Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

https://cpj.org/blog/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-combatting-disinfor.php

by panic • 7 years ago

493 128 7 years ago

cpj.org

suiting• 7 years ago

Wiki page of Audrey Tang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang

She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source software.

ocdtrekkie• 7 years 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.

NicoJuicy2• 7 years ago

Upvoted, just so people would read the wiki page (y)

That's who I want as a digital minister!

git-pull• 7 years ago

Audrey Tang was also an author in The Architecture of Open Source Applications (AOSA):

https://aosabook.org/en/500L/web-spreadsheet.html

Chinese (Traditional): https://github.com/aosabook/500lines/blob/master/spreadsheet...

https://aosabook.org/en/socialcalc.html

You can check the series out in its entirety at https://aosabook.org

patcon• 7 years 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

Transcript in case that's quicker: 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

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/

dominicl• 7 years 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.

w8vY7ER3• 7 years ago

My experiences visiting various Taiwanese cities were so positive- can't wait to return.

komali211• 7 years 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...

pcwalton2• 7 years 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.

eric_khun2• 7 years ago

Taiwan, is trying really hard to attract foreign talents. If you're interested, check their Golden Card Permit. It's a visa+redisent card allowing you to stay and work for anyone there up to 3years. The only requirement is to justify of a salary of 160k NTD/month(~USD 5210/month), anywhere in the world, if you don't earn that, try the skills application[1].

I'll not talk about all the positive things about Taiwan, just read the other comments.

[1] https://foreigntalentact.ndc.gov.tw/en/

mleonhard3• 7 years ago

The Gold Card Permit is now 5 years. Spouses and children can get national health insurance even if they don't live in Taiwan.

https://foreigntalentact.ndc.gov.tw/en/Content_List.aspx?n=6...

YayamiOmate• 7 years ago

Do you include in your evaluation uregulated political status of the state on international forum?

When I read about it, technically ROC should be the real china in the international law sense, but de facto it's PRC. (I think so, correct me please) I dont think it's officially resolved at all, even how many chinas are there...

From the middle of europe I am not afraid of Chinese (mainland ofc) army but close there, when PRC says the island is PRC, and ROC say it's ROC while they don't lost UN recognition, I consider it a serious risk. Unless one fancies fighting for freedom at some point.

Also looking from the middle of europe I am skeptical in the general international reaction, when even much stronger mandate, it achieved no practical result with Ukraine/Russia dispute.

All above saddens me deeply, because otherwise I find it hard to argue.

komali211• 7 years ago

Statistically speaking, I should spend far more mental energy on ensuring I don't get hit by a car on my bicycle ride home this evening, than I should worry about getting nuked by China.

If China invades Taiwan while I'm there, I will deal with the situation, or perhaps I'll be killed. That's life, and that's life no matter where I am (maybe I'll get hit by a car tonight, maybe I'll get killed in a freak sparring accident, maybe I'll crash my motorcycle). I won't let these concerns stop me from living, while taking reasonable precautions when I do partake in risky activities.

As for international law - the USA de facto recognizes the sovereignty of Taiwan in many ways. For example, Taiwanese citizens can apply for an ESTA visa waiver - Chinese cannot. The USA sells arms to Taiwan, not to China. Taiwanese citizens are eligible for Global Entry, Chinese aren't.

There's also the Taiwan Relations act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_Relations_Act

The act further stipulates that the United States will "consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States".

Taiwan is a sovereign nation, but the whole world has to tip toe around a fragile PRC ego about it. I'm not afraid of living there and shouting to the world that the ROC is the superior version of Chinese government.

warp_factor• 7 years ago

Spending a considerable amount of time in both Taiwan and China for work and personal reasons over the last 10 years I'm always shocked to see the huge difference between those two countries that have a common origin.

As a European I think Taiwan would be one of the easiest and best places where I could relocate in Asia. Mainland China on the other hand would be a nightmare.

iamnothere• 7 years 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

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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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).

mistermann• 7 years ago

I'd love to hear as many details about this as you have.

GavinMcG• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

mc324• 7 years 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?

