 Hello, my name is Ryan Haas, I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and today it is my honor to have the opportunity to welcome Taiwan's digital minister, Audrey Tong, to our virtual stage to deliver a keynote address for this event. Minister Tong is one of the leading thinkers in the world on how to adapt democracy to our changing times. And Minister Tong is not just a thinker, but also a doer. As digital minister, Minister Tong is in charge of helping develop government strategies for communicating more directly with the public. Minister Tong is at the leading edge of a radical form of government transparency that has earned plaudits around the world. Minister Tong has worked at the front lines of countering disinformation. Minister Tong also has harnessed technology to ensure better two-way communication between leaders and the public, helping to make sure that a government by the people works for the people. I could go on speaking about Minister Tong's accomplishments for some time, but I will stop here. Minister Tong, welcome to Brookings. The floor is yours. Hello, I'm Audrey Tong, digital minister in charge of social innovation. I'm really happy to be here virtually to share some sauce around not working for the people, but with the people as I'm a minister working with the government, not for the governments. In Taiwan, we countered the pandemic with no lockdown and the infodamic associated with it with no takedowns. And the reason why we could do that is through digital social innovation, meaning it's everyone's business and with everybody's help. Now, in the beginning of this particular pandemic, we played a SARS playbook because on the PTT or the Taiwanese equivalent of Reddit in 2019, December 31st, there was a young doctor with the nickname Nomar Pipe reposting Dr. Lee Wenliang's message from Wuhan. It has said, and I quote, there's seven new SARS cases, unquote. Now, Dr. Lee Wenliang's message did not reach the Wuhan citizens until much later, but he literally saved the Taiwanese people because people started to triage the message on the PTT off-voting with their expertise and all this reached the medical officer, the center for disease control, within hours. And then the very next day, starting January 1st, 2020, we started health inspections for all flights coming in from Wuhan and set up the central epidemic commonsense even before we had the first local case. Now, the PTT isn't exactly equivalent to Reddit. PTT is part of our social sector. It's funding. It's by the National Taiwan University. Its maintenance is entirely kind of self-governed by its participants. The source code is open source. It's on GitHub and all its operation and so on are serving primarily the people of Taiwan instead of the advertisers or any particular shareholders. PTT doesn't really have a shareholder board. Now, the importance of such digital public infrastructure is most salient when we see like Dr. Lee Wenliang's message because this serves primarily a social function, a pro-social function. People contributed rather than labeling each other rather than attacking each other with conspiracy theories and divisive speech and so on. We very quickly not only fact-checked the message to see that it is probably legit, but also people starting to recommend ways to prevent SARS from happening again. And of course, in Taiwan, people who are above 30 years old that includes myself all remember SARS in 2003. We were hit pretty hard, excluded from the international community, the WHO, just like this time around. And the central government was saying very different things from the municipal government. And we had to lock down the hoping hospital unannounced. A year after the SARS in 2004, the constitutional court said that whatever we did during 2003 was barely constitutional and there need to be a way for the democratic policy to counter SARS if it happens again. It will happen again. SARS 2.0 within the democratic authorization by instituting the legal protections for the people, the essential rights, and applied equitably to quarantines, isolations and so on without needing to declare a state of emergency. And that's exactly what we did throughout 2020. There's been so far seven deaths, but around the second half of the year, life returned to normal. We held not just one, but two pride parades and so on. And all thanks to the institutions that was built during the SARS and also after the SARS pandemic in 2004 that enabled this mutual trust between the Central Epidemic Command Center on one side and the citizenry on the other. And we also made sure that the communication through the internet also takes care of people's questions and so on without relying on surveillance capitalism or other authoritarian infrastructures. For you see the hotline 1922 that anyone can call to report anything that happens during the pandemic is built entirely on domestic infrastructure and with a very open live streamed press conference where the Central Epidemic Command Center answers each and every journalist's questions are limited until they run out of questions every day, literally every 2 p.m. And these two combined enabled social innovations to thrive. For example, people who called 1922 saying that's a developed way for traditional risk bookers to kill the virus but doesn't kill the mask, that got amplified on the press conference. Back in April, there was a young boy that called saying, hey, you're rationing out the mask and all of the boys in my class have blue masks but all I get through the rationing was pink mask and I don't want to wear pink to school. Well, the very next day, everyone including the administrator John War pink medical mask regardless of their gender and the ministry even said that pink panther was a childhood hero. So the boy become the most hit boy in the class for only he has the color that the heroes wear and the heroes hero wear. And that also enabled contributions from the social sector on the essential supplies visualization. Early February last year, what we've seen is that there's a lot of coders