ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのPart ２ TED interview Audrey Tan

16:09
WPR: I will come back shortly with more questions, but I'll leave you guys to continue your conversation.
16:14　AT: Awesome.
16:16
DB: Well, clearly, part of that trust in government was maybe not there in 2014 during the Sunflower Movement. So talk to me about that and how that led to this, kind of, digital transformation.
16:35
AT: Indeed. Before March 2014, if you asked a random person on the street in Taiwan, like, whether it's possible for a minister -- that's me -- to have their office in a park, literally a park, anyone can walk in and talk to me for 40 minutes at a time, I'm currently in that park, the Social Innovation Lab, they would say that this is crazy, right? No public officials work like that. But that was because on March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied the legislature to express their profound opposition to a trade pact with Beijing under consideration, and the secretive manner in which it was pushed through the parliament by Kuomintang, the ruling party at the time. And so the protesters demanded, very simply, that the pact be scraped, and the government to institute a more transparent ratification process. And that drew widespread public support.
17:30
It ended a little more than three weeks later, after the government promised and agreed on the four demands [unclear] of legislative oversight. A poll released after the occupation showed that more than 75 percent remained dissatisfied with the ruling government, illustrating the crisis of trust that was caused by a trade deal dispute. And to heal this rift and communicate better with everyday citizens, the administration reached out to the people who supported the occupiers, for example, the g0v community, which has been seeking to improve government transparency through the creation of open-source tools. And so, Jaclyn Tsai, a government minister at the time, attended our hackathon and proposed the establishment of novel platforms with the online community to exchange policy ideas.
18:18
And an experiment was born called vTaiwan, that pioneerly used tools such as Polis, that allows for "agree" or "disagree" with no Reply button, that gets people's rough consensus on issues such as crowdfunding, equity-based crowdfunding, to be precise, teleworking and many other cyber-related legislation, of which there is no existing unions or associations. And it proved to be very successful. They solved the Uber problem, for example, and by now, you can call an Uber -- I just called an Uber this week -- but in any case, they are operating as taxis. They set up a local taxi company called Q Taxi, and that was because on the platform, people cared about insurance, they care about registration, they care about all the sort of, protection of the passengers, and so on. So we changed the taxi regulations, and now Uber is just another taxi company along with the other co-ops.
19:15
DB: So you're actually, in a way, crowdsourcing laws that, well, then become laws.
19:22
AT: Yeah, learn more at crowd.law. It's a real website.
19:28
DB: So, some might say that this seems easier, because Taiwan is an island, that maybe helps you control COVID, helps promote social cohesion, maybe it's a smaller country than some. Do you think that this could be scaled beyond Taiwan?
19:49
AT: Well, first of all, 23 million people is still quite some people. It's not a city, as some usually say, you know, "Taiwan is a city-state." Well, 23 million people, not quite a city-state. And what I'm trying to get at, is that the high population density and a variety of cultures -- we have more than 20 national languages -- doesn't necessarily lead to social cohesion, as you said. Rather, I think, this is the humbleness of all the ministers in the counter-coronavirus response. They all took on an attitude of "So we learned about SARS" -- many of them were in charge of the SARS back then, but that was classical epidemiology. This is SARS 2.0, it has different characteristics. And the tools that we use are very different, because of the digital transformation. And so we are in it to learn together with the citizens.
20:46
Our vice president at the time, Dr. Chen Chien-jen, an academician, literally wrote the textbook on epidemiology. However, he still says, "You know, what I'm going to do is record an online MOOC, a crash course on epidemiology, that shares with, I think, more than 20,00 people enrolled the first day, I was among them, to learn about important ideas, like the R0 and the basic transmission and how the various different measures work, and then they asked people to innovate. If you think of a new way that the vice president did not think of, just call 1922, and your idea will become the next day's press conference.
21:27
And this is this colearning strategy, I think, that more than anything enabled the social cohesion, as you speak. But this is more of a robust civil society than the uniformity. There's no uniformity at all in Taiwan, everybody is entitled to their ideas, and all the social innovations, ranging from using a traditional rice cooker to revitalize, to disinfect the mask, to pink medical mask, and so on, there's all variety of very interesting ideas that get amplified by the daily press conference.
21:59
DB: That's beautiful. Now -- oh, Whitney is back, so I will let her ask the next question.
22:07
WPR: Sure, we're having some more questions come in. One from our community member Aria Bendix. Aria asked, "How do you ensure that digital campaigns act quickly without sacrificing accuracy? In the US, there was a fear of inciting panic about COVID-19 in early January."
