15 ms·

Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

493 points by panic 7y ago

adagdsgf 7y ago
shit
suiting 7y ago
Wiki page of Audrey Tang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source software.
- git-pull 7y ago
  Audrey Tang was also an author in The Architecture of Open Source Applications (AOSA): https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html Chinese (Traditional): https://github.com/aosabook/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/spreadsheet.zh-tw.markdown https://github.com/aosabook/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet... https://aosabook.org/en/socialcalc.html https://aosabook.org/en/socialcalc.html You can check the series out in its entirety at https://aosabook.org https://aosabook.org
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  One of her projects, EtherCalc, is my preferred spreadsheet software of choice. So it's a bit of a context shift to see political interviews! But her position on combating disinformation without censorship seems pretty on-point, and where I'd really like to see the conversation shift here.
- NicoJuicy 7y ago
  Upvoted, just so people would read the wiki page (y) That's who I want as a digital minister!
- patcon 7y ago
  omg her omni-talks with civil society groups are amazing. So long but SO CHOCK FULL of information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc_5bM0zSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc_5bM0zSM Transcript in case that's quicker: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Fork-the-government-CES--AeVW9NadMOtLRKV9t468O0q~Ag-2WkwonjChbKbl1qMVLGJW https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Fork-the-government-CES--AeVW9... She was talking about this article's tactics at Open Government Partnership Summit last week, but mostly emphasized the feline nature of some of the counter-propaganda :) https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1134532549957394432 https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1134532549957394432 And for a look at how she's rockin transparency in gov, check out her log of ALL convos she has with ANY non-gov stakeholders: https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/en/track/ https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/en/track/
dominicl 7y ago
Great approach, and a smart minister. Living in Taipei I can only congratulate the country for this lively and young democracy. If you consider moving to Asia, Taiwan is the most forward, fair and open society.
- w8vY7ER 7y ago
  My experiences visiting various Taiwanese cities were so positive- can't wait to return.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- komali2 7y ago
  I'll second that. I was there during the sunflower protests. Student activist sat in the parliament building for a couple days. The entire country rallied to their cause. Restaurants sent food, small shops (Taiwanese equivalent of Bodega) donated water, businesses sent pillows and blankets. If you tried that in China,you'd be sent to a xinjiang reeducation camp. At the very least. A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a shining and obvious example otherwise. Not to mention the absurdly low cost of living, one of the best public transit systems in the world, socialized healthcare, strong education system churning out competent professionals, and mountains... My partner and I are preparing a semi permanent move in the next few years. Edit: if anyone is curious, I documented my cost of living there back in 2014. Fair warning, I did so as a much younger, relatively naive dude, but the data's there anyway: http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live-in-asia.html?m=1 http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live...
  - pcwalton 7y ago
    > A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a shining and obvious example otherwise. Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.
procaina 7y ago
Hi. I am Rob. Çocaine was much cheaper and purer some time around 1984 to the middle 1990's. Let's just get that on the record.
procaina 7y ago
The truckers flagged my cocaine comment how do I make them stop.
iamnothere 7y ago
> First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited testing or A/B testing, and that's before it became really popular. It's just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so to speak. I have definitely seen this happen in real time. Suggest it publicly and you'll be accused of being Alex Jones, but it happens. Glad to see a public official acknowledging this. > Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination. Strange that I've just come across a paper related to this notion: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268 An interesting approach, might be an oversimplification of real-world dynamics though. > Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false. This is much better than removing the post, but it still makes me nervous. Just imagine that we're in the early 2000s, and you can envision a banner saying "The claims in this article are FALSE. As confirmed by the intelligence community and the New York Times, Iraq is actively working on its nuclear weapons program." Perhaps they should have a policy limiting the use of this tool when it comes to issues that may lead to war.
- turk73 7y ago
  I can tell you all about how the propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq invasion was pulled off. They had agents on message boards and all over the Internet even back then. They even drafted the comedian, Dennis Miller, to go on late night tv shows multiple times and push the propaganda there. I was astounded that very few people were talking about what a sell job it all was. Just to refresh everyone's memory: Saddam didn't have WMDs. It was a total put up. We need to somehow get these intelligence agencies and their deep state buddies put back in a box.
  - frenchy 7y ago
    IIRC didn't they get bad intel from Iraqies who wanted an invasion (because they didn't like Sadam)? I think they might have known the intel was suspect, but didn't ask too many questions. I grew up among conservative US expats who didn't have message boards and mostly didn't watch television. I think you underestimate the desire of some Americans to relive their glory days and "liberate" other countries. Edit: I think most of them didn't really even care about WMDs, they just knew Sadam was an evil person (and to be fair, he was).
GavinMcG 7y ago
