 Hello everyone. I'm Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister in charge of social innovation and open government. I would like to welcome all of you to Taiwan, and I would like to share our contributions in the field of finding facts in the world of disinformation. As you know, disinformation is a global crisis. It's a threat to authentic journalism. And more importantly, the more liberal a democracy is, the more threat disinformation is to the democracy in general. In Taiwan, we have a legal definition of disinformation. It's intentional, harmful, untruth. And by harmful, we mean that it harms the society in general, and harms everybody's health in terms of epidemics, and harms the democracy in terms of election. It doesn't mean that harming the image of a minister. That just means good journalism. And we also have some other values to hold on to. According to the Civicus Moneta, in our jurisdiction, we're the only one in the nearby jurisdictions that doesn't sacrifice the freedom of speech, of assembly, of the freedom of the press in response to the disinformation crisis. Everybody else has made some compromises in terms of over-concentrating the power into the administration, sometimes necessarily, by in Taiwan because we still remember the martial law, and we never want to return to there. So because of that, we must devise solutions that does not concentrate power into the administration. So what did we do? We developed this so-called triple-two response system. Whenever a rumor, a trending rumor happens on social media, within one hour, we must roll out a counter-clarification. We're not taking anything down, we're just sharing our meme. A meme is something that spreads very easily. So within one hour, any minister now has the power to roll out a meme, a picture, that has at least two pictures in it, at most 20 characters in its title, and at most 200 characters in its body. Let's take an example. A couple months ago, there was a trending rumor that says, if you perm your hair multiple times within a week, the government will find you $1 million. Now this may sound ridiculous, but it really is trending on the social media. So within one hour, we rolled out this response, as you can see here. In its title, it said, perm your hair will subject to the fine. That's not true. And in its body, it said, from a premier, our prime minister, Su Zhenchang, when he was young, with hair, he said, even if I am bald now, I will not punish people with hair. And a fine print that says, what we actually did is requiring hair products to label its ingredients, and only takes effect by 2021. So those are the clarification parts. But the memetic part is at the bottom. At the bottom is the premier, as he looks now, saying, however, even if there is no fine about it, if you do perm your hair many times within a week, it will damage your hair and you will end up looking like me now. So that was very funny, right? So it went viral. The collaborative checking community loved this clarification message. And because of that, it reached far more people than the original disinformation, even when they have one hour of head start. And we have evidence to show that everybody who have seen this clarification through the community will never share the original disinformation again. In a sense, it act as an inoculation, as a memetic vaccine, so that when we phrase something as very funny, instead of correcting people's mistakes, then people would actually naturally, voluntarily share our disinformation counter clarification message. Now, how do we actually discover that something is trending at the first place? In Taiwan, we have a popular end to end encryption method called line. Line is like WhatsApp. It means that everything between a communication and its recipient is encrypted, so that even the corporation itself doesn't know what's happening between the transmission. So normally, we have no idea of what's being trending on the line framework. However, we also devised a solution from the social sector. Here you can see the co-facts project is from the GovZero movement. GovZero is a movement that look at everything the government has done wrong, or the government has not been doing, and show the government a prototype that can solve the problem entirely from the voluntary social sector. So what the co-facts people have done is essentially just as how we deal with SPAM. They convinced Line and many other companies to add this simple flag as SPAM button. I'm sure that you have received around the turn of this century. It's an email that says, oh, I'm a royalty from a foreign country. I have two billion dollars. If you just spend a thousand dollars as a transaction fee, I will trust you to have those two billion dollars wired into your account and so on. Twenty years ago, all our email accounts are flooded by such SPAM messages. To the point where Bill Gates said, we must charge a postal stamp to each email. Otherwise the email is done. However, the solution to the SPAM problem two decades ago was not a law or a regulation, but rather just a simple flag as SPAM button that enable people to donate their private communication. Well, it's not really private, right? You send it to 10,000 people. It's not private communication to the international social sector network called the SPAM house. And when the SPAM house using machine learning, at the time called Bayesian filtering, to match the signature of the SPAM, then the next time