22:26
AT: This is a great question. So most of the scientific ideas about the COVID are evolving, right? The efficacy of masks, for example, is a very good example, because the different characteristics of previous respiratory diseases respond differently to the facial mask. And so, our digital campaigns focus on the idea of getting the rough consensus through. So basically, it's a reflection of the society, through Polis, through Slido, through the joint platform, the various tools that vTaiwan has prototyped, we know that people are feeling a rough consensus about things and we're responding to the society, saying, "This is what you all feel and this is what we're doing to respond to your feelings.
23:13
And the scientific consensus is still developing, but we know, for example, people feel that wearing a mask mostly protects you, because it reminds you to not touch your face and wash your hands properly." And these, regardless of everything else, are the two things that everybody agrees with. So we just capitalize on that and say, "OK, wash your hands properly, and don't touch your face, and wearing a mask reminds you of that." And that lets us cut through the kind of, very ideologically charged debates and focus on what people generally resonate with one another. And that's how we act quickly without sacrificing scientific accuracy.
23:52
WPR: And this next question sort of feels connected to this as well. It's a question from an anonymous community member. "Pragmatically, do you think any of your policies could be applied in the United States under the current Trump administration?"
24:05
AT: Quite a few, actually. We work with many states in the US and abroad on what we call "epicenter to epicenter diplomacy." (Laughs) So what we're doing essentially is, for example, there was a chat bot in Taiwan that lets you, but especially people under home quarantine, to ask the chat bot anything. And if there is a scientific adviser who already wrote a frequently asked question, the chat bot just responds with that, but otherwise, they will call the science advisory board and write an accessible response to that, and the spokesdog would translate that into a cute dog meme.
24:44
And so this feedback cycle of people very easily accessing, finding, and asking a scientist, and an open API that allows for voice assistance and other third-party developers to get through it, resonates with many US states, and I think many of them are implementing it. And before the World Health Assembly, I think three days before, we held a 14 countries [unclear] lateral meeting, kind of, pre-WHA, where we shared many small, like, quick wins like this. And I think many jurisdictions took some of that, including the humor versus rumor. Many of them said that they're going to recruit comedians now.
25:24
WPR: (Laughs) I love that.
25:26　DB: I hope so.
25:28
WPR: I hope so too. And we have one more question, which is actually a follow-up, from Michael Backes, who asked a question earlier. "Does the Ministry plan to publish their plans in a white paper?" Sounds like you're already sharing your plans with folks, but do you have a plan to put it out on paper?
25:43
AT: Of course. Yeah, and multiple white papers. So if you go to taiwancanhelp.us, that is where most of our strategy is, and that website is actually crowdsourced as well, and it shows that more than five million now, I think, medical masks donated to the humanitarian aid. It's also crowdsourced. People who have some masks in their homes, who did not collect the rationed masks, they can use an app, say, "I want to dedicate this to international humanitarian aid," and half of them choose to publish their names, so you can also see the names of people who participated in this. And there's also an "Ask Taiwan Anything" website,
26:25(Laughs)
26:27
at fightcovid.edu.tw, that outlines, in white paper form, all the response strategies, so check those out.
26:36
WPR: Great. Well, I will disappear and be back later with some other questions.
26:42
DB: A blizzard of white papers, if you will. I'd like to turn the focus on you a little bit. How does a conservative anarchist become a digital minister?
26:56
AT: Yeah, by occupying the parliament, and through that.
27:00(Laughs)
27:01
More interestingly, I would say that I go working with the government, but never for the government. And I work with the people, not for the people. I'm like this Lagrange point between the people's movements on one side and the government on the other side. Sometimes right in the middle, trying to do some coach or translation work. Sometimes in a kind of triangle point, trying to supply both sides with tools for prosocial communication. But always with this idea of getting the shared values out of different positions, out of varied positions. Because all too often, democracy is built as a showdown between opposing values.
27:44
But in the pandemic, in the infodemic, in climate change, in many of those structural issues, the virus or carbon dioxide doesn't sit down and negotiate with you. It's a structural issue that requires common values built out of different positions. And so that is why my working principle is radical transparency. Every conversation, including this one, is on the record, including the internal meetings that I hold. So you can see all the different meeting transcripts in my YouTube channel, in the SayIt platform, where people can see, after I became digital minister, I held 1,300 meetings with more than 5,000 speakers, with more than 260,000 utterances. And every one of them has a URL that becomes a social object that people can have a conversation on.
