ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのHow digital innovation can fight pandemics and strengthen democracy | Audrey Tang

00:04
Audrey Tang: Very happy to be joining you, and good local time, everyone.
00:09
David Biello: So, tell us about -- Sorry to -- Tell us about digital tools and COVID.
00:17
AT: Sure. Yeah, I'm really happy to share with you how Taiwan successfully countered the COVID using the power of digital democracy tools. As we know, democracy improves as more people participate. And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation, as long as the focus is on finding common ground, that is to say, prosocial media instead of antisocial media. And there's three key ideas that I would like to share today about digital democracy that is fast, fair and fun.
00:51
First about the fast part. Whereas many jurisdictions began countering coronavirus only this year, Taiwan started last year. Last December, when Dr. Li Wenliang, the PRC whistleblower, posted that there are new SARS cases, he got inquiries and eventually punishments from PRC police institutions. But at the same time, the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit, the Ptt board, has someone called nomorepipe reposting Dr. Li Wenliang's whistleblowing. And our medical officers immediately noticed this post and issued an order that says all passengers flying in from Wuhan to Taiwan need to start health inspections the very next day, which is the first day of January.
01:31
And this says to me two things. First, the civil society trusts the government enough to talk about possible new SARS outbreaks in the public forum. And the government trusts citizens enough to take it seriously and treat it as if SARS has happened again, something we've always been preparing for, since 2003. And because of this open civil society, according to the CIVICUS Monitor after the Sunflower Occupy, Taiwan is now the most open society in the whole of Asia. We enjoy the same freedom of speech, of assembly, [unclear] as other liberal democracies, but with the emphasis on keeping an open mind to novel ideas from the society. And that is why our schools and businesses still remain open today, there was no lockdown, it's been a month with no local confirmed cases.
02:15
So the fast part. Every day, our Central Epidemic Command Center, or CECC, holds a press conference, which is always livestreamed, and we work with the journalists, they answer all the questions from the journalists, and whenever there's a new idea coming in from the social sector, anyone can pick up their phone and call 1922 and tell that idea to the CECC.
02:33
For example, there was one day in April where a young boy has said he doesn't want to go to school because his school mates may laugh at him because all he had is a pink medical mask. The very next day, everybody in the CECC press conference started wearing pink medical masks, making sure that everybody learns about gender mainstreaming. And so this kind of rapid response system builds trust between the government and the civil society.
02:57
And the second focus is fairness. Making sure everybody can use their national health insurance card to collect masks from nearby pharmacies, not only do we publish the stock level of masks of all pharmacies, 6,000 of them, we publish it every 30 seconds. That's why our civic hackers, our civil engineers in the digital space, built more than 100 tools that enable people to view a map, or people with blindness who talk to chat bots, voice assistants, all of them can get the same inclusive access to information about which pharmacies near them still have masks. And because the national health insurance single payer is more than 99.9 percent of health coverage, people who show any symptoms will then be able to take the medical mask, go to a local clinic, knowing fully that they will get treated fairly without incurring any financial burden. And so people designed a dashboard that lets everybody see our supply is indeed growing, and whether there's over- or undersupply, so that we codesign this distribution system with the pharmacies, with the whole of society.
03:56
So based on this analysis, we show that there was a peak at 70 percent, and that remaining 20 percent of people were often young, work very long hours, when they go off work, the pharmacies also went off work, and so we work with convenience stores so that everybody can collect their mask anytime, 24 hours a day. So we ensure fairness of all kinds, based on the digital democracy's feedback.
04:20
And finally, I would like to acknowledge that this is a very stressful time. People feel anxious, outraged, there's a lot of panic buying, a lot of conspiracy theories in all economies. And in Taiwan, our counter-disinformation strategy is very simple. It's called "humor over rumor." So when there was a panic buying of tissue paper, for example, there was a rumor that says, "Oh, we're ramping up mass production, it's the same material as tissue papers, and so we'll run out of tissue paper soon." And our premier showed a very memetic picture that I simply have to share with you. In very large print, he shows his bottom, wiggling it a little bit, and then the large print says "Each of us only have one pair of buttocks." And of course, the serious table shows that tissue paper came from South American materials, and medical masks come from domestic materials, and there's no way that ramping up production of one will hurt the production of the other. And so that went absolutely viral. And because of that, the panic buying died down in a day or two. And finally, we found out the person who spread the rumor in the first place was the tissue paper reseller.