There's an attitude in the United States that any and all legal restrictions are "bad for business" and should be rejected out of hand. I think this article offers a counterpoint: even with the restrictions the article describes, these social media companies still find it worthwhile to be in the market and to invest staff and tools to work within the law. One of government's core jobs is to regulate the boundaries within which the market competes, and this is a great example of that.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Any restriction, well, restricts the space of available business moves. OTOH not every restriction is going to ruin a business, or even affect its bottom line materially. Certain businesses can even ask for a restriction if the restriction limits them much less than it limits their competition.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Is that a sufficient criteria to say that regulation is bad? As a society we decide on minimum standards that businesses must follow; for example, if a domestic American company needs child labor to survive we‘ve already decided it‘s a company and jobs not worth having.
mc32 7y ago
Tang speaks of propaganda and disinformation and how historic propaganda by the government is more or less indistinguishable from disinformation at least by a significant segment of the population. ...But she says that to combat disinformation campaigns the government ministries are in charge of pre-empting disinformation by disseminating their version of information... But that seems like a contradiction. Government was a source of misinformation in the past, but now is the source of truth (as in the past). How is that reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus being propagandists? Now, I get that the PRC has definite identifiable goals so it might be easier to suss out here, but what about other areas?
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  Absolutely, it is simply fighting the adversary's propaganda with your own. Plus ca change...
  - w8vY7ER 7y ago
    I would posit that this differs _significantly_ as it's being done with transparency and the motives for it are being clearly expressed by those pursuing the efforts. This stands in stark contrast to the assumed and obviously nefarious motives of those responsible for the disinformation. What better approach, I wonder?
    - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
      You don't seem to really be contradicting my point. You're just assuming that the 'good guys' don't lie while the others are the 'bad guys' who obviously do lie. There are indeed fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda, which is an age old strategy. They do seem to have adapted it for our era of instant communication and social media. Now, working out the facts in any given situation is not always easy. Everyone tends to spin things, or to omit things, or to simply make things up...
      - komali2 7y ago
eric_khun 7y ago
is anyone interested in an hn meetup in taipei? found it hard to like-minded tech focused people, talking English, that dont mind a beer from time to time, and would like to talk about the last google cloud downtime or it's current side project
- rocky1138 7y ago
  I wish I was in Taipei to come hang out. I love it there. Actually, Hualien is my fave but shhh don't tell Taipei!
- aianus 7y ago
  I will be in Taipei in the second half of June and would be happy to meet up. My email/keybase are in my profile.
- komali2 7y ago
  We're moving there soon so I'll preemptively put my hand up. Feel free to email me, or pop a link to some means of communication and I'll hop in!
- jonnyy 7y ago
  Feel free to email me too. I work here in Taipei
cryoshon 7y ago
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. a very interesting approach that seems to be working for taiwan. i think that European countries may be able to implement something similar with good results. of course, it relies on the government ministries being uniformly oriented against disinformation -- something that we in the US cannot manage, as many elements in our government benefit from certain kinds of disinformation. notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship. i don't have enough context to tell whether this is the case or not, but at the core the entire taiwanese plan relies on the ministries as being able to tell the difference between disinformation and facts. in other words, it's fundamentally a critical-thinking based system.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  >notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship This is kind of how I see it too. I think if your goal is to combat disinformation or propaganda you should just come out straight up and say it because it's a perfectly defensible position to hold, but creating a government counter-narrative isn't any more harmless than just censoring something, it's just sounds nicer than having to use the word "censor" which tends to make people in some parts of the word jump up in panic.
- gunnm 7y ago
  It's an interesting approach and a good start, but I wouldn't say it is 'working' yet. I think it would be better if more emphasis was placed on the independent non-government fact checking organizations.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
I can't wait to go to Taiwan, the country seems to be amazing and this confirms it. I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it gets resolved one day.
- vehementi 7y ago
  Just imagining how disappointing it must have been for Taiwan when democracy failed, again, in China (on my mind due to the Tiannamen Square massacre 30 year anniversary)
  - throaway5533 7y ago
    Just a nitpick, Taiwan wasn’t yet a democracy in 1989. It was close, but they had to wait until 1996 before having their first democratic elections.
CharlesColeman 7y ago
For a very brief time, late in the Cold War, the US State Department had a very shoestring team called the "Active Measures Working Group" who worked to investigate and counteracting disinformation. They had some success, such as uncovering the Soviet origins of the lie that the US created AIDS in a military lab, but the effort was wound down after the Soviet Union fell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d... (very good video series, highly recommend for anyone interested in disinformation) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-russian-disinformation-targeting-the-u-s https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-russia...
- ilaksh 7y ago
  Off the top of my head, I don't have a bunch of links, but it is my impression that propaganda and counter-propaganda are extremely important strategic ongoing activities for all major governments including the US. This is due to the relationship between overt state activities (i.e., they need to be motivated by ethical concerns) and the press.