28:34
And because of that, for example, when Uber's David Plouffe visited me to lobby for Uber, because of radical transparency, he is very much aware of that, and so he made all the arguments based on public good, based on sustainability, and things like that, because he knows that the other sides would see his positions very clearly and transparently. So that encourages people to add on each other's argument, instead of attacking each other's person, you know, credits and things like that. And so I think that, more than anything, is the main principle of conserving the anarchism of the internet, which is about, you know, nobody can force anyone to hook to the internet, or to adhere to a new internet protocol. Everything has to be done using rough consensus and running code.
29:22
DB: I wish you had more counterparts all around the world. Maybe you wish you had more counterparts all around the world.
29:28
AT: That's why these ideas are worth spreading.
29:31
DB: There you go. So one of the challenges that might arise with some of these digital tools is access. How do you approach that part of it for folks maybe who don't have the best broadband connection or the latest mobile phone or whatever it might be that's required?
29:53
AT: Well, anywhere in Taiwan, even on the top of Taiwan, almost 4,000 meters high, the Saviah, or the Jade Mountain, you're guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second over 4G or fiber or cable, with just 16 US dollars a month, an unlimited plan. And actually, on the top of the mountain, it's faster, fewer people use that bandwidth. And if you don't, it's my fault. It's personally my fault. In Taiwan, we have broadband as a human right. And so when we're deploying 5G, we're looking at places where the 4G has the weakest signal, and we begin with those places in our 5G deployment. And only by deploying broadband as a human right can we say that this is for everybody. That digital democracy actually strengthens democracy. Otherwise, we would be excluding parts of the society.
30:43
And this also applies to, for example, you can go to a local digital opportunity center to rent a tablet that's guaranteed to be manufactured in the past three years, and things like that, to enable, also, the different digital access by the digital opportunity centers, universities and schools, and public libraries, very important. And if people who prefer to talk in their town hall, I personally go to that town hall with a 360 recorder, and livestream that to Taipei and to other municipalities, where the central government's public servants can join in a connected room style, but listening to the local people who set the agenda. So people still do face-to-face meetings, we're not doing this to replace face-to-face meetings. We're bringing more stakeholders from central government in the local town halls, and we're amplifying their voices by making sure the transcripts, the mind maps, and things like that are spread through the internet in real time, but we don't ever ask the elderly to, say, "Oh, you have to learn typing, otherwise you don't do democracy." It's not our style. But that requires broadband. Because if you don't have broadband, but only a very limited bandwidth, you are forced to use text-based communication.
31:52
DB: That's right. Well, with access, of course, comes access for folks who maybe will misuse the platform. You talked a little bit about disinformation and using humor to beat rumor. But sometimes, disinformation is more weaponized. How do you combat those kinds of attacks, really?
32:13
AT: Right, so you mean malinformation, then. So essentially, information designed to cause intentional public harm. And that's no laughing matter. So for that, we have an idea called "notice and public notice." So this is a Reuters photo, and I will read the original caption. The original caption says "A teenage extradition bill protester in Hong Kong is seen during a march to demand democracy and political reform in Hong Kong." OK, a very neutral title by the Reuters. But there was a spreading of malinformation back last November, just leading to our presidential election, that shows something else entirely. This is the same photo -- that says "This 13-year-old thug bought new iPhones, game consoles and brand-name sports shoes, and recruiting his brothers to murder police and collect 200,000 dollars." And this, of course, is a weapon designed to sow discord, and to elicit in Taiwan's voters a kind of distaste for Hong Kong.
33:19
And because they know that this is the main issue. And had we resorted to takedowns, that will not work, because that would only evoke more outrage. So we didn't do a takedown. Instead, we worked with the fact checkers and professional journalists to attribute this original message back to the first day that it was posted. And it came from Zhongyang Zhengfawei. That is the main political and legal unit of the central party, in the Central Communist Party, in CCP. And we know that it's their Weibo account that first did this new caption. So we sent out a public notice and with the partners in social media companies, pretty much all of them, they just put this very small reminder next to each time that this is shared with the wrong caption, that says "This actually came from the central propaganda unit of the CCP. Click here to learn more. To learn about the whole story."
34:16
And that, we found, that has worked, because people understand this is then not a news material. This is rather an appropriation of Reuters' news material and a copyright infringement and I think that's part of the [unclear]. In any case, the point is that when people understand that this is an intentional narrative, they won't just randomly share it. They may share it, but with a comment that says "This is what the Zhongyang Zhengfawei is trying to do to our democracy."
34:45
DB: Seems like some of the global social media companies could learn something from notice and public notice.
34:54　AT: Public notice, that's right.