what we call civic hackers in Taiwan. Many of them in the GovZero or GZeroV initiative volunteering their time to show for example, the pharmacies real-time mask availability. When people queue in line using their national health card this is my national health card which is an IC card and swiping the cards to get the rationed mask. Now, nowadays is 10 per two weeks. People who queue after them can check their phone and on more than 100 different chatbots, maps, voice assistants and so on. They can see in real time, the stock of that particular pharmacy decrease by 10 by 10 by 10 every time anyone makes a purchase. And if it rather grows, people will call one night to report a anomaly. So I call the three pillars of the digital social innovation in response to the pandemic fast, fair and fun where the fast pillar pertains to the collective intelligence and the rapid iteration of accountability of giving out accounts of the scientific measures and the fairness pertains to not just mass rationing but also the open API trusting the citizens with real-time open data. So they can build not only the various different languages of mask availability map and so on chatbots and so on but also make interpolations to the minister because we've never declared a state of emergency. All the measures that we do is subject to democratic oversight. So for example, there was a MP, Gao Hong'an, who interpolated the minister Chen. Now, Engao the MP was VP of data analytics at Foxconn Group. So she knows something about data and she said according to the updated every 30 seconds to real-time open API the mask distribution isn't quite fair actually as the ministry makes it out to be to show on the map even though it looks like each person no matter where you are in Taiwan who of course enjoy broadband as human rights. So we can all check our phone and see the nearby pharmacies availability is roughly even it's not actually even if you take into account the public transportation time that people must take the more rural areas. So by the time they travel to the seemingly closed pharmacy maybe the pharmacy has already closed past its opening hours. Now, because this is evidence-based interpolation minister Chen did not defend the policy at all. He simply said legislator teaches and so we began co-creation the very next day and we introduced 24 hour mask pre-ordering and pickup system with more than 12,000 convenient stores around the island. And so that of course made the MP very happy and she posted saying that yesterday's interpolation become tomorrow's co-creation and this is indeed a non-partisan or beyond partisan effort that unites the entire parliament and citizenry together. Now during the pandemic there's of course not just the virus of the body but also virus of the mind our conspiracy theories and the infodemic. The infodemic is particularly prevalent when it concerns the essential supplies. For example, there was a conspiracy theories around them I think April that said the tissue papers are going to run out soon and because all its materials are being repurposed to make medical mask. Of course that's not true. The tissue papers are made out of paper and the medical mask are plastic material but nevertheless many people believed it and panic by tissue papers. So the fun pillar in fast fair fun took effect and we developed this idea called humor over rumor. And we did so because Taiwan was hit pretty hard by this information around the years around 2015 to 2017 leading to the 2018 mayoral election. There's huge amounts of this information and information manipulation but because people around when they're 40 years old, I'm 39 so I barely remember the martial law but people above my age all remember the martial law. So just as people above 30 years old wouldn't want to go back to the lockdown of hospitals in SARS. People above the 40 years old in Taiwan don't want to go back to administrative takedown and censorship because we all remember how bad martial law was. And so we need to fight the infodamic and this information without resorting back to the administrative takedowns. So what would we do? Well, we discovered that it is possible to make a vaccine of the mind by employing humor. When people have laughed about something they turn this outrage into a more creative spirit and then people can worry together and create together how to make solutions without resorting to revenge or discrimination against one another. So technically speaking, we have this triple two rule that whenever a disinformation or just a viral misinformation that has a basic reproduction value above one that's spreading, gets detected then each and every ministry have a team of participation offices that's responsible to engage training hashtags essentially and they need to wrote out the two different modalities like one image and one video in one and each less than 200 characters. So it fits on the phone screen and it must be very funny and within two hours. Now, for example, the conspiracy theories about tissue papers within two hours our premier, the prime minister, Zhu Zhenchang wrote this out. Now this is his backside and it says in very large forms each of us only have one pair of bottoms. It's a wordplay because in Mandarin to stockpile, tuan sounds the same as bottom tuan and this is basically saying it doesn't pay to stockpile tissue papers. And by the way, tissue papers are made out of South American materials while medical masks are made out of domestic materials. This is truly hilarious. It's spread when viral and reach far more people than the conspiracy theory and people who have laughed about it remembers the comparison table would refrain from panic buying and would more likely than not share this to their friends and families who gets immune from the conspiracy theories and as they see this picture. Now this is not a one shot thing. This is actually quite systemic. Whenever a Central Epidemic Command Center press conference announced a new measure, the stock official stock Shiba Inu Zhongchai of the Central Epidemic Command Center translate