Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship
cpj.org
cpj.org
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.
Audrey was also the principal author of the Pugs (Perl6 implemented in Haskell) effort.
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.
After all, we generally can't check each observation or theory ourselves first hand. Deciding which sources are trustworthy and which are not is a critical issue.
E.g., an anti-vaxxer reading a post on Facebook that agrees that vaccination is harmful, by this concept would be likely to approve the post (like, share) without wasting time with authorities or fact-checking.
99% of these “problems” stem from newsfeeds that are algorithmic rather than simply chronological.
But in any case, definitely none of this would be a problem if we got rid of the Internet. What's your point?
Algorithmic newsfeeds benefit social media companies enormously (by increasing engagement) and at least some consumers (I'm not denying they also hurt some consumers). They'll never voluntarily give them up, and banning them would be an extremely oddly specific measure that's probably unconstitutional and definitely has lots of loopholes ("we're not an algorithm newsfeed---we just prioritizing your notifications, like Gmail's Priority Inbox").
They're here to stay. We can fix them or come up with something better that eclipses them, but there's no banning them.
[1]: https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/21/18191455/whatsapp-forward...
Nicotine cigarettes benefit tobacco companies enormously (by increasing addiction). They'll never voluntarily give them up, either. Yet we have approaches for dealing with addictive consumables; taxes, health warnings, education, etc. I wonder if similar approaches might work when applied to social media.
I don't think cigarettes are a relevant precedent. It's not like cigarettes cause cancer in some people and make others healthier. (I guess it can make you thinner? But yet it still increases your likelihood of heart disease.)
Algorithmic newsfeeds are a much better experience for many people, who don't want thoughtful discussion and wedding and family photos buried under people announcing to the world that they're pooping.
You also didn't respond to my point that deadly viral WhatsApp forwards refute your contention that "99%" of disinformation problems are due to algorithmic rather than chronological newsfeeds.
With pure timeline-based views, the ability to reinforce misinformation is diminished -- yes, people can repost and troll news mechanically, but that can be rate-limited. So I don't think we should throw the idea out the window just yet.
You might be right about the reinforcement being diminished, just like misinformation existed before the Internet, but getting rid of the Internet would surely diminish the reinforcement. Like I asked above, so what? There's no going back.
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...
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.
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?
For the government to be more transparent, I suppose you could just publish the articles you marked as disinformation, and let people debate whether they were truly fake or not. Doing nothing, right now, does not seem like an option, in the face of propaganda coming from other countries.
...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?
Plus ca change...
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...
Doesn't that make a difference?
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.
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?
The free press still exists and can fact check away. And, since Taiwan is democratic, if a minister takes the piss, the press can report on it, and the public can elect someone else.
In that more autocratic era, the people who called out the government would have been arrested and imprisoned. That has now changed and that the public and press are now more freely allowed to challenge what is being said by their government.
The article suggests that today's government, under the careful supervision of the opposition parties and the independent press (both of which now exist), has resources that allow it to detect propaganda, and preemptively respond to it, in a way that individuals cannot.
Conservativism trumps historical rivalries.
Disinformation comes from all sides and one has to be critical of everything.
Often there isn't even one truth.
And of course when you have two competing versions there is no guarantee that one is true, or that one is not true for that matter.
I'm just saying to people should use caution and not take anything at face value.
Note I saw saying "if there are two narratives". The "fake news" situation is often just one narrative. (US cable news has no narrative. Or brain.)
The government shouldn't assume it's correct. But if there is a wide variety of narratives it should be less difficult for the populace.
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.
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.
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.
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.
News Business contains overlapping elements of Show Business. Production, post-production, dramatization, acting, advertising, storytelling, actors, agents, a whole lot of money, etc. Both are sometimes owned by the same networks and parent corporations too. There's a difference between "news as a business" and just "news".
If a news business were to broadcast plaintext news with only raw pictures, videos, and audio, and bare-minimum graphics to the masses, then their broadcast would be super boring to the layperson and not grab people's attention the same way explosions, special effects, and hypothetical opinions would. As the saying goes, "it's just business". (Imagine a content comparison of 'weather.gov' vs. 'The Weather Channel' for context).
Entertainment is the sauce businesses add on top of the pasta that is the news to make their product more appealing to consumers.
Now, politics is the most popular flavor addition to news (and has been for the last few years). News Businesses have self-politicized their news products because that is the "entertainment" trend of news that is a hot seller. This is more than just "news" - it's finding ways to innovate facts and opinions to sell a particular "product" to a particular demographic.
Whether it's the government or a corporation, someone in a suit sitting in an armchair at the top is going to favor pushing the version that benefits themselves the most. Don't just hate or like sources blindly because they say "we are the good guys!"[1]
[1] "Are we the baddies?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
There is sadly no simple answer to the problem of obtaining The Truth...
