Democracy in the age of disinformation, with Audrey Tang
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To me, plurality is democracy as a collaborative technology.

So think of democracy not as some age-old 200-year, 300-year institutions that you cannot touch because it's already set in stone, but rather think of it like, I don't know, semiconductor chip design, that you have a new generation every six months or something. And it means that designing our institution rapidly with digital tools such that all voice can contribute in their unique way

And instead of saying that unity and diversity is a dial, a spectrum of trade-offs, we actually encourage diversity without crushing it, because that would be authoritarianism. Welcome to Stop the World, the ESPY podcast. I'm David Rowe. And I'm Georgia Opie, filling in for Olivia Nelson.

Our guest today is Audrey Tang. Audrey was Taiwan's inaugural digital affairs minister. She was the youngest minister ever in Taiwan's cabinet and the first non-binary cabinet minister, I believe, anywhere in the world. Her journey was all the more remarkable because she isn't a politician in any ordinary sense, but rather came to prominence first as an open source programmer and hacker.

before becoming involved in the successful Sunflower Movement demonstrations in Taiwan from 2014 and then joining the government in 2016 at the age of just 35.

She's a kind of guru of technology and democracy, and she holds the world's attention on issues like countering disinformation and using technology to enhance democracy, including by reducing political polarization. And I've got to say, Georgia, I think she's got kind of Jedi vibes, don't you? I mean, I'm sure she does, Dave, but I've not seen Star Wars, I must admit. Oh my God, you are doing well. Trust me, she's got total Obi-Wan Kenobi vibes. He's the odd...

Jedi guy in the first movies and then he's a younger more handsome guy in the newer ones. I think she's the newer category.

Well, I mean, he sounds pretty cool, but I would say she sounds more like a Taoist in the way that she speaks, which really tracks with this podcast because she actually talks about the influence of her beliefs in Taoism. Good real-world groundedness instead of sci-fi nerddom, which I have. Yeah, and you know, Georgia, her IQ is reportedly off the charts. She actually topped out at the maximum possible IQ score.

I'm really not surprised by that. Dave, you and Audrey spoke about Taiwan's approach to combating disinformation without top-down moderation that judges whether something's true or not. You also spoke about countering authoritarianism without becoming an authoritarian yourself. The importance of facts and truth. The importance of free speech.

new models of social media that reduce polarization, why she went on Laura Loomer's podcast, and also the way authoritarian China has prompted Taiwan's democratic approach to technology and online information. Hello everyone, I'm here with Audrey Tang. Audrey, thanks for coming on the program. Anytime, very happy to be here and good local time everyone.

So I'd like to just talk a bit about your general approach first to combating mis- and disinformation. I mean, there are lots of things that I want to cover, but this seems to be a good place to start. You have tended to focus on

whether material posted on social media and online is contested, whether it's controversial and polarizing, rather than whether it's factually true as a way to address and counter mis- and disinformation. Can you just explain what the philosophy is behind that approach? Finally, so this stems from Taiwan's commitment to free speech.

After living under decades of martial law, our society has zero appetite for a return to censorship.

So rather than having authorities arbitrate truth, we ensure that any claim can be publicly challenged, corrected in a way that makes the uncommon ground or the common ground that is rarely discovered in a polarized antisocial corner of social media to be common knowledge. And so we measure success not by purging posts,

but by making sure that people are inoculated by having engaged in deliberation. And so this harmful impact of those contested information is no longer that harmful if people see it as social objects around which to have meaningful deliberation. And so, for example, we look at how much a viral rumor polarized people, like engagement through enragement,

During early COVID, we had polarized conversations about mask use. For example, some people thought that N95, the highest grade, is the only useful mask because of our SARS experience. And some people thought, well, it's ventilation, it's aerosol, any kind of mask hurts you and N95 hurts the most.

And so that is a bit of contested information, but actually science doesn't even know the answer at the beginning of 2020. And so through this contest, we managed to find the uncommon ground, which is why very quickly we pushed out this very cute meme, a Shiba Inu, a dog, putting her paw to her mouth and the spokes dog said, well, wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty and washed hands from

from your face. And so instead of mask versus virus, it is now mask as a reminder of hand washing. And we measured tap water usage. It really did grow after this. And people who left at this PSA, public service announcement, basically become inoculated against the worst of the polarized debate about mask use. Because if you don't wear and you see somebody who does wear, well, it's just reminding you to wash your hands.