the SPAM will send anything to anyone, it doesn't go to the inbox anymore. It goes to the junk mail folder so that it doesn't consume our attention. Similarly, cofacts in partnership with Trend Micro, our premier antivirus corporation locally, said that if you report something as SPAM on your line network, it donates its signature for analysis so that we can see how trending it is. But in Taiwan, we don't think it's the government's job to tell people the right from the wrong. We're just adding our piece to the puzzle to contribute to the fine process of the facts. And so we have professional journalists establishing part of the international fact-checking network that publishes the fact-check work for each and every trending rumor. So as you can see, during the election season is where this information grows. Facebook has already implemented a feature here where when the Taiwan fact-checking center says that something is not true and they have published their case-by-case fact-finding process, Facebook will move that into the junk mail folder. What is it then? It means that on your timeline where you're swiping and see your friend's posts, if a friend shares something that is already fact-checked as wrong by the social sector, you will not see it. Unless of course you only have one friend, well they have to show it to you. But if you have two friends or more friends, Facebook will much prefer to show the other messages to you, so much so that the original disinformation will no longer reach the same population actually will decrease so massively that it reaches not even one-fifths of its original audience. Because of that during the election then, the disinformation is easy to move to the junk mail folder and even if you find that message, they will show you a related link, the links to the Taiwan fact-check center. And so this is about honesty in the message. But on Facebook there is a way to make it reach more people. It's pay Facebook money. If you pay precision target money, advertisements, Facebook will move that from something that people ignore into something that they push out to the specific audience that you say, oh maybe people living in a city, people fitting a certain demographic and so on. And in the previous election, because we have one of the most transparent campaign donation law where we publish each and every donation record, we find that people doesn't go there anymore if they have funding from the foreign source. Instead they just sponsor Google, Facebook, other social media to publish such disinformation using targeted advertisement. That cannot happen again. Facebook now have already wrote out in addition to Google, to Line, to PTT and everybody who have signed on this counter disinformation self-regulation norm package, everybody agreed that during the election season, all the political advertisements need to be real-name based. You have to declare who you are. Also, very importantly, the entire transaction history is published forever, just like campaign donation. And just like campaign donation, only our national citizens can donate to those political advertisements. If they trace their funding all the way to a foreign source, just like anti-money laundering, then it's subject to a very heavy penalty around 30 million NT dollars. So because of that, we ban foreign interference in the paid advertisement and we require the citizens who donate to the campaign donation that's disclosed by our Corrective Control Yuan. The same criteria applies if they sponsor some advertisement online and they also must disclose the criteria of their advertisement. The greatest thing about AF3 and thriving journalism is that we have independent analysts. You can see here our political contributions from the previous election being independently analyzed on GitHub, which is a shared data and source code platform. Many different media work together to analyze the campaign donation. So on the next election, our presidential election, they would then use those radical transparency data to analyze how does the political advertisement influence our elections. And also because of that, they are now forming a cross-check initiative that checks each and every word that the presidential candidates have spoken during the election season so that it can inform the people with the facts, not the disinformation. Of course, all what I have described are just reactive, passive measurements. Disinformation happens, we counter it with clarification. This information gets trending, we do a fact-checking. The election campaign may be accept some foreign donations, then we just ban it or find them. All of these are reactive. However, we also have three measures that are proactive. In the rest of this conference, you will learn that we have an e-participation platform join the GOV.TW. Taiwan has 23 million people. Join the platform has already 10 million unique visitors. That means that a large swath of our population now learns directly where the budget is being spent, how does it achieve its KPIs. They can comment and influence their KPIs. For major strategies such as opening our mountains for climbers, people can use an AI-moderated conversation to influence the agenda setting. Also, people can raise e-petitions. For example, a couple years ago, a young person, 16 years old, said that we must ban plastic straws in the drinks. Now, her idea becomes our reality. She only gets 5,000 people online, but we reached a consensus with