that into viral memes. And this particular Shiba Inu actually lives with the participation officer of the Ministry of Health and Welfare. And so humor over rumor is rather easy instead of paying for copyright for some trending photos or memes. They just take a photo of the dog and then you see the social distancing explained in terms of three Shiba Inus between one another indoors, otherwise wear a mask or the outdoor physical distance to Shiba Inus, otherwise wear a mask, cover the mouth and nose when sneezing and as shown by this, like don't do what the Shiba Inu is doing. And this very cute photo shows that why would you wear a mask because you wear a mask to protect your own face from your own unwashed hands? And this is quite a critical message because it link hand sanitization and mask use together and it's much easier to remind one another to take care of one's own safety, appealing to rational self-interest, rather than saying wear a mask to protect the elderly or to respect the health workers and so on. We make sure that's more than three-quarter of the population have seen this message, remember the message, there's much more hand sanitization and measured by tap water usage going on after this message rose out. And most importantly, people build trustworthiness like with the community pharmacists and so on, who not only dispense the mask, but also health advice and so on. So we can all remain calm and collected and strengthen democratic governance even during the pandemic and infodemic. So I guess this is a story of us building back better, of encountering a pretty bad epidemic in 2003 and pretty bad infodemic in 2017, 18, but with people, public, private, punishment, the social sector set the norms, discussed on the digital public infrastructure. We built public infrastructure for online deliberation and debate and on those public infrastructure, people did come up with viable vaccines, antidotes, solutions to both the pandemic and infodemic and the democratic governance gets reinforced, strengthened during the pandemic. So I guess this is my opening keynote, demos over demics and I will welcome you to follow us, follow our work in Taiwan can help us. Thank you for listening. Minister Tong, thank you for that tremendous keynote. It was uplifting, inspiring, encouraging. I think it's what a lot of us need right now. I particularly like the idea of humor over rumor and I think it's really important for us to benefit from the best practices that you and others have honed, you and your team and the public in Taiwan. If I might, I wanna start out on this area because democratic governments rely upon the consent of the governed and consent is strengthened through transparency. It's weakened when there is a perception that the government is illegitimate. And in that context, looking beyond the twin demics that you described, what are some of the real world examples that you can point to of how strengthening transparency has helped legitimize Taiwan's government and how has the public been responding to your efforts? That's a great question. So in Taiwan, we have the national auditing office within the control room, its own branch for the campaign donation transparency. And although the campaign donation expense are tracked by the office, the office only publishes under the Freedom Information Act, paper copies of the campaign expenditure reports before 2017. And so the Gov Zero or GZero V, a civic technology group that I'm a part of that focus on radical transparency and accountability used to work with the NGOs and went to the office in the control room, physically brings out the printed A4 copies of the auditing reports and ask people to run OCR or Otaku character recognition. We turn it into a game where people can help digitize those paper records into open data so that investigative journalists can draw their own conclusions. Back at the time in 2015, the control room said, this is quite dangerous. Even though you say three people have looked into a number to confirm its accuracy, you can't be 100% sure. And we wrote back like, of course, you have the public data, you should made it open data and free from the copyright constraints and so on because this is public money, like literally public money for a campaign expenditure. So in 2018, the social sector norm became non-ignorable. So the control room did publish the campaign donation and expenditure as open data. And the independent journalists immediately jump in it, analyze it and discover that the social media advertisements were not listed in almost all cases of campaign donation or expenditure, meaning that our campaign donation laws, which forbids extraterrestrial, sorry, extrajudicial interference into the campaign donation, basically there's a shortcut, there's a bypass through Facebook and other social media venues. And that resulted in a lot of hyper-precise election-affecting messages, sponsored messages on Facebook and other social media that are truly more anti-social than pro-social during our 2018 election. So we went to Facebook, the civics integrated team and said, look, here is our social norm. Our public sector has already agreed with the social sector on the real-time open data. And if you conform to the social norm, then of course you will be seen as a responsible citizen. And if you don't, even though we don't have direct jurisdiction over what you do, well, you may face social sanction because it's a very strong social norm already built. And so Facebook did publish in the 2019, leading up to the 2020 presidential and legislative election in real-time, the campaign donation expenditure as open data. So the dark pattern could be detected and also clarified. So there's not so much information manipulation and that particular front and there's no non-domestic sponsors of election-related messages during our 2020 presidential and legislative election. So I guess that's a pretty good case of the public relationship from the social sector into the public sector and then extending to the private sector. Fascinating. You were just