That's a fascinating example and I'd like to actually come back to that in a moment. But

First of all, I mean, I think I just want to talk a little bit about the social media structure in the environment. I mean, you mentioned engagement through enragement. The existing social media platforms that are very successful in the world today have a particular business model in common. Well, most of them, the ones that have done very well tend to, and it encourages engagement.

at the enragement because it seems to be stickier, it seems to be more engaging. People seem to like it at some sort of primitive psychological level. They find it more entertaining or more emotionally satisfying to pursue that. And that is a business model that drives engagement and therefore raises the value of advertising on those platforms.

You've called that, I think, anti-social media and others have referred to it that way as well. You published a paper with some colleagues last year about what you call pro-social media. Can you just talk us through the thesis of that paper? I think it's a really important example of how we might be able to break social

the trap that we're in at the moment with the business models that depend on that advertising revenue. How do you create a pro-social platform as opposed to the one that uses top-down content moderation imperfectly and relies on that engagement through enragement?

Yes, the basic thesis is that social media does not have to be an outrage machine. We can re-engineer it to strengthen the connective tissue of society, what I call the civic muscle.

So instead of algorithms that amplify anger and sensationalism for ad clicks, we propose platform designs that actively reward constructive civic engagement and cross-community dialogue. So this is not about top-down moderation. It is about changing the incentive structure so that being a good citizen online actually pays off.

On the top level, this draws from our experience with platforms such as Polis in Taiwan for the past decade. Every post on Polis is labeled with context that let people know which community it comes from, how that community views it positively or negatively, as well as how other groups feel about it. So imagine seeing a post and knowing whether it's broadly accepted across society.

or only popular in a small echo chamber. Dislabelling or social provenance expose people to the fact that

that claim widely believe in one circle might be actually highly controversial in another. So by reclaiming context, users won't be fooled by the false sense of consensus just because the viral algorithm see the same shared misinformation over and over again. And so we basically made invisible social info visible. And that is the first part, is the transparency part. Okay, so far? Yes.

And the second part is what we call bridging. So we introduce metrics for content that bridges divide. And in our design, the post that finds this uncommon ground between different communities is then labeled as bridging content.

Opposing the bridging content, there's also the balancing content, which is the kind of content that presents a fair representation, a summary of the opposing views in a way that is seen as valuable. So both are valuable. Bridging content highlights agreement across divides. Balancing content ensures diverse voice, even minority ones are heard. And so this way, platforms wouldn't just chase virality, they would elevate posts that

that create consensus or enrich the dialogue. It's like applying old-fashioned journalism principles, the Hutchins Commission ideas, to modern social feeds. And in this way, we can have the communities themselves drive the promotion. Communities can vote with their attention, with their wallet, on what's bridging and what's balancing. And then they can pay a small amount to boost bridging content so that more people see it.

It's like subscribing to a good magazine because your value is quality reporting. Except here you're also boosting those posts that bring people together. In Taiwan's experience, such bridging content, such as the Shiba Inu handwashing I just mentioned, inevitably brings the social fabric and heals the social fabric together so that people can understand their surprising valid data.

People who usually disagree with me still agree on these counts. And people I usually agree with have some very interesting balancing points to make. It's interesting that you mention that old-fashioned journalistic approach. I think of that as a form of top-down moderation, actually. I mean, new media have been wonderfully democratizing, but old-fashioned journalism isn't.

is shaped around the idea or is driven by the idea that there is a sort of a publisher of authoritative information that reaches a certain audience and journalists, the job of journalists is to sift and curate and judge different claims against each other and try to

try to move the discussion closer to a form of factual accuracy. So I suppose that sort of leads in quite nicely to my next question, which is I'm interested in the role of objective truth in the approach that you're taking. I mean, sometimes

One side is actually more accurate in their claims than the other. And if the goal is to reduce polarisation, which I completely agree is a laudable goal, and it's an important antidote to the business model that we just talked about, which is to amplify controversy.

but sometimes one side of a debate is actually closer to factual truth than the other side. I suppose, where does that leave the importance of actual facts and respect for facts and accuracy and truth in the discussion? Well, as the example I mentioned showed, of course objective facts and science are absolutely crucial, especially in crises like the pandemic.