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.
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.
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.
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...
She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source software.
That's who I want as a digital minister!
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
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/
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.
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.
I think it would be better if more emphasis was placed on the independent non-government fact checking organizations.
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.
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.
I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it gets resolved one day.
> 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.
China is making an effort to influence public opinion in Taiwan through the media.
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.
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...
Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of neoreactionary theory that is slowly seeping into public discourse.
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of neoreactionary theory that is slowly seeping into public discourse.
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of the newest progressive agenda to give more power to the federal government and to California and New York. What's been slowly seeping into the public discourse is, "Freedom? Meh."
Don't like someone's speech. "F Free Speech!" The trend is to give either the government or big corporations more control over people's interactions at work, how employers pay employees, what information we receive, and how much privacy we have in commerce and the information we consume.
The people must always fight the power and speak truth to power. What we have forgotten in recent years, is that the insurgents need to amass power to do so, and by amassing power, they often become the established power. I remember a quip about Postmodernism by a PhD student -- how it started out as something disruptive and edgy, then ended up as the stuff you had to spout to get your degree. The edgy, subversive media and academic movements of the 60's are now the media and academic establishment of 2019.
When in doubt, always go to first principles and universal principles. Be skeptical of feelings -- governments and corporations have long been using emotions to manipulate people. Governments for thousands of years, and corporations started in earnest well over a century ago.
I'm not saying this means democracy is impossible, but if you work in tech I'd hope you'd be able to at least recognize that doing democracy in Taiwan is not even remotely comparable to doing it in China because of scale issues alone.
That's not a federal system as generally understood.
Generally, the distinction between a federal system and a unitary state with somewhat-autonomous subdivisions is that in a federal system, the powers of the subnational entities are constitutionally entrenched, whereas in a unitary state, the autonomy of a subnational division is at the will of the national government.
The overwhelming majority of countries have some form of autonomous regional government, because it's impossible to run any sufficiently large country any other way, but the majority of countries are not federations.
Don't be so smug, the US and EU are only getting a small taste of the sort of problems that China has been facing for several thousand years as a diverse centralized state, and are already resorting to the sort of things that China ended up having to do with respect to social control and stability.
Not saying it's better or worse in the end but at the least, the experiment goes on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/03/world/asia/india-toilet-m...
Regarding peeing specifically, India has a Nationwide push for increasing toilet infrastructure. The change over the past five years, let alone ten, is dramatic. Possibly faster than anything in human history.
I also don't understand why you think nobody is doing anything about people using the restroom on the streets of SF - new bathroom trailers are being added. It's not much but it's something, and more are coming.
If you have other ideas, would you like to join me tomorrow at 2pm for the next board of supervisors meeting to present them to the city?
Yet the USA and EU have democracies with close to a billion people combined. India is an example of a developing democracy with a population close to China and all the issues that come with a huge population. Yet India is a democracy and the people have gone from a population ruled by the British to a democracy.
The people of anywhere should get to decide what they want.
I don't dispute this. I dispute people in their comfy first world homes pontificating about how China should have democracy, when they haven't been to China and experienced: 1.) the kinds of problems China faces and 2.) the difficulties facing solving those problems in China
It smacks of arrogance and youthful naivety. Yes we have a democracy in the US and how is it doing? We have garbage voting machines that are easily hackable, rampant gerrymandering, and coordinated disinformation campaigns that contributed to Trump of all people being our president.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have it than not have it, and I think we can solve these problems. I'm optimistic. But those are just the problems WE have in a developed country one third the size of China, and with better infrastructure, education, and quality of live overall. I can't imagine trying to implement an _effective_ voting system in a country like China where many people do not even have clean water or basic sanitation yet. Not to mention the fact that they don't have division of powers, so before democracy was implemented they'd require a whole bottom up restructuring of their entire governmental apparatus.
One big issue unique to China is related to fallout from the cultural revolution, which affected a huge number of people. Read this section of the Wiki about education to get some idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
Another is the lack of a separation of powers. The geography of China carries a lot of challenges as well. One of the advantages the US had was being able to develop in an extremely protected place in the world. China has had pressure from a wide variety of neighboring states for almost its entire history.
Second, China actually does have a voting infrastructure in place - locals "elect" their prefecture "representatives," who go on to elect upwards further government officials.
But yeah, the Party is not going anywhere without a fight. The obstacle to democracy in China isn't size or culture, it's Xi Jinping and his cronies.
I'll not talk about all the positive things about Taiwan, just read the other comments.
https://foreigntalentact.ndc.gov.tw/en/Content_List.aspx?n=6...
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.
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.
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.
EU vs Disinformation campaign
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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".
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.
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.