 Hello, and welcome to the session of the Denver Democracy Center. I'm Jonas Prowler-Plesner, Executive Director at the Alliance of Democracies Foundation. I'm also really delighted to be joined by Digital Minister Audrey Tang from Taiwan for this keynote session on protecting democracy from disinformation, the case of Taiwan. Welcome, minister. Hi. Good luck, Otaim, everyone. Great to see you again. I went to Taiwan last year for the presidential election in January and met with you there and witnessed firsthand some of the knowledge of tactics for combating disinformation and also foreign-driven election interference from China. And as part of your approach, minister, with radical transparency, that conversation at that time was recorded and is still sort of publicly fully accessible. And I know all of your official meetings and texts and everything with people, they are all sort of publicly available, again, as part of that sort of openness to combat disinformation. So it's a pleasure to have you here again virtually. And together, we'll focus on Taiwan's effort to engage both citizen, business, and civil society and the government's fight against disinformation. And we'll also talk about whether other democracies can learn from Taiwan. So my first question is really about what Taiwan has done to curb disinformation both in elections and during the pandemic. Yeah. The Taiwan model of countering the pandemic, easy to remember, it's called countering the pandemic with no lockdown and countering the infodemic with no takedown. And we do so via humor. The playbook is called Humor Over Rumor. That is to say, whenever there is any trending myth or disinformation, we make sure that within a couple hours, for example, as you can see here, there's a very cute dog here that explains physical distancing in terms of indoors, three Shiba Inus away from one another, two Shiba Inus away from one other. If it's outdoors, it's very difficult to unsee that clarification. And because it's so cute and harmless, people remix and share it all the time. As soon as the clarifications and the science reaches more people in a way that's humorous, the outrage that disinformation travels dissipates. People stop sharing conspiracy theories and so on, because there's something equally interesting and even more scientifically correct for people to share. But the real challenge is how to detect the trending misinformation, disinformation before it reaches majority of population. This is not unlike detecting a virus. And so we do so by what we call a people-public-private partnership, having the social sector forming those early advanced warning systems, including virus like companies like Trend Micro, including, for example, the co-facts project from the Gov Zero collective. And many people who just report any misinformation, disinformation, but not to the government, but rather to the social sector fact-checkers and journalists. That's really interesting, because you, of course, come from a background, having been a software engineer, hacker of sorts, even would put on your bio and from the sort of civic tech community of Taiwan. Do you think that's unique to Taiwan that you have this very engaged citizenry and very engaged software community around this or something the rest of us can also replicate? I think it's quite pervasive in pretty much all jurisdictions. There are, for example, chapters of the Code for All Network around the globe. So there's no shortage of civic technologists. But I think in Taiwan our unique configuration is such that we're a very young democracy. Our first presidential election was in 1996, which is already after the World Web gets popular. So in our month, democracy is a set of technologies. That is to say, instead of having hundreds of years of traditions to us, democracy is not just uploading three bits per person every four years, which is all voting, by the way. But from the very beginning of our democratization, we think of day-to-day democracy through deliberative meetings, participatory budgeting, sandboxes, presidential hackers on e-petition, you name it. All these increase the bandwidth between the social sector and the public sector when it comes to collective decision-making. And so that in turn informed our social sector to form like the Taiwan Fact-Check Center and many other response systems that just as we countered the spun decades ago by setting up voluntary report as spun buttons in all the email reading agents and having a global spun house network to send out the signals that can flag something as spun before it hits our inbox that goes to junk mail folder. Similarly, an immune system like this operated by the voluntary sector is configured in Taiwan much more easily because people think of democracy as something that we can contribute not just for the professional career public servants. Any words? People actually do this? Yes, the K-12 curriculum, which I'm one of the designers specifically emphasized instead of media literacy like we did in last century. We now say media competence. Literacy is when you are readers and viewers of media. Competence is when you are producers of media. And because Taiwan has brought in as a human right, so any primary school student, middle school student have access to broadband at just 16 US dollars per month for unlimited data. Otherwise, it's my fault. So they can actually Fact-Check very easily. And they did that. For example, in last year's presidential election, there's plenty of student that Fact-Check all the three presidential candidates, public debate and platform on the kind of cross-check platform so that they can contribute to the newsroom in conjunction with the social media and the professional mainstream media. They just look at everything that the presidential candidate has uttered. And once they have this experience, it's actually very difficult for them to go back to conspiracy theories because they have engaged in finding out the facts together. That's very interesting. Of course, in Europe and in the US at the moment, we're discussing a lot on this information of what the social media platforms have a responsibility that they should take down more than something and should label and so on. But your approach, do you think that you don't even need that? Or would there still be a need for better regulation of social media companies on this information? So instead of regulations here, we have the norms set up by the social sector. For example, the Gamzero movement a few years ago started a campaign to get the National Auditing Office to publish the campaign donation expenditure as open data, raw data for all the investigative journalists to look at. Now once they get what they wanted in 2018, and the National Auditing Office did publish these, then we discovered that none of the social media expenditure is filed as campaign finance. And that's obviously a loophole because in Taiwanese law only domestic people can contribute to campaign donation, but foreign interference kind of find a shortcut through the social media advertisements. So we talked to Facebook and other social media companies saying, look, there's already a very strong social sector norm and they convinced the public sector to comply to do the same. And now it's your turn. If you do not publish your advertisement library in real time in the same sort of raw data and open data as our National Auditing Office did, well, we don't have any regulations against you, but you may face social sanction. And in Taiwan, social sanction is really strong. So in 2019, Facebook worked with us so that when became, I think the first jurisdiction that they published in real time, the advertisement library pertains to political or social sponsorship advertisement. But the other thing that you just mentioned, which is the public labeling, we do that too. And we call it notice and public notice. So for example, here is something that was making the rounds around the presidential election that says, and I quote, Hong Kong sucks compensation exposed, killing a police earns those teenagers up to 20 million. That's of course, like intentionally wrong information, but the photo is legit is the Reuters photo. So the time fact check sent him after enough people flagged it for review, actually found the alternate caption of the original Reuters photo said nothing about being paid to kill police, which is that there are young people in the protest. But the alternate caption came from Zhuang Zhenfa Wei, Zhang Anjian, the central political and law unit of the Chinese Communist Party. So instead of taking anything down, we just put a public notice and with the collaboration of Facebook and other social media platforms, people who share this alternate caption, they can still share it. But everyone see that the Taiwan fact check center has already shown that the original alternate caption came from the way board of the Zhuang Zhenfa Wei. That's a fascinating example. Minister Tang, we're actually about to come to a close, but like the panel that follows after us is of course going to continue the discussion of disinformation. So if you have just one piece of advice to them, what would be sort of the most important takeaway on disinformation for their discussion? So I tend to think of the infodemic as just like the pandemic that if people wear a mask and wash their hands, then it's of course reduced our value. And this is similar to the notice and public notice that I just described. But to actually fix it, it really requires a contextual understanding in a more holistic way, the policy question. And so through radical transparency, through citizen deliberation, I do believe by listening at scale, that's the vaccine of the mind that can truly guard us for the long run against infirm dynamics. Thank you, Minister Tang. These have been really illuminating examples and a great way for the audience to hear about Taiwan and your personal experience with combating disinformation. And it's also a perfect introduction to the next panel, which I will also discuss the information and can of course draw on some of the experiences which Taiwan has brought forward. Once again, thank you. Thank you, Liflo and Presby. You too.