On the other hand, science is a process. It is not something that is set in stone, especially early in the pandemic when literally nobody knows what really is the interaction of the mask versus this new virus. And so it is a journey of discovering those facts together rather than the individual facts themselves that has an inoculating effect on the society against contested

polarization. And so in Taiwan, we changed the basic curriculum back in 2019 so that instead of saying media literacy, which is about exactly as you said, a few gatekeepers, journalists,

and most people just readers, consumer of information, maybe with some critical thinking skills, into what's called media competency, which is the young people themselves working the role of journalists and democratizing the access to journalistic integrity and knowledge and so on, so that they see a piece of contested information. They engage in the fact-finding journey together with their classmates, with their parents, grandparents, and so on. And we found that

that it is not the destination that safeguards our society. It is this journey of going through this together, the social fabric, again, that safeguards the society. So yes, at the end of the day, if something that is really repeatedly experimented with good results, the hypothesis proven, the scientific method, usually that view prevails. But you need a very...

smooth letter of expertise. You need the professional scientists, the citizen scientists, the science popularizers, the individuals who can contribute a little bit, and so on and so forth in a very smooth fashion. If you only have like a few vertical institutions and then everybody else, it doesn't actually work out to be either scientific or journalistic in its dissemination of knowledge.

Yeah, I mean, that's good to hear. And I think in the case of the mask example that you used, am I right in saying that based on the amount of tap water that was recorded as having been used, it did indicate an increase in the number of people who were washing their hands? Yes, and that's because washing hands is scientifically understood as very important in defending against any

coronavirus, not just the COVID, and also it is not controversial. So that is the point. The point is to make sure that the part of knowledge that are non-controversial do not get sacrificed in the debate of the more controversial or unproven parts of science. So it had a positive health outcome, and I think that's an important point. I suppose the

The other way that I am tempted to look at it is that the the controversy itself over face masks could have actually driven a greater investment in the science to test well who is actually right and who is wrong. As you say in 2020 and I remember in Australia there was some back and forth by our government. First they were saying look masks aren't all that important and then suddenly we were being told that masks were important.

And I completely respect the situation that our scientists and health authorities were in at that point. And I think they gave us the best advice that they could. But it clearly, you know, as you say, the science in 2020 was still being worked on. But

Can you see instances where the controversy over the debate can actually drive greater action in trying to reach the facts, like a government putting more investment in a hurry with a sense of urgency into determining the role of masks in a pandemic, for instance? Yeah, definitely.

And that's the idea of what I call nerd immunity, which is a play of words on herd immunity. Educating, empowering the populace so broadly so that everybody can serve as a civic journalist.

And in that environment, the obvious falsehoods just cannot find fertile ground. In such a society with high immunity, nerd immunity, if somebody shouts the equivalent of "the sky is green", people would not need a minister to tell them that it's blue. They'll collectively laugh and correct it together. And so the role of government is not to arbitrate truth, but rather to create that environment.

to supply timely facts, to ensure radical transparency, to nurture, again, media competency. And if we do that, the objective truth will stand out very clearly and earn public trust. And so it's all about incentives. We absolutely assert truth, but we have to back it up with openness and invite the public to

to keep us honest as well, because in the government there is also exactly as you said, to have an incentive to present facts in such a way that facilitates public service. But academics or people working in investigative journalism and so on may present the facts in a different order, again serving their respective disciplines.

And in a society with high media competency, these would seamlessly weave together because people would be able to essentially work on their own deep research. Nowadays, with the help of AI. But in a society with high polarization, that is simply not possible.

Okay. Talk a bit about the concept of plurality as I envisage it. You wrote a book, I think published last year, about plurality. You wrote it with a co-author and I think there were a number of contributors from the general public as well, I believe about 100. But it introduces this concept of plurality.

I mean, we think of pluralism in a democracy where there are a number of different points of view that can all coexist peacefully with each other and contribute to one another. And that's generally regarded to be a healthy thing. I think of plurality as you're describing it in the book as a set of sort of overlapping, almost kind of Venn diagrams of different communities. And it's finding that

what you'd call before, I think, uncommon ground, which is the common ground that people don't realise that they actually have with one another and is actually a basis for civil and constructive discussion. Anyway, rather than my pitiful attempts to describe it myself, perhaps can you talk us through this concept of plurality?

So I'm reminded of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our previous president, who in her inauguration speech 2016 said, "Before, democracy was a showdown between two opposing values. But from this point onwards, democracy is to become a conversation between diverse values."