05:29
And this is not just a single shock point in social media. Every single day, the daily press conference gets translated by the spokesdog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare, that translated a lot of things. For example, our physical distancing is phrased as saying "If you are outdoors, you need to keep two dog-lengths away, if you are indoor, three dog-lengths away," and so on. And hand sanitation rules, and so on. So because all this goes viral, we make sure that the factual humor spreads faster than rumor. And they serve as a vaccine, as inoculation, so that when people see the conspiracy theories, the R0 value of that will be below one, meaning that those ideas will not spread.
06:07
And so I only have this five-minute briefing, the rest of it will be driven by your Q and A, but please feel free to read more about Taiwan's counter-coronavirus strategy, at taiwancanhelp.us. Thank you.
06:22
DB: That's incredible. And I love this "humor versus rumor." The problem here in the US, perhaps, is that the rumors seem to travel faster than any response, whether humorous or not. How do you defeat that aspect in Taiwan?
06:43
AT: Yeah, we found that, of course, humor implicitly means there is a sublimation of upsetness, of outrage. And so as you see, for example, in our premier's example, he makes fun of himself. He doesn't make a joke at the expense of other people. And this was the key. Because people think it hilarious, they share it, but with no malicious or toxic intentions. People remember the actual payload, that table about materials used to produce masks, much more easily. If they make a joke that excludes parts of the society, of course, that part of society will feel outraged and we will end up creating more divisiveness, rather than prosocial behavior. So the humor at no expense, not excluding any part of society, I think that was the key.
07:37
DB: It's also incredible because Taiwan has such close ties to the origin point of this.
07:44　AT: PRC, yes.
07:45
DB: The mainland. So given those close economic ties, how do you survive that kind of disruption?
07:56
AT: Yeah, I mean, at this moment, it's been almost a month now with no local confirmed cases, so we're doing fine. And what we are doing, essentially, is just to respond faster than pretty much anyone. We started responding last year, whereas pretty much everybody else started responding this year. We tried to warn the world last year, but, anyway. So in any case, the point here is that if you start early enough, you get to make sure that the border control is the main point where you quarantine all the returning residents and so on, instead of waiting until the community spread stage, where even more human-right invading techniques would probably have to be deployed one way or the other.
08:41
And so in Taiwan, we've not declared an emergency situation. We're firmly under the constitutional law. Because of that, every measure the administration is taking is also applicable in non-coronavirus times. And this forces us to innovate. Much as the idea of "we are an open liberal democracy" prevented us from doing takedowns. And therefore, we have to innovate of humor versus rumor, because the easy path, the takedown of online speech, is not accessible to us.
09:09
Our design criteria, which is no lockdowns, also prevented us from doing any, you know, very invasive privacy encroaching response system. So we have to innovate at the border, and make sure that we have a sufficient number of, for example, quarantine hotels or the so-called "digital fences," where your phone is basically connected to the nearby telecoms, and they make sure that if they go out of the 15-meter or so radius, an SMS is sent to the local household managers or police and so on. But because we focus all these measures at the border, the vast majority of people live a normal life.
09:48
DB: Let's talk about that a little bit. So walk me through the digital tools and how they were applied to COVID.
09:56
AT: Yes. So there's three parts that I just outlined. The first one is the collective intelligence system. Through online spaces that we design to be devoid of Reply buttons, because we see that, when there's Reply buttons, people focus on each other's face part, not the book part, and without "Reply" buttons, you can get collective intelligence working out their rough consensus of where the direction is going with the response strategies. So we use a lot of new technologies, such as Polis, which is essentially a forum that lets you upvote and downvote each other's feelings, but with real-time clustering, so that if you go to cohack.tw, you see six such conversations, talking about how to protect the most vulnerable people, how to make a smooth transition, how to make a fair distribution of supplies and so on.