NotPaidToPost5• 7 years ago

Absolutely, it is simply fighting the adversary's propaganda with your own.

Plus ca change...

w8vY7ER3• 7 years 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?

TazeTSchnitzel• 7 years ago

What happens when the misinformation is coming from inside the government? A problem in, for example, the UK, where there is an internal conflict within the Cabinet over Brexit, and where ministers are willing to spout some things that are, frankly, bullshit.

ThrowawayR22• 7 years ago

"propaganda (n.) information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view."

If the Taiwanese government ministries were putting out information _of a misleading or slanted nature_ in their official capacity, the press and public would rightly call them out on it.

mc324• 7 years ago

But the minister herself indicates the government did just that in the past

Beside, if the press and public could and would call out government propaganda (which according to the minister is pretty much indistinguishable from disinformation) why would they need the government to pre-empt and counter it if it's easy to spot?

NotPaidToPost5• 7 years ago

I think it's dangerous to assume that one side are the good guys who never lie while the other are the bad guys who always do.

Disinformation comes from all sides and one has to be critical of everything.

vkou• 7 years ago

Mainstream press doesn't like to call the government out on bald-faced lies, because then they get cut off from government information sources.

This is currently happening with the White House. Nobody has enough of a spine to be sufficiently critical of the firehose of garbage that it broadcasts, because their press correspondent credentials will be revoked.

kijin• 7 years ago

It is ultimately up to the people to decide which side of the story to believe. All the usual heuristics apply: Do they have a history of lying? Are they acting as if they're trying to save their own asses? Did they just casually forget to mention a piece of information that happens to contradict their argument?

Governments are often so awful at passing this test that even when they're telling the truth, a lot of people would rather believe crazy conspiracy theories. This is especially problematic in countries with a recent history of dictatorship like Taiwan and South Korea. If Ms. Tang can instill in her ministry a culture of responding quickly, effectively, and earnestly to current issues, that would be a major contribution to the public discourse even if the government isn't always truthful.

Also, this is Taiwan, not PRC. Very different government.

CharlesColeman2• 7 years ago

How is that reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus being propagandists?

If there are multiple conflicting narratives, at least some people will be motivated to do more research to resolve the contradiction. If the government is being more truthful, its statements can point to resources that provide independent verification, accelerating the process. At a minimum that will blunt the effect of the lies.

komali211• 7 years ago

That's why the free press is imperative. It sort of "lends confidence" to anything the government puts out. It keeps them honest, because they know they'll be torn a new one if they put out falsehoods.

The USA technically has this as well but the existence of entertainment shows billing themselves as news, such as "Fox News," has found a way around this system - foment distrust of everyone BUT "your side" for a full generation, and no amount of fact checking will unseat your viewers' biases.

Taiwan doesn't have this problem yet, but it is a very small place compared to the USA, and as the article indicates its free press is very young. I'm very curious how they'd handle the uprising of an organization like Fox or Breitbart.

mikepurvis• 7 years ago

To be fair, "entertainment as news" covers the spectrum— The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight are absolutely in that category as well. Of course, those are also a few hours a week rather than a 24hr barrage, and I suspect that a greater proportion of their viewers understand that their mission is to generate laughs, if necessary at the expense of a total commitment to the facts.

tsimionescu• 7 years ago

Well, to be honest, the free press is often its own source of misinformation, often simply parroting the government / big business position, for a variety of reasons - since way before stuff like Fox or Breitbart.

There is sadly no simple answer to the problem of obtaining The Truth...

neves• 7 years ago

It really looks like some people does not have the minimum idea about the magnitude of the concerted misinformation campaigns. Tang is the first one that offers effective ways to counter attack these efforts. This is the best article that I read about the subject. There is a great menace to the democratic world. Everyone should take it seriously.

XuMiao• 7 years ago

In fact, Taiwan has suffered from DPP for many years. The president Tsai has spent quite bit of funding to control the social media. They organize and spread rumors to attack other political figures. Double standard has become the new standard for the government. The laws, the judges, the elections, are controlled by DPP. People in the government, in the media do not care about the truth. They only care about the ideology, the party. Very typical results of the bipartisan politics.