So I think that defines plurality very well. To me, plurality is democracy as a collaborative technology.

So think of democracy not as some age-old 200-year, 300-year institutions that you cannot touch because it's already set in stone, but rather think of it like, I don't know, semiconductor chip design, that you have a new generation every six months or something. And it means that designing our institution rapidly with digital tools such that all voice can contribute in their unique way

And instead of saying that unity and diversity is a dial, a spectrum of trade-offs, we actually encourage diversity.

without crushing it, because that would be authoritarianism. And instead, we see the conflicts that inevitably arise when you have a diverse society, not as fire to be put out from the ground, but rather see it as energy sources underneath. You can dig underneath and

and then you can turn that contested energy into something that is very co-creative if you have the right engine, that is to say democracy as a technology, to channel it into co-creation. And so that is plurality.

It is basically saying between rigid centralization and chaotic decentralization, there's a middle point that is pluralism. And just like pressure makes diamonds, like in Taiwan, we're diamond shaped. You can take the pressure that comes from a diverse society and channel it into creative energy.

I have a terrible feeling that most of the developed democracies in the world right now, and I can think of a couple of standout examples, are much more of the nature of the former that President Tsai was referring to rather than the, I guess, the more progressed version that you're describing. Do you feel as if Taiwan itself has moved a bit more towards the kind of

next generation democracy that you're referring to there? Yeah, definitely. And so in Taiwan, for example, we have among OECD equivalents, the most civically engaged 15-year-olds, according to the International Civic and Citizenship Center study, ICCS, in 2022, our 15-year-olds are top of the world

when it comes to the civic agency that they feel they're already 18 years old. They are already setting the national agenda on issues pertaining to planet and people and many others and so on. And so with this kind of a population, it's not about treating the citizens as subjects or consumers and so on, but rather as

citizens, as people who set agenda together on the grassroots level, on a municipal level and on a national level. And as a result, we also have the least

polarization emotionally, affective polarization in terms of urban-rural divide, in terms of intergenerational divides, and in terms of religious divides. And so even though that ideologically our political parties are extremely partisan, the civic fabric itself remains the new kind of democracy as Dr. Tsai Ing-wen has mentioned.

Staying on Taiwan for a moment, I'm really interested in how this has come about and how much is to do with, well, I mean, obviously Taiwan's own recent political history is extremely relevant here, but also the nature of the obvious political player

across the Taiwan Strait for you in mainland China, the extent to which that has sort of shaped

the approach that Taiwan is taking and the approach that people like yourself are taking to democracy and the role of technology in democracy. You've touched on this already, but I heard you in another podcast mentioning that the goal that you have is to counter authoritarianism without becoming authoritarian ourselves. And I really like that idea. Can you expand on that a little bit, explain the

the relationship to free speech in that and what bearing has mainland China and its approach had on the way that you would like Taiwan to develop? Yeah, definitely. So according to Freedom House, Freedom on the Internet reports, Taiwan is the most free in all of Asia in terms of online freedom. And so to us, the freedom of expression, of assembly,

offline, transferred very well to the equivalent online rights. We do not say that just because it's the internet, we need to censor, we need to limit people's freedom of movement, and so on and so forth. We bring the same commitment to freedom.

And that is in direct contrast with the direction that the Beijing regime is taking or was taking since around 2012, 2013. They basically spent more on what they call harmony

the internal authoritarian measures to basically see diversity as fire on the ground to be put out, spend more than even of their military budget. And so the Great Firewall and so on, people now understand what it's about now. But like 10 years ago, we really see it as a fork in the road. In 2014,

We literally occupied our parliament non-violently for three weeks because we do not want a trade deal with Beijing in the service trade that would have opened our publishing industry, our telecom industries and so on to Beijing's way of arranging the social harmony and their commitments to make the diversity or serve a single

ideology and our Occupy was quite successful, actually uniquely successful in that after three weeks of nonviolent deliberation, half a million people on the street and many more online, the speaker of the parliament at the time, Wang Jinping said,

actually people had a better idea than ours, so let's just adopt people's ideas. And we pivoted toward this radically transparent and open government way of working. At the end of that year, 2014, all the mayoral candidates that supported this new way of working, this new democracy, got elected, sometimes surprising to themselves, and the people who commit to the old authoritarian way similarly lost.

