about it. And so the white hat people are the most treasured information workers in Taiwan. The president herself said that the cyber security is national security and we guarantee for all new government projects 5% to 7% of budget just for penetration testing and white hat hacker empowerment. And so if you're a white hat hacker in Taiwan, you get paid really well. You get to meet with the president or digital minister quite frequently and so that you don't fall to the dark side which has cookies. And so a good relationship with white hat hackers is our answer of being literally on the front line of cyber attacks. And that applies to a degree also to disinformation but we emphasize more the social sector's role because the requirement of training is less than hard cyber security but it's very similar. I think the second question is quite crucial. Yes. How do you encourage public to participate in crowdsource fact shaking? Yes, so the key to get people participating in any activity like that are three. First that it has to be easily actionable. Actionable meaning that you can only spend a couple seconds on upvoting or downvoting something. You can maybe spend just five seconds to flag something as disinformation. So making it really easy for people to participate and instant gratification that is very important. Second is about connected. So when people do this fact checking they don't do this alone. As I mentioned the weekly meetups, the meetings with good food and drink and venue and things like that making it a popular hobby of people to participate that is also important in the environment. And the third thing is to make it extensible. Extensible means that people in social sector when they do co-facts and things like that everything is open source. So everybody can build another system that builds off on it. For example, there's another bot on the line system called the Mei Yu aunt, Mei Yu Yi. Mei Yu Yi is another bot that you can invite to your chat rooms on the line system and they see every message that everybody sent but they forget about it so there's no log, there's no analytic. It's all open source you can check or set up yourself but they compare every incoming message with a clarified rumor on the co-fact database and if it's already clarified they just add saying oh it's clarified it's not like that and things like that. And so Mei Yu Yi is really popular because then you can correct the mistakes that your friends or families made without hurting their face. If you correct them by yourself they will hate you but now it's just a bot correcting them so it's better I think. And so just more creative ways to make things extensible in addition of being actionable and connected. These are the three keys of public engagement. I got the signal, I'm so sorry I got the signal that our time is up but I just have two personal, not quite personal. The one is technology company like Facebook, Google, Twitter they are part of spreading this information what should be mechanism by the government or citizens in general to have checks and balances of them. Right so actually the German NetsDG really helped us because we talked to them and because all my meetings are publicly transcribed so you can actually find my talks with people from Google and Line and Facebook on this particular matter. And basically what we were saying is that we think notice and public notice, we think a code of conduct is a better way, a multi-stakeholder way. But please implement it correctly. Otherwise we may be forced to do something like NetsDG that force those social media companies to do the takedown censorship by themselves. So don't force us to force you to force others on takedown. So because then they will incur a large amount of cost in just implementing the system and so I think they see it as kind of a better alternative to participate in this best practice of digital accountability. That's a bit semi-personal. Did you enjoy being hacker or being minister? Which one is? I'm both, I'm still contributing on GitHub. If you go to my GitHub account I'm still coding, right? I'm still maintaining the civic hacking projects. So as I said, I'm working as a channel between the movements on one hand and the governments on the other hand. So I'm kind of at the middle, at the Lagrange point between the two to make sure that people can culturally translate each other's ideas and voices in a way that fosters understanding and common values. And we all know that Taiwan is the first country in Asia to have same sex. Yeah, to have marriage equality, yes. And you are transgender minister. Do you find having open source has also helped in terms of advocate people to really support any big cause or any big issue like to support same sex marriage? Yes, I think so. Having an open debate, a good petition system, a system where everybody can see everybody's arguments eventually led us to legalize marriage equality in a way that is very unique in the world. What we have legalized is that we have legalized the bylaws, that is to say the rights and duties and all the benefits of marriage, of performing marriage and being wed, but not of the in-laws. So basically in Mandarin we have 16 different words for aunt and uncle and things like that. And there's a specific chapter in the civil code that talks about the related parts of the in-laws. And these become kind of confusing to people who are more conservative when after marriage equality gets passed. So we have a hyperlink act that says we enjoy all the marriage equality couples, enjoy exactly the same status as heterosexual couples for the bylaws, but we don't touch anything about the in-laws. And I think that is the kind of rough consensus common understanding that across generations people can accept and we're very happy to export it for example to Japan or to other jurisdictions which share a very similar civil code. One last final question. Is your IQ 118? No, no, that's actually a misinformation. My height is 180 centimeters. And for adults IQ, the test stops at 160. So I don't know, I don't know what my IQ is, but I know that nowadays if you have some apps on your phone and you're allowed to bring the phone to IQ test, everybody is 160. So adult IQ is not important anymore. What's important is how we reach common understanding and common values. You are being modest. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Thank you to our minister all day long. Thank you.