komali2 7y ago
> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false. That'd be very interesting if the Taiwanese government was in direct communication with Facebook over something like this. CPJ wasn't able to get a hold of Facebook, I wonder if anyone here has visibility into something like that? Given that the US government took a more "combative" approach (dragging executives in front of Congress) I'd be curious how more tame approaches like this were being received.
- gdhbcc 7y ago
  It is censorship though. Part of the job of the censor is to determine whether the likelyhood some information will be seen, justifies the censorship in question. You can read the censor reports from the estado novo for example, and in many of them the censor declined to ban the book because even though it was objectively illegal, it would naturally be a book that wouldn't be sought after by the general public, and so only those who knew about it would look for it. I'd say this is an even more pernicious form of censorship because you dont know what you dont know.
- freeflight 7y ago
  It should be noted that dragging executives in front of Congress might not have been received well, but it did "its job" by nudging these companies into expanding their outsourced moderation practices to topics important to the US government [0], without the US government itself being too directly involved. [0] https://youtu.be/iGCGhD8i-o4 https://youtu.be/iGCGhD8i-o4
wazoox 7y ago
Wow, that's Audrey Tang, of Perl6 (pugs) fame. A serious hacker.
- jdonaldson 7y ago
  Yeah, my impression of Taiwan just went up again.
nabla9 7y ago
EU has also project that tries to combat disinformation EU vs Disinformation campaign https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/
- mleonhard 7y ago
  From their About page, they are focused on disinformation coming from the government of Russia. Do you know if they do anything like Taiwan's 60-min response goal with accountability? https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/
- Kenji 7y ago
  That just looks like plain old "It's the Russians!" At this point the meme has become old and boring.
ilaksh 7y ago
I don't know if it's the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc. I can understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister. I have never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better technical discussion in my life. And the work she did on that project scaling EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and also the creation of webworker-threads years ago, to me those were very inspiring projects. Never interacted with anyone with better technical abilities. That interaction gives me the idea that if I am critical and she happens to enter this thread, it will not fall on deaf ears. I don't really like sounding negative, and especially in this case they are much better than most countries. What is described is better than China, but it's not ideal. However I do think they should be commended from explicitly avoiding censorship to the degree that they do. However, communications from the government to counter other communications identified as disinformation are government propaganda. If they are not identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original disinformation. Secondly, making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship. It's just a brilliant type of crowd-sourced censorship. I know the theory is that that would only be applied to false information. However, censorship doesn't work like that. The end result is going to be a worldview that is reduced and shaped by a dominant group rather than the free flow of information. Especially if it relates to all of the information that people in a country can see. This can be very dangerous. So I will just say what I think would be ideal even if it may not be very realistic. The history of government propaganda and censorship should be part of the public context. I think it is good to be able to flag articles as being propaganda and from what source. However I think that removing things from being visible entirely is very dangerous for freedom. Taiwanese/US/Chinese/etc. government propaganda or counter-propaganda should be identified as such if possible. Perhaps a generic way to say something is propaganda or bias and a generic way to indicate where you think it's coming from (could be a political party or country). However the news that I see from large media, about 90% of it qualifies. I don't think it should be possible for these flags to remove information from the stream. Although certainly there can be standards related to removing things like gore -- but this needs to be monitored to make sure that it does not get used for political censorship.
- 7y ago
censor-the-mark 7y ago
Easy. Just rig the game. People don't notice censorship if the media manipulation appeals to a gambler's tendency.
steve76 7y ago
The things adolescents snide at, start there. Sure you can drink your beer. Who do you think painted the Coor's light can red and silver? Mom? Dad? Or the People's Republic of China with help of General Sulamani of Hezbollah? Sorry kids, I'm not going to burn alive a billion people just because you can't control what you shove down your fat throat or what's in between your legs.
Isamu 7y ago
Audrey Tang's github profile: https://github.com/audreyt https://github.com/audreyt
mleonhard 7y ago
Combatting disinformation will become more and more important for every organization. I'm glad to see at least one government taking it seriously and pushing social/media companies to actually do something and add tools. When will we have degree programs in Disinformation Prevention and Control, Anti-Manipulation, Discourse Integrity? How about job titles like Discourse Protector, Media Accountability Officer, Fact-Checker, and Truth Wielder? I think companies usually hire PR firms to do this work. That's like hiring thieves to protect your valuables. It can work, but is it really the best strategy?
zachguo 7y ago
Isn't this sort of media manipulation? How is it philosophically different from censorship? > We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation. Is it making the whole system more vulnerable to manipulation? Trolls only need to click twice now instead of drafting a comment. In the end, it would be a race of who has the biggest troll farm.
tus87 7y ago
> Disinformation is a threat, especially for open societies. Especially around Taiwan lots of jurisdictions, not just PRC, use disinformation as an excuse for the state to do censorship. We don't want to go there, because we still remember the martial law. Wait what? So we need to fight (i.e. censor) disinformation because if we don't oppressive governments will use disinformation as an excuse for censorship? Left-wing thought really is a mental disease.