their mayoral seats. And so the central government at the end of that year tapped us, the civic technologists as reverse mentors to enter the cabinets. So all this is to say, I think

We started looking at the social media becoming antisocial and so on, but committed instead of clamping down free speech, we need to build our own pro-social media ecosystem so that people can continue to enjoy free speech, but in a way that fosters collaboration across diversity. And around the same time, President Xi Jinping was taking an exact opposite route. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, do you want to just continue about that for a moment? Because, I mean, you've covered the Taiwanese political history there and the development and the demonstration that I think you were involved in. To what extent is it an ongoing consideration for people like yourself and for people, particularly for young people in Taiwan, looking across the strait and saying, OK, we can see exactly what the nature of the political system is across the strait and

And that is something we almost want to sort of define ourselves in distinction from. Yeah, definitely. And that is also because...

because of Xi Jinping's investment into this kind of harmony apparatus, people do see that they're also progressing very quickly, accelerating on the opposite direction. So 10 years ago, it used to be that you can still have some measure of civic journalism under the Beijing regime. You could already at the time,

have what's called a blogosphere to have an investigation of what's going on, corruption and so on, on a local level and so on. But it's all gone now. The independent journalism, the civic freedom to assemble and so on and so forth used to be like really actively explored ideas under the Beijing regime around 2010-ish. But there's no trace of it, especially after the pandemic now.

And so, of course, we all see that, we all feel that. And so there's a constant reminder that regardless of what your political ideology here is in Taiwan among young people, there's one thing that we similarly reject, which is the Hong Kong model, because we all have seen the 2019, 2020 national security law protests.

protests and then the clampdown in Hong Kong and the so-called one country, two system model has entirely collapsed. Basically, the Beijing regime would not tolerate a vibrant civil society, either within their regime or in Hong Kong or really anywhere else if they can help it.

Do you feel, I mean, you do a lot of public engagement, which is fantastic. I mean, it's quite noticeable. You know, when I was doing some research for this conversation, you know, I discovered just how many recent podcasts and recent articles and, you know, YouTube interviews and so forth that you've been doing, you know, conferences. You know, you're very, very engaged publicly, which is admirable because, you know, clearly in order to make people

an impact on people, you know, you've just got to go out and talk to them and talk to them and talk to them. And that's really the only way and the best way to do it. Do you find that your particular approach to free speech

especially in that, you know, that idea of countering authoritarianism without becoming authoritarian oneself. Do you find that's resonating across the political spectrum? Because I do, I mean, it occurs to me that really free speech is one of the

You know, one of the flashpoints that that left and right are arguing about right now and what actually sort of constitutes free speech and what constitutes misinformation, I think,

I think if I'm correct, you went on Laura Loomer's podcast, for instance, clearly trying to, you know, and understandably trying to reach a different audience there. But do you find that your views are actually resonating across the spectrum? I mean, what kind of political reception are you getting?

Yeah, if you're referring to the 16,000 people on live stream on X.com and also Rumble, Loomer Unleashed, I believe, that's the show. Yes, we had an hour-long conversation. I'm not an aficionado, I must confess, but sorry. We had an hour-long conversation.

And I think it was very well received. For most people watching the show, the main issue they have with the antisocial corners of social media was that it's very arbitrary.

I think Laura actually mentioned that there's people who run these platforms that are for 100% free speech according to them. And then there's some speech that concerns themselves and sadly they're not 100% free speech anymore. And so it is this arbitrariness that really makes it

skeptical for those people that if any centralized way of running social media can actually be pro free speech. And I think it's a very reasonable intuition, a very reasonable impulse. And in Taiwan, indeed,

We have the most people in Taiwan on the Fediverse. Threads.net, which is Meta's way of bridging into the Fediverse, counts more Taiwanese than people of any other countries. And so we are instinctively pro-Fediverse, pro-Federated social media, and we also understand

Just as when you're switching, you know, telephones from one telecom to the other, you don't have to abandon your number and get a new number. Just as when you're switching to a different bank, you can still withdraw cash from the same ATM, thanks to interbank protocol. We believe in the same sort of digital choice. And so I think that idea that you can switch providers without losing all your social connection and content is really the uncommon ground.

the people on Luma Unleashed loved it, but it is also what Jake Rivers' t-shirt, the blue sky CEO, the world without Caesar, it's also what that symbolizes as well.