It's going to be a turning point for Taiwan next year. They need a leader to pull the society out of this ugly bipartisan fighting.

jamesclyeh• 7 years ago

Why do you say the laws, the judges, the elections, are controlled by DPP?

aristophenes• 7 years ago

I don't agree, I think this approach is completely legitimate. Because it is prominent politicians who are spreading this message, it is clear where it is coming from and what the motivations are. It isn't manipulation, like seeding articles with a subtext of some idea or another. It is just, here's the governments view of this issue. And then it seems like the idea is for people to think about that, and they will compare to the other idea.

So everyone, including government leaders, get to share their thoughts, people get to choose what is best. If what was described is actually what happens. In the past, the government ideas would be the only ideas shared.

eric_khun2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

komali211• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

Feel free to email me too. I work here in Taipei

cryoshon• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

gunnm2• 7 years 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.

NicoJuicy2• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

CharlesColeman2• 7 years 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://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-russia...

ilaksh3• 7 years 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.

komali211• 7 years 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• 7 years 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• 7 years 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

wazoox• 7 years ago

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

jdonaldson• 7 years ago

Yeah, my impression of Taiwan just went up again.

nabla9• 7 years ago

EU has also project that tries to combat disinformation

EU vs Disinformation campaign

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/

mleonhard3• 7 years 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/

ilaksh3• 7 years 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.

autarch2• 7 years ago

Yes, this is the same person.

laughinghan7• 7 years ago

Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?

laughinghan7• 7 years ago

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.

Yes, that's why you need an independent media, as mentioned in the article: "The mainstream media, of course, then picks up this counter-narratives and then do a balanced report."

making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it [...] all of the information that people in a country can see

From the article, emphasis mine: "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."

They key word here is preferred. It's not blocked, but rather deprioritized and contextualized.

Obviously, there's good reason to still be uncomfortable with this, because this advantages the dominant worldview. Fundamentally though, tradeoffs have to be made, to prevent things like the Rohingya crisis and the emboldening of the far-right. Deprioritizing and contextualizing of fringe worldviews, without fully blocking them, seems like a good tradeoff to me.

ilaksh3• 7 years ago

The problem is you have an authority deciding what supposedly is fact and what is not fact.

chatmasta2• 7 years ago

Would any of this be a problem if social sites would restore chronological news feeds?

99% of these “problems” stem from newsfeeds that are algorithmic rather than simply chronological.

f00_• 7 years ago

making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship.

Devotion, a small Taiwanese horror game, is an example of people abusing these types of control on steam

Devotion, which came under fire over the weekend because of the presence of a piece of art that appears to mock Chinese president Xi Jinping. That quickly led to a massive review-bombing campaign (that has now bled over into Devotion's predecessor, Detention)

https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18239937/taiwanese-horror...

https://www.pcgamer.com/taiwanese-horror-game-devotion-has-b...

Zak• 7 years ago

Anything that's crowdsourced and likely to be manipulated needs to have a plan for handling coordinated inauthentic activity. I imagine Steam's existing measures are designed more around preventing game developers from using fake positive reviews to promote their games rather than fake negative reviews as a form of censorship.

studentrob2• 7 years ago

making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship

That is not what was described,

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.

rqs• 7 years ago

This gives me some weird feelings. I mean, if you ask a website to turn some content "unpreferred" without user consensus, isn't that also some type of censorship? In fact, many Chinese websites are doing it right now, and it's very effective in terms of censoring contents.

However, I support the idea of content flagging, but instead of making them "unpreferred", maybe add a mark saying "Propaganda from XXX" so people can be more cautious about those information themselves?

Isamu• 7 years ago

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

mleonhard3• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

MVf4l• 7 years 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

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.

komali211• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

gunnm2• 7 years ago

I believe the 60 minutes is the 'max' time to respond, not the 'min' time.

tareqak• 7 years 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• 7 years 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.

pellaeon• 7 years ago

This is the transcript of the original interview: 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.

new4thaccount2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

It was Pugs. :-)

new4thaccount2• 7 years 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• 7 years ago

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

Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

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