- komali2 7y ago
  >Left-wing thought really is a mental disease. I'm intensely curious why you thought to include this line here. Are you willing to share your thoughts on why it was necessary? Judging from your comment history, you seem intelligent enough to know that not only would such a line not be very well received here (obviously), it's also in opposition of a bunch of the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html So why bother?
- brlewis 7y ago
  > fight (i.e. censor) Where are you getting this definition?
MVf4l 7y ago
China is making an effort to influence public opinion in Taiwan through the media. Take a look at this post I saw a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551 While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it. What people saw is disinformation that looks like from China, or China looks like is the most beneficial one from the disinformation. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's from China. There might be third parties faking it to sabotage the relationship between China and Taiwan. Aka false flag. Or simply put, I could create disinformation about me, then I crack it. That will probably discredit my competitor, even though he/she did nothing. Of course, people could call this conspiracy theory, because lack of evidence. Similarly, people shouldn't consider that so-called China's effort is true. At least to me, I won't be so sure before I see some solid evidence.
- komali2 7y ago
  Taiwan is a critical democratic ally off the coast of communist China - why would US intelligence agencies attack the public perception of the sovereignty of the nation?
trhway 7y ago
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. why wait? In many situations/events it is very predictable what fake news and disinformation will appear in say the next hours, so it is possible to do totally preventive Truth "injections" well before the disinformation appears (sometimes even before the originating situation/event happens itself). One of the most important aspects in fake news and disinformation spread is the receptivity of the given populace to the fake news and information. That receptivity is based on many factors, like education, prejudices, economic and social situation, etc. For example, by systematically performing daily "ground Truth" disinformation "vaccinations" government can work on decreasing the prejudices and thus decreasing the disinformation receptivity of the populace.
- gunnm 7y ago
  I believe the 60 minutes is the 'max' time to respond, not the 'min' time.
tareqak 7y ago
The comparison of disinformation to a virus and proactive counter-messaging to a vaccine understandable. It's also interesting because the words "virus" and "vaccine" only make sense in relationship to the host. In this case, are the people of a country the "host" or just the government in charge?
vincvinc 7y ago
The real nugget in here is their solution for dealing with fake news spreading on private social networks: it needs a centralized list just like with email’s spam problem! > Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag that as spam you're essentially donating the signature of this message. It's not involuntary. It's a voluntary donation to a global system called the Spamhaus, the Domain Block List, and so on. > There's a whole system for that. It's like the email's immune system so that after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach the recipient, it's not censorship, but it goes to the junk mail folder so it doesn't waste people's time by default. > We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation.
papier 7y ago
By far, the biggest source of disinformation in Taiwan is the taiwanese government and their state affiliated public/private institutions. This is the same in China, Russia, EU, US, etc. But we can pretend and even praise this attempt at "combatting disinformation", but that in and of itself is disinformation. Isn't it funny how every country from EU countries to China to Russia to Taiwan and even in the US are trying to "combat disinformation"? And isn't it funny how so many comments are praising it when one side does it and bashes it when the other side does it? Look at the comments praising taiwan and even tang. Those comments are themselves disinformation. But it's the disinformation we like I guess. It is government disinformation that leads to genocides, illegal wars, devastation, etc. But we are to believe that the government is interested in "combatting disinformation"? The article itself is disinformation. From the tang's wiki: "Tang was quoted saying, "My existence is not to become a minister for a certain group, nor to broadcast government propaganda. Instead, it is to become a "channel" to allow greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together." Tang's assertion is itself disinformation. Tang's action and tang's assertion are contradictory so tang's assertion is a lie ( disinformation ). Government disinformation actually since tang is part of the government.
pellaeon 7y ago
This is the transcript of the original interview: https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-steve-butler https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-stev... In the interview concerns of government over-control did turn up, but it wasn't well addressed I think. The journalist skipped this part in the published article.
new4thaccount 7y ago
For those that don't know, Audrey Tang was involved or wrote one of the early Perl6 VMs in Haskell iirc. I can't remember if it was Pugs or Parrot. The language still has Haskell roots.
- audreyt 7y ago
  It was Pugs. :-)
  - new4thaccount 7y ago
    Haha. Always good to be corrected by the subject in question :) Thanks for the hard work in helping to get that project off the ground btw. As a language user and not an implementor, I sometimes feel bad that I use so much open source software without giving anything back except word of mouth approval. I haven't read the full article yet, but I'm sure it is an immensely complicated situation balancing individual freedoms versus the spread of "disinformation". That is what I got from skimming last night. In the US we have so much of this right now with anti-vaxxers and people turning against medical science in favor of fraudulent cures like "essential oils".
AnthonyWnC 7y ago
Hard to take the article seriously given it's not even remotely objectively written. I guess it's another political org mouthpiece.