the people who make such straws so that they can use it a renewable material, for example, from sugar canes to replace the plastic pipes. And because of that, she didn't have to go to strike every Friday. She can just go to the join platform and then we collaboratively set an agenda and make the policy happen. When we handle an emerging social issue in such a proactive way, there is no way that this information or rumor can grow. Instead, people become true partners in our policymaking processes. And each and every ministry, as I mentioned, has a team which we call participation offices in charge of engaging people who have such emerging topics before they go to the street. And this is my office, by the way. This is a social innovation lab in the one I wrote near our central park in Da'an. As you can see here, this is a very creative space. This space is co-created by hundreds of social entrepreneurs. The soccer field you see here is drawing art by people with Downs syndrome. Now, we are the academics and administrators. When we see something, we see the text, we see the numbers, we see the evidence, the logic behind those buildings. But people with Downs syndrome, they see it with geometry, with a topological understanding. So when they draw the picture they see, it's like Van Gogh, right? If you step into this place, you become very creative. And so instead of the so-called vulnerable populations, they become very busy VIPs, valuable, important people contributing to our co-creative process. And here, because that's my office, every Wednesday, from morning until evening, anyone can walk in or book my time and talk to me for 40 minutes. All I ask is that we publish the entire transcript or video of our meetings online. It's magical. If it's a closed-door meeting and we don't publish anything, the lobbyists always talk something that is only to their benefit and sometimes sacrifice the general benefit. But when it's radically transparent, everybody talks about public benefit. And so because of that, people participate not early during the policymaking, but they can also see the why of policymaking during the drafting stage. They don't just see the what of policies. They can, in fact, set the agenda from the very beginning by just talking to me for 40 minutes. And again, if you have a friend who you meet every Wednesday, if you hear rumors about that friend, that will not spread. You will just check with them next Wednesday. But if that friend only writes an email to you using very professional language, but only responds within half a year and so on, of course there are rooms for rumors to grow. So radical transparency, again, is our best proactive action against this information. And so, as I mentioned, the built-in flagging, which used to be a social sector innovation, a civic technology, is now incorporated into line itself. They also publish our trending clarifications like the bought and the haired premiere, that's actually very funny by itself, into their line-to-day platform as part of daily news. And so because of that, the private sector now learns from the social sector. Without concentrating power to the public sector, they're now working very well in true partnership through open innovation. And here is our president, Dr. Tsai Ing-wen. When she visited the line corporation, they said she is the model citizen, perhaps because she is not shutting anything down from the line, and in fact, keeping the end-to-end encryption nature from the line platform. Line doesn't even know the text what she's sending to other people. Line only knows the stickers because they sell the stickers, you see. So finally, the final way, proactive way, is just to make it publicly aware that there is this information, that how the media frames things. Because of time, I cannot say of the entire curriculum which is starting this month in our primary school from the first grade all the way to the senior grade, that we have the media literacy creative critical thinking as part of our K-12 curriculum. What I would share though, is that in your country, if you tune into HBO Asia, you probably already can discover a TV series funded by public budget designed exactly to teach media literacy, not just to K-12 people, but for people from all age groups. And this is called The World Between Us Woman Yu-e de Juli. The Japanese version is just online last week. As you can see on IMDB, they got 95% of rating. And anyone who has seen this TV series, which has 10 episodes and I watched them all, actually has in their mind how the media actually works, and how we can be responsible citizens in this age where everybody is a YouTuber, everybody is a media by ourselves, by teaching ourselves journalism 101, we can all be responsible correspondents in this era of social media. And so this is The World Between Us. As I can show that we use a vaccine analogy, we talk about inoculation, about spreading of this information, about inoculation and things like that. I would encourage you also think along this axis. It's not that takedown, general correction doesn't work, they certainly work, but our way is as efficient as this way, sometime more effective and always builds more trust. For trust is part of the sustainable development goals. In my view, this is what digital must do, is to increase trust between the people working on economy, on society, on environment, so that we can truly achieve sustainability together. Thank you very much for your attention.