Yeah, look, I might need to listen to Luma Unleashed before making any assessment. But I suppose one thing that occurs to me, and I'm at risk of possibly circling back to what we were talking about before about sort of facts versus facts.

non-factual information. But your approach does put a lot of trust in people. And again, I think that's very admirable. But democracy, you know, I suppose there's always been a bit of a tension with democracies between, you know, the idea of having elections every three, four, five years and then, you know, deciding has the current government done a good job? And if not, then, you

we will throw them out and replace them with somebody else, but largely just sort of leaving the government to run things for that period for which they're elected. They then, people then don't necessarily take a close interest in the details of policies being pursued.

But you are putting a lot of trust, it seems to me, in people to be right about complicated issues. And I'm at risk of getting into trouble here because I sound patronising towards people. I don't think that average people are stupid or lack knowledge or anything like that, but rather that

People aren't always necessarily rational, and I certainly include myself in that. I frequently chastise myself for my irrational behavior, but I'm conscious that...

I don't know everything that the government is doing and therefore I just trust the government to sort of run things. Are you putting a lot of trust in ordinary people here with the approach that you're taking? Because they can actually be wrong or irrational or just not have the knowledge. Yeah, I fundamentally believe that the only way to have a trustworthy governance system is to trust the people.

One of my favorite saying comes from Tao Te Ching, I'm a Taoist, by the way, to give no trust is to get no trust. So in other words, if the state treats citizens as unworthy of trust, then citizens will more often than not reciprocate with cynicism. And on the other hand, if you trust citizens with full information and respect citizens' wisdom, then they rise to the occasions like Pygmalion effect.

And I think the point here is that people behave differently in broadcasting networks versus in conversation networks.

When somebody is broadcasting, as we're having now, a relationship that our voice goes out to lots and lots of people without a feedback loop, the risk, of course, exactly as you said, is that we'll be captured by emotion. We will just have one corner and defend that corner forever and so on and so forth. On the other hand, in what I call the

a broad listening situation. For example, the two of us already in a conversation is better than a single broadcaster. And imagine now this conversation not with two people, but with say six or up to 10 people or 12 like a jury. And then the more extreme views, the more extreme or toxic views simply would not resonate with the small groups.

What would resonate is the ability to consider the different sides and come up with creative

and nuanced interpretations, and also that resonates with people's feelings, not just the facts themselves. And so if you structure the collective intelligence system through such small conversation networks as in deliberative democracy, then you do get very nuanced conversations in Taiwan. We had a problem last year, a year ago,

with deepfakes on the social media. You see advertisements from our very respected, very trusted entrepreneurs such as Jensen Huang of NVIDIA telling you to buy some crypto or buy some stocks or things like that. If you click it and Jensen actually talks to you, it's all, of course, deepfake voice and later on video. And so without sacrificing freedom of speech, we sent

200,000 text messages, SMS to random numbers in Taiwan coming from 111, the government number, simply asking, how do you feel what we should do about the information integrity online? And also a lot of people volunteer, thousands of them, so that we chose

randomly again, 450 people statistically representative of the Taiwanese population and in rooms of 10 people, those small conversation networks of 45 rooms, people just deliberated among themselves online, extended all day conversation. At the end of the day, the uncommon ground was discovered and people said, for example,

If Facebook runs an advertisement featuring Jensen, they need to get a digital signature from Jensen and KYC proving that it actually comes from him. Otherwise, it's assumed to be a scam. And if Facebook runs such unsigned scam advertisement, somebody gets scammed out of, say, $7 million, then Facebook should be fully liable for that $7 million lost.

And if there's like TikTok, ByteDance that does not set up local representation so that we can find them and put them into full liability, then we should slow down connection to their servers gradually until all their business goes to Google or something. And so these kind of measures act on the actor layer. It's not on the content layer and therefore it does not sacrifice free speech, but it comes from people's consensus. We can show regardless

of their age, gender, occupation, place they live, more than 85% of people agreed with this set of very nuanced suggestions. And so the consultation was last March. We had a draft with multi-stakeholder consultation with the tech people in April. The draft law was put to the parliament in May. It swiftly passed in June, the digital signature amendment, and in July, the Anti-Fraud Act.

And today there's simply no such advertisements scams on Facebook or YouTube anymore here in Taiwan. We passed, I think the first law among all jurisdictions that has this KYC requirement through all advertisements online. So this is just a small anecdote to show that if you poll individually the people

and you don't get this kind of very nuanced policy recommendations, but in an extended jury-like conversation, what we call an online citizens' assembly, then people do come up with these very creative measures.