493 points by panic 7y ago

shit

Wiki page of Audrey Tang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source software.

git-pull 7y ago
Audrey Tang was also an author in The Architecture of Open Source Applications (AOSA): https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html Chinese (Traditional): https://github.com/aosabook/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet/spreadsheet.zh-tw.markdown https://github.com/aosabook/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet... https://aosabook.org/en/socialcalc.html https://aosabook.org/en/socialcalc.html You can check the series out in its entirety at https://aosabook.org https://aosabook.org
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
One of her projects, EtherCalc, is my preferred spreadsheet software of choice. So it's a bit of a context shift to see political interviews! But her position on combating disinformation without censorship seems pretty on-point, and where I'd really like to see the conversation shift here.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
Upvoted, just so people would read the wiki page (y) That's who I want as a digital minister!
patcon 7y ago
omg her omni-talks with civil society groups are amazing. So long but SO CHOCK FULL of information. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc_5bM0zSM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tc_5bM0zSM Transcript in case that's quicker: https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Fork-the-government-CES--AeVW9NadMOtLRKV9t468O0q~Ag-2WkwonjChbKbl1qMVLGJW https://paper.dropbox.com/doc/Fork-the-government-CES--AeVW9... She was talking about this article's tactics at Open Government Partnership Summit last week, but mostly emphasized the feline nature of some of the counter-propaganda :) https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1134532549957394432 https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1134532549957394432 And for a look at how she's rockin transparency in gov, check out her log of ALL convos she has with ANY non-gov stakeholders: https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/en/track/ https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/en/track/

dominicl 7y ago

Great approach, and a smart minister. Living in Taipei I can only congratulate the country for this lively and young democracy. If you consider moving to Asia, Taiwan is the most forward, fair and open society.

w8vY7ER 7y ago
My experiences visiting various Taiwanese cities were so positive- can't wait to return.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
komali2 7y ago
I'll second that. I was there during the sunflower protests. Student activist sat in the parliament building for a couple days. The entire country rallied to their cause. Restaurants sent food, small shops (Taiwanese equivalent of Bodega) donated water, businesses sent pillows and blankets. If you tried that in China,you'd be sent to a xinjiang reeducation camp. At the very least. A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a shining and obvious example otherwise. Not to mention the absurdly low cost of living, one of the best public transit systems in the world, socialized healthcare, strong education system churning out competent professionals, and mountains... My partner and I are preparing a semi permanent move in the next few years. Edit: if anyone is curious, I documented my cost of living there back in 2014. Fair warning, I did so as a much younger, relatively naive dude, but the data's there anyway: http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live-in-asia.html?m=1 http://ablate.blogspot.com/2014/05/what-does-it-cost-to-live...
- pcwalton 7y ago
  > A common PRC propagandic trope is that the ten thousand years of Chinese history doesn't lend the culture to democracy. That the culture is simply incompatible with the concept - the people need autocracy. Taiwan is a shining and obvious example otherwise. Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.

procaina 7y ago

Hi. I am Rob. Çocaine was much cheaper and purer some time around 1984 to the middle 1990's. Let's just get that on the record.

procaina 7y ago

The truckers flagged my cocaine comment how do I make them stop.

iamnothere 7y ago

> First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited testing or A/B testing, and that's before it became really popular. It's just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so to speak. I have definitely seen this happen in real time. Suggest it publicly and you'll be accused of being Alex Jones, but it happens. Glad to see a public official acknowledging this. > Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination. Strange that I've just come across a paper related to this notion: https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268 https://aip.scitation.org/doi/pdf/10.1063/1.5090268 An interesting approach, might be an oversimplification of real-world dynamics though. > Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false. This is much better than removing the post, but it still makes me nervous. Just imagine that we're in the early 2000s, and you can envision a banner saying "The claims in this article are FALSE. As confirmed by the intelligence community and the New York Times, Iraq is actively working on its nuclear weapons program." Perhaps they should have a policy limiting the use of this tool when it comes to issues that may lead to war.

turk73 7y ago
I can tell you all about how the propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq invasion was pulled off. They had agents on message boards and all over the Internet even back then. They even drafted the comedian, Dennis Miller, to go on late night tv shows multiple times and push the propaganda there. I was astounded that very few people were talking about what a sell job it all was. Just to refresh everyone's memory: Saddam didn't have WMDs. It was a total put up. We need to somehow get these intelligence agencies and their deep state buddies put back in a box.
- frenchy 7y ago
  IIRC didn't they get bad intel from Iraqies who wanted an invasion (because they didn't like Sadam)? I think they might have known the intel was suspect, but didn't ask too many questions. I grew up among conservative US expats who didn't have message boards and mostly didn't watch television. I think you underestimate the desire of some Americans to relive their glory days and "liberate" other countries. Edit: I think most of them didn't really even care about WMDs, they just knew Sadam was an evil person (and to be fair, he was).