10:51
And people are free to voice their ideas, and upvote and downvote each other's ideas. But the trick is that we show people the main divisive points, and the main consensual points, and we respond only to the ideas that can convince all the different opinion groups. So people are encouraged to post more eclectic, more nuanced ideas and they discover, at the end of this consultation, that everybody, actually, agrees with most things, with most of their neighbors on most of the issues. And that is what we call the social mandate, or the democratic mandate, that then informs our development of the counter-coronavirus strategy and helping the world with such tools.
11:29
And so this is the first part, it's called listening at scale for rough consensus. The second part I already covered is the distribute ledger, where everybody can go to a nearby pharmacy, present their NHI card, buy nine masks, or 10 if you're a child, and see the stock level of that pharmacy on their phone actually decreasing by nine or 10 in a couple of minutes. And if they grow by nine or 10, of course, you call the 1922, and report something fishy is going on. But this is participatory accountability. This is published every 30 seconds. So everybody holds each other accountable, and that massively increases trust.
12:04
And finally, the third one, the humor versus rumor, I think the important thing to see here is that wherever there's a trending disinformation or conspiracy theory, you respond to it with a humorous package within two hours. We have discovered, if we respond within two hours, then more people see the vaccination than the conspiracy theory. But if you respond four hours or a day afterwards, then that's a lost cause. You can't really counter that using humor anymore, you have to invite the person who spread those messages into cocreation workshops. But we're OK with that, too.
12:41
DB: Your speed is incredible. I see Whitney has joined us with some questions.
12:46
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: That's right, we have a few coming in already from the audience. Hi there, Audrey. And we'll start with one from our community member Michael Backes. He asks how long has humor versus rumor been a strategy that you've implemented. Excuse me. "How long has humor versus rumor strategy been implemented? Were comedians consulted to make the humor?"
13:09
AT: Yes, definitely. Comedians are our most cherished colleagues. And each and every ministry has a team of what we call participation officers in charge of engaging with trending topics. And it's a more than 100 people-strong team now. We meet every month and also every couple of weeks on specific topics. It's been like that since late 2016, but it's not until our previous spokesperson, Kolas Yotaka, joined about a year and a half ago, do the professional comedians get to the team. Previously, this was more about inviting the people who post, you know, quotes like "Our tax filing system is explosively hostile," and gets trending, and previously, the POs just invited those people. Everybody who complains about the finance minister's tax-filing experience gets invited to the cocreation of that tax filing experience. So previously, it was that. But Kolas Yotaka and the premier Su Tseng-chang said, wouldn't it be much better and reach more people if we add some dogs to it or cat's pictures to it? And that's been around for a year and a half.
14:20
WPR: Definitely, I think it makes a lot of difference, just even seeing them without being part of the thought process behind that. And we have another question here from G. Ryan Ansin. He asks, "What would you rank the level of trust your community had before the pandemic, in order for the government to have a chance at properly controlling this crisis?"
14:42
AT: I would say that a community trusts each other. And that is the main point of digital democracy. This is not about people trusting the government more. This is about the government trusting the citizens more, making the state transparent to the citizen, not the citizen transparent to the state, which would be some other regime. So making the state transparent to the citizens doesn't always elicit more trust, because you may see something wrong, something missing, something exclusively hostile to its user experience, an so on, of the state. So it doesn't necessarily lead to more trust from the government. Sorry, from the citizen to the government. But it always leads to more trust between the social sector stakeholders.
15:21
So I would say the level of trust between the people who are working on, for example, medical officers, and people who are working with the pandemic responses, people who manufacture medical masks, and so on, all these people, the trust level between them is very high. And not necessarily they trust the government. But we don't need that for a successful response. If you ask a random person on the street, they will say Taiwan is performing so well because of the people. When the CECC tells us to wear the mask, we wear the mask. When the CECC tells us not to wear a mask, like, if you are keeping physical distance, we wear a mask anyway. And so because of that, I think it's the social sector's trust between those different stakeholders that's the key to the response. 　16:09