That's a really, really persuasive example that you've just given. And it does. I mean, it's reassuring that getting a group of just representative ordinary people who are not, you know, they're not public policy experts, but they just come up with good ideas. And as you say, nuanced ideas to actually, you know, that you can actually base legislation on.

is extraordinary and clearly a strong recommendation for that kind of more direct democracy that you're an advocate of. I suppose, and it's the last question I ask about this, I promise, but

I do see instances around the world where people are effectively saying the sky is green, as you've referred to. I mean, one, I mean, I don't want to get into specific political examples too much because then we'll wade into politics, which we don't want to do. But I mean, to me, you know, the claim that

that the 2020 US election was rigged, for instance, and that Joe Biden did not win fair and square. It seems to be now held by, you know, I know something between 40 and 50% of the US population. That is equivalent to me of saying the sky is green. And yet it is a widely held belief. Do you ever worry that...

that those sorts of just false beliefs are allowed to persist and that they are not sufficiently being challenged and that under a sort of direct democracy form, they could actually feed into policymaking and that that would actually be detrimental to a particular country. Yeah, the example you gave perfectly illustrates the need for civic journalism.

In Taiwan, leading up to our election for president and MPs last January, we asked the citizen journalists, people of all three major parties, to witness the tallying of the votes. Again, we have paper-only votes, but we also

encourage people with high resolution recorded devices as we count each and every vote as they're tallied. We show the votes to all the different angles to ensure that people in the witnessing audience have a high quality and high definition recording of each and every vote as they were tallied. And so we have seen also info attacks

that accuses of election rigging and things like that. But in an environment such as Taiwan's, you do not have to trust the government. You can trust your political parties, YouTubers, influencers, civic journalists.

who did have complete footage. So it's like a distributed ledger. Each and every note that are concerned about election integrity has exactly the same information as anybody else. And so in that environment, very quickly, all three party leaders came out and say, well, there's no widespread election reading after all. And some of them are deep fake videos. Some of them are taken out of context and things like that. But imagine if we do not actively invite

all three parties, YouTubers, to document this entire tallying process, then it creates a vacuum. And in a vacuum in the information ecosystem, of course, all sorts of conspiracy theories are going to thrive. So I see those as a symptom, not as a cause. And the only way is not to debunk it after the fact, but pre-bunk it before this kind of thing actually happens.

I love this idea of pre-bunking. Can you just explain that to the audience? I'm familiar with it from some of your previous discussions, but I think it is, you know, if I actually give presentations myself on disinformation from time to time, and I actually use the idea of pre-bunking as one of the great sort of innovative solutions that people have come up with, but just tell the audience about that. Yeah, certainly. So around three years ago, I deepfaked myself

And an actor who played me said something, and then in the public service announcement video, people started to see gradually how this actor morphed into me using the not very sophisticated defake technology at the time. And it concludes with me saying that this is only to get better.

currently it requires maybe 12 hours running on a laptop, but soon it will be 12 minutes, 12 seconds, 12 milliseconds. At that point, then you would not be able to tell whether something is true or false by content alone, and you will have to verify.

at the source, whether it comes from one on one, whether it has a digital signature and so on. And so I think that is pretty bunking before the deepfake issue become rampant. That was three years ago. We already show people that this attack is coming. This is how it works.

Here is how you spot it as the attack happens. So when the attack did happen, leading up to the last January's election, people saw it for what it is. And it really backfired. Dr. William Lai, our current president, pulled under for

40% in a three-way race leading up to the quiet period before the election. But then the attack happened and then it backfired because people saw what it is. And then he got elected with more than 40% of support.

And it's not just deepfakes, right? I mean, anything, any situation where you can get, you can predict a lie. If you've got a good strategic communications plan where you have people looking at, okay, well, what is an adversary, an information adversary likely to do with this situation? Oh, they're almost certainly going to make up a lie about X, Y, Z. Let's get ahead of that lie and actually debunk it before it's happened, i.e. pre-bunk it.

it's going to be more successful. Basically, if you're chasing down a lie, then you're already at a disadvantage. Whereas if you're countering a lie... Exactly. And sorry for interrupting. I think it's not necessarily a lie. It can also just be a vibe.