GavinMcG 7y ago

There's an attitude in the United States that any and all legal restrictions are "bad for business" and should be rejected out of hand. I think this article offers a counterpoint: even with the restrictions the article describes, these social media companies still find it worthwhile to be in the market and to invest staff and tools to work within the law. One of government's core jobs is to regulate the boundaries within which the market competes, and this is a great example of that.

nine_k 7y ago
Any restriction, well, restricts the space of available business moves. OTOH not every restriction is going to ruin a business, or even affect its bottom line materially. Certain businesses can even ask for a restriction if the restriction limits them much less than it limits their competition.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  Is that a sufficient criteria to say that regulation is bad? As a society we decide on minimum standards that businesses must follow; for example, if a domestic American company needs child labor to survive we‘ve already decided it‘s a company and jobs not worth having.

mc32 7y ago

Tang speaks of propaganda and disinformation and how historic propaganda by the government is more or less indistinguishable from disinformation at least by a significant segment of the population. ...But she says that to combat disinformation campaigns the government ministries are in charge of pre-empting disinformation by disseminating their version of information... But that seems like a contradiction. Government was a source of misinformation in the past, but now is the source of truth (as in the past). How is that reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus being propagandists? Now, I get that the PRC has definite identifiable goals so it might be easier to suss out here, but what about other areas?

NotPaidToPost 7y ago
Absolutely, it is simply fighting the adversary's propaganda with your own. Plus ca change...
- w8vY7ER 7y ago
  I would posit that this differs _significantly_ as it's being done with transparency and the motives for it are being clearly expressed by those pursuing the efforts. This stands in stark contrast to the assumed and obviously nefarious motives of those responsible for the disinformation. What better approach, I wonder?
  - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
    You don't seem to really be contradicting my point. You're just assuming that the 'good guys' don't lie while the others are the 'bad guys' who obviously do lie. There are indeed fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda, which is an age old strategy. They do seem to have adapted it for our era of instant communication and social media. Now, working out the facts in any given situation is not always easy. Everyone tends to spin things, or to omit things, or to simply make things up...
    - komali2 7y ago

eric_khun 7y ago

is anyone interested in an hn meetup in taipei? found it hard to like-minded tech focused people, talking English, that dont mind a beer from time to time, and would like to talk about the last google cloud downtime or it's current side project

rocky1138 7y ago
I wish I was in Taipei to come hang out. I love it there. Actually, Hualien is my fave but shhh don't tell Taipei!
aianus 7y ago
I will be in Taipei in the second half of June and would be happy to meet up. My email/keybase are in my profile.
komali2 7y ago
We're moving there soon so I'll preemptively put my hand up. Feel free to email me, or pop a link to some means of communication and I'll hop in!
jonnyy 7y ago
Feel free to email me too. I work here in Taipei

cryoshon 7y ago

>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. a very interesting approach that seems to be working for taiwan. i think that European countries may be able to implement something similar with good results. of course, it relies on the government ministries being uniformly oriented against disinformation -- something that we in the US cannot manage, as many elements in our government benefit from certain kinds of disinformation. notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship. i don't have enough context to tell whether this is the case or not, but at the core the entire taiwanese plan relies on the ministries as being able to tell the difference between disinformation and facts. in other words, it's fundamentally a critical-thinking based system.

Barrin92 7y ago
>notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship This is kind of how I see it too. I think if your goal is to combat disinformation or propaganda you should just come out straight up and say it because it's a perfectly defensible position to hold, but creating a government counter-narrative isn't any more harmless than just censoring something, it's just sounds nicer than having to use the word "censor" which tends to make people in some parts of the word jump up in panic.
gunnm 7y ago
It's an interesting approach and a good start, but I wouldn't say it is 'working' yet. I think it would be better if more emphasis was placed on the independent non-government fact checking organizations.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

I can't wait to go to Taiwan, the country seems to be amazing and this confirms it. I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it gets resolved one day.

vehementi 7y ago
Just imagining how disappointing it must have been for Taiwan when democracy failed, again, in China (on my mind due to the Tiannamen Square massacre 30 year anniversary)
- throaway5533 7y ago
  Just a nitpick, Taiwan wasn’t yet a democracy in 1989. It was close, but they had to wait until 1996 before having their first democratic elections.

CharlesColeman 7y ago

For a very brief time, late in the Cold War, the US State Department had a very shoestring team called the "Active Measures Working Group" who worked to investigate and counteracting disinformation. They had some success, such as uncovering the Soviet origins of the lie that the US created AIDS in a military lab, but the effort was wound down after the Soviet Union fell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Measures_Working_Group https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-disinformation-fake-news-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/12/opinion/russia-meddling-d... (very good video series, highly recommend for anyone interested in disinformation) https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-russian-disinformation-targeting-the-u-s https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-long-history-of-russia...

ilaksh 7y ago
Off the top of my head, I don't have a bunch of links, but it is my impression that propaganda and counter-propaganda are extremely important strategic ongoing activities for all major governments including the US. This is due to the relationship between overt state activities (i.e., they need to be motivated by ethical concerns) and the press.