speaking about the contrast between the 2018 election and the 2020 election. I was wondering if I could ask a little bit more about that because in 2018, I think that it was widely reported and widely understood that there was external meddling in Taiwan's electoral process, but we heard less about the disinformation and interference or influence operations in 2020. And is that observation accurate? And if so, what explains it? Is it what you described as these efforts and these outreaches that were made or was there something else at work? Yeah, the immune system is definitely stronger in 2019 as compared to 2017-18 election. I'll just cite one example. There was in November 2019, there was this picture from Reuters actually that showed these young protesters in Hong Kong. Now the original caption just said, and I quote, a teenage extradition bill protester was seen during the March to demand democracy and political reform in Hong Kong. And it's a very neutral caption. On the other hand, the trending social media disinformation in Taiwan says something quite different. This says this 13 year old suck bought new iPhones, game consoles and brand name sports shoes and recruiting his brothers. And if they murder a police, they can earn up to 20 million. Okay, so it's the same photo with a very different caption, a very different message. Now, because we already have an immune system in the form of a real-time reporting, just like spam reporting in the leading end to end encrypted channel, that's to say the line messenger. So people who have seen this message, even before it went truly viral, they could just report saying that, hey, this is a very suspicious looking caption going on. And the fact checkers who are not government's employees or contracted from the government, they are professional journalists in the social sector, relying on crowdfunding and so on, traced this alternate caption back to the Chang'an Jian or the Central Political and Law Unit of the PRC regime, their Weibo account actually. And so we are of course quite tempted to take it down, but we didn't because we remember the martial law. So we didn't take it down. Rather, we put out a notice and public notice, which means that once this is confirmed by the time of fact checking center, whenever people want to share it on, say, Facebook, there will be a public notice and that says this message is proudly sponsored by the PRC regime and its Weibo account. Well, it doesn't say proudly sponsored, we get the idea. So people understand the frame around which that this alternate caption is done. And because of course, at the time, people understood the Hong Kong issues probably going to be the dominant determining issue for our presidential election. So I wouldn't say there wasn't extra jurisdictional meddling, there certainly was. It was just detected early on by the sort of immune system of the civic participation and then clarifying in real time. And it was the partnership with the private sector entities, the notice and public notice regime reduced the basic transmission rate of those meddling. Fascinating. As we all know, disinformation doesn't always originate abroad. It also is created at home. And when it happens, domestic disinformation often widens divisions within society. We see this happening not just in Taiwan but in the United States and elsewhere. What can be done, in addition to what you've already described about strengthening the immune system to help in democratic societies with free speech protections to reduce the scope and effect of homegrown disinformation? Well, in our K to 12 education, as long as people are connecting to the broadband, which if they don't, it's my fault personally, broadband is a human right. So for the schools connecting to the internet, we don't quite teach media literacy anymore. That's a last century concept. We teach media competence and digital competence. Now, the difference between literacy and competence is that the form of concept assumes that the students are just the viewers, the people who receive information from mass media. But media competence assumes that because the broadband is bilateral, is people could actually upload much more than they previously could. And many primary schoolers are maybe having more followers on Instagram than I do. So they are all media people. They are all producers of media. Now, whether they are journalists or not, entirely depends on whether they have gone through a journalistic newsroom work. So in the schools, we encourage those very young people to, for example, fact check the three presidential candidates during the debate and deliberation and policy forums. For example, we encourage them to build the air boxes, which are inexpensive devices that measures PM 2.5 and other environmental indicators and publish it automatically on a distributed ledger so that everyone can contribute to climate science, but also pollution reporting and things like that. And so democracy for us is a technology. This is not just about uploading three bits of information per person every four years, which is called voting, by the way, but rather a continuous input from the population. And once we switch to a competence-based thinking, people would not get captured that easily by the disinformation anymore because they have participated in a newsroom-like process in contributing to the general sense-making of the society. And so they get this much more nuanced, much more holistic view on pretty much all the social issues. And that's part of the basic education, integration with the open government, partnership principles is part of our commitment in our national action plan. Well, Minister Tong, we could impose upon you with questions all day if we had the time, but we need to let you go back to doing the good work with the Taiwan people. I just want to thank you so much for taking the time to share best practices, wisdom, insight, and we look forward to continuing the conversation with you here at Brookings in the future. Thank you. Thank you for the great questions. Live long and prosper.