So one of the things that we pre-bunk over and over again is this vibe that says democracy never delivers. Democracy only leads to chaos. Only top-down strong authoritarianism can counter emergency X.

So it could be the pandemic, it could be the infodemic, it could be really anything. But the idea is always the same, that democracy only leads to chaos and never deliver. Now, whether that's a lie or not depends on the particular configuration of democracy. But we do know that this is the meta narrative that our authoritarian neighbors love to spread around the world. And so just calling it out and pre-bunking it is also very, very useful

regardless of whether it is a lie in that particular configuration. It's a great example. And all power to you in trying to pre-bunk that, because I do agree, it's one of the really pernicious vibes that authoritarian leaders are putting around about democracy in this time. There's a famous saying that, what is it, that...

While a lie has traveled around the world, the truth is still putting its boots on. It just, you know, it shows how quickly lies spread and how long it takes for the truth to actually catch up with them. I think it's Mark Twain. And I only say that because all of those things always seem to turn out to be Mark Twain.

Look, that's wonderful. There's one final thing I want to ask you. You mentioned your Daoist beliefs, and I'm just really interested in the role that Daoism plays in, I suppose, in your philosophy and your attitude towards information and democracy, and whether you think that those Eastern philosophies have in any way shaped the way that Taiwan's approach to these things have actually developed.

Yeah, definitely. So as I mentioned, Taiwan is a very religiously tolerant and diverse place, I think second only to Singapore. We have very strong Taoist traditions and Buddhist traditions, animist folk religion traditions, Christianity, of course, and many other religions as well.

The core concept to me of Taoism is this yin yang symbol that you may have seen. It is not just the black and white halves, but also the little dots of white within black and black within white. And to me that means even in opposing forces, there's the seed of the other. Nothing is purely one way or the other.

So in a sense it is non-binary, not just in the gender sense, but rather in the everything sense. So I have in my mind not this notion of half of the people are my people and half of the people are the out-group of other people. I always see a little bit of myself in all the different polarities and I always look for the uncommon ground. So whenever faced with a binary conflict,

For example, during the pandemic, privacy versus public health or economy versus the environment, so on and so forth. My Taoist instinct is to find the hidden third path that reconciled them. And there's a Taoist saying that soft overcomes the hard and water, the softest thing can carve stone over time. So this taught me that gentle approaches can actually solve problems much quicker that brute force cannot.

And it's quite visible and quite palpable in the way that you comport yourself in all of your public engagements, which is to be admired and congratulated. Look, I do think that you are one of those rare people who might actually be able to shift the dial in public attitudes on all of these issues because you can actually very patiently appeal to a wide array of political beliefs. So I

I wish you very, very well, Audrey. It's been very great to talk to you and I thank you for your time. But look, thank you for coming on Stop the World. Yeah, thank you for the great questions. Live long and prosper.

Terrific. Thanks so much. That's great. And look, yeah, I think probably in one of those, some of my questions might have been a little bit long winded. And I think probably one of them, I got myself a little bit tangled. So anyway, hopefully my editor can cut out some of my pauses and ums and ahs there. But look, it's just really fascinating to listen to you.

Yeah, and I think that the arc that you painted, and again using the 2020 election so-called "stop the steal" as an example, I think that's great. It speaks directly to the heart of the matter that we're now in many societies seeing a very fragmented epistemic situation. So that situation, I think, is what people need to name it.

need to come to terms with it because pretending that we still have like one epistemic society isn't simply working, simply isn't working anymore. I completely agree and I suppose it worries me to give too much, I suppose to tolerate alternative epistemic

that I simply think are not, are untenable. But look, I think probably I need to get a bit more of your empathy in trying to understand where it comes from rather than just saying, oh my God, that is so ridiculous. How can people possibly believe that? Because I think everyone's saying that about themselves. Sorry, everyone's saying that about other groups of people. Right, there's a caricature going on, yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, and

And clearly we're not making progress that way. So we've got to find some kind of way of, you know, finding the uncommon ground, as you say. Great. All right. Okay, Audrey, look, thanks again. And look, hopefully we can talk again sometime. Yeah, definitely. Take care. Ciao. Super. Okay. Thank you. You too.

Thanks for listening, everyone. We won't be back next week because of the Easter break, but ASPE sends its best wishes for all our listeners for Easter and for Anzac Day in Australia. And we'll have more from Stop the World soon. Bye. Ciao.