komali2 7y ago

> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false. That'd be very interesting if the Taiwanese government was in direct communication with Facebook over something like this. CPJ wasn't able to get a hold of Facebook, I wonder if anyone here has visibility into something like that? Given that the US government took a more "combative" approach (dragging executives in front of Congress) I'd be curious how more tame approaches like this were being received.

gdhbcc 7y ago
It is censorship though. Part of the job of the censor is to determine whether the likelyhood some information will be seen, justifies the censorship in question. You can read the censor reports from the estado novo for example, and in many of them the censor declined to ban the book because even though it was objectively illegal, it would naturally be a book that wouldn't be sought after by the general public, and so only those who knew about it would look for it. I'd say this is an even more pernicious form of censorship because you dont know what you dont know.
freeflight 7y ago
It should be noted that dragging executives in front of Congress might not have been received well, but it did "its job" by nudging these companies into expanding their outsourced moderation practices to topics important to the US government [0], without the US government itself being too directly involved. [0] https://youtu.be/iGCGhD8i-o4 https://youtu.be/iGCGhD8i-o4

wazoox 7y ago

Wow, that's Audrey Tang, of Perl6 (pugs) fame. A serious hacker.

jdonaldson 7y ago
Yeah, my impression of Taiwan just went up again.

nabla9 7y ago

EU has also project that tries to combat disinformation EU vs Disinformation campaign https://euvsdisinfo.eu/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/

mleonhard 7y ago
From their About page, they are focused on disinformation coming from the government of Russia. Do you know if they do anything like Taiwan's 60-min response goal with accountability? https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/ https://euvsdisinfo.eu/about/
Kenji 7y ago
That just looks like plain old "It's the Russians!" At this point the meme has become old and boring.

ilaksh 7y ago

I don't know if it's the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc. I can understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister. I have never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better technical discussion in my life. And the work she did on that project scaling EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and also the creation of webworker-threads years ago, to me those were very inspiring projects. Never interacted with anyone with better technical abilities. That interaction gives me the idea that if I am critical and she happens to enter this thread, it will not fall on deaf ears. I don't really like sounding negative, and especially in this case they are much better than most countries. What is described is better than China, but it's not ideal. However I do think they should be commended from explicitly avoiding censorship to the degree that they do. However, communications from the government to counter other communications identified as disinformation are government propaganda. If they are not identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original disinformation. Secondly, making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship. It's just a brilliant type of crowd-sourced censorship. I know the theory is that that would only be applied to false information. However, censorship doesn't work like that. The end result is going to be a worldview that is reduced and shaped by a dominant group rather than the free flow of information. Especially if it relates to all of the information that people in a country can see. This can be very dangerous. So I will just say what I think would be ideal even if it may not be very realistic. The history of government propaganda and censorship should be part of the public context. I think it is good to be able to flag articles as being propaganda and from what source. However I think that removing things from being visible entirely is very dangerous for freedom. Taiwanese/US/Chinese/etc. government propaganda or counter-propaganda should be identified as such if possible. Perhaps a generic way to say something is propaganda or bias and a generic way to indicate where you think it's coming from (could be a political party or country). However the news that I see from large media, about 90% of it qualifies. I don't think it should be possible for these flags to remove information from the stream. Although certainly there can be standards related to removing things like gore -- but this needs to be monitored to make sure that it does not get used for political censorship.

7y ago

censor-the-mark 7y ago

Easy. Just rig the game. People don't notice censorship if the media manipulation appeals to a gambler's tendency.

steve76 7y ago

The things adolescents snide at, start there. Sure you can drink your beer. Who do you think painted the Coor's light can red and silver? Mom? Dad? Or the People's Republic of China with help of General Sulamani of Hezbollah? Sorry kids, I'm not going to burn alive a billion people just because you can't control what you shove down your fat throat or what's in between your legs.

Isamu 7y ago

Audrey Tang's github profile: https://github.com/audreyt https://github.com/audreyt

mleonhard 7y ago

Combatting disinformation will become more and more important for every organization. I'm glad to see at least one government taking it seriously and pushing social/media companies to actually do something and add tools. When will we have degree programs in Disinformation Prevention and Control, Anti-Manipulation, Discourse Integrity? How about job titles like Discourse Protector, Media Accountability Officer, Fact-Checker, and Truth Wielder? I think companies usually hire PR firms to do this work. That's like hiring thieves to protect your valuables. It can work, but is it really the best strategy?

zachguo 7y ago

Isn't this sort of media manipulation? How is it philosophically different from censorship? > We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation. Is it making the whole system more vulnerable to manipulation? Trolls only need to click twice now instead of drafting a comment. In the end, it would be a race of who has the biggest troll farm.

tus87 7y ago

> Disinformation is a threat, especially for open societies. Especially around Taiwan lots of jurisdictions, not just PRC, use disinformation as an excuse for the state to do censorship. We don't want to go there, because we still remember the martial law. Wait what? So we need to fight (i.e. censor) disinformation because if we don't oppressive governments will use disinformation as an excuse for censorship? Left-wing thought really is a mental disease.

komali2 7y ago
>Left-wing thought really is a mental disease. I'm intensely curious why you thought to include this line here. Are you willing to share your thoughts on why it was necessary? Judging from your comment history, you seem intelligent enough to know that not only would such a line not be very well received here (obviously), it's also in opposition of a bunch of the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html So why bother?
brlewis 7y ago
> fight (i.e. censor) Where are you getting this definition?

MVf4l 7y ago

China is making an effort to influence public opinion in Taiwan through the media. Take a look at this post I saw a few days ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20058551 While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it. What people saw is disinformation that looks like from China, or China looks like is the most beneficial one from the disinformation. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's from China. There might be third parties faking it to sabotage the relationship between China and Taiwan. Aka false flag. Or simply put, I could create disinformation about me, then I crack it. That will probably discredit my competitor, even though he/she did nothing. Of course, people could call this conspiracy theory, because lack of evidence. Similarly, people shouldn't consider that so-called China's effort is true. At least to me, I won't be so sure before I see some solid evidence.

komali2 7y ago
Taiwan is a critical democratic ally off the coast of communist China - why would US intelligence agencies attack the public perception of the sovereignty of the nation?

trhway 7y ago

>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. why wait? In many situations/events it is very predictable what fake news and disinformation will appear in say the next hours, so it is possible to do totally preventive Truth "injections" well before the disinformation appears (sometimes even before the originating situation/event happens itself). One of the most important aspects in fake news and disinformation spread is the receptivity of the given populace to the fake news and information. That receptivity is based on many factors, like education, prejudices, economic and social situation, etc. For example, by systematically performing daily "ground Truth" disinformation "vaccinations" government can work on decreasing the prejudices and thus decreasing the disinformation receptivity of the populace.

gunnm 7y ago
I believe the 60 minutes is the 'max' time to respond, not the 'min' time.

tareqak 7y ago

The comparison of disinformation to a virus and proactive counter-messaging to a vaccine understandable. It's also interesting because the words "virus" and "vaccine" only make sense in relationship to the host. In this case, are the people of a country the "host" or just the government in charge?

vincvinc 7y ago

The real nugget in here is their solution for dealing with fake news spreading on private social networks: it needs a centralized list just like with email’s spam problem! > Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag that as spam you're essentially donating the signature of this message. It's not involuntary. It's a voluntary donation to a global system called the Spamhaus, the Domain Block List, and so on. > There's a whole system for that. It's like the email's immune system so that after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach the recipient, it's not censorship, but it goes to the junk mail folder so it doesn't waste people's time by default. > We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation.

papier 7y ago

By far, the biggest source of disinformation in Taiwan is the taiwanese government and their state affiliated public/private institutions. This is the same in China, Russia, EU, US, etc. But we can pretend and even praise this attempt at "combatting disinformation", but that in and of itself is disinformation. Isn't it funny how every country from EU countries to China to Russia to Taiwan and even in the US are trying to "combat disinformation"? And isn't it funny how so many comments are praising it when one side does it and bashes it when the other side does it? Look at the comments praising taiwan and even tang. Those comments are themselves disinformation. But it's the disinformation we like I guess. It is government disinformation that leads to genocides, illegal wars, devastation, etc. But we are to believe that the government is interested in "combatting disinformation"? The article itself is disinformation. From the tang's wiki: "Tang was quoted saying, "My existence is not to become a minister for a certain group, nor to broadcast government propaganda. Instead, it is to become a "channel" to allow greater combinations of intelligence and strength to come together." Tang's assertion is itself disinformation. Tang's action and tang's assertion are contradictory so tang's assertion is a lie ( disinformation ). Government disinformation actually since tang is part of the government.

pellaeon 7y ago

This is the transcript of the original interview: https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-steve-butler https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw/2019-05-17-interview-with-stev... In the interview concerns of government over-control did turn up, but it wasn't well addressed I think. The journalist skipped this part in the published article.

new4thaccount 7y ago

For those that don't know, Audrey Tang was involved or wrote one of the early Perl6 VMs in Haskell iirc. I can't remember if it was Pugs or Parrot. The language still has Haskell roots.

audreyt 7y ago
It was Pugs. :-)
- new4thaccount 7y ago
  Haha. Always good to be corrected by the subject in question :) Thanks for the hard work in helping to get that project off the ground btw. As a language user and not an implementor, I sometimes feel bad that I use so much open source software without giving anything back except word of mouth approval. I haven't read the full article yet, but I'm sure it is an immensely complicated situation balancing individual freedoms versus the spread of "disinformation". That is what I got from skimming last night. In the US we have so much of this right now with anti-vaxxers and people turning against medical science in favor of fraudulent cures like "essential oils".

AnthonyWnC 7y ago

Hard to take the article seriously given it's not even remotely objectively written. I guess it's another political org mouthpiece.