By Jack Crovitz

Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan, is best known as the first transgender cabinet member in the world. Still, that may be the least interesting thing about her, going by a recent wide-ranging virtual interview with Apple Daily. She was a leader in Taiwan’s 2014 mass protests against a government trade pact which reshaped the political landscape of the island, has practical advice for Hongkongers trying to reform their administration, and is not short of innovative ways to bring Taiwanese democracy into the digital age.

Now 40 years old, Tang recalls the awe of “discovering democracy” when she was just 15. Born into an era of martial law, she had a front-row seat in Taiwan’s first free presidential election. “At that point, we all learned that it was possible to vote for one’s president. That was really acquired knowledge. It wasn’t even thinkable when I was really young.” This revelatory experience, Tang said, led to her belief that “democracy is a technology, one that we can continuously improve.”

The belief now governs Tang’s public service on the self-ruled island. A whiteboard in her office, visible over her shoulders during our virtual interview, screams out the words “#DefendDemocracy” in large print, boldly proclaiming the meeting of her political and ministerial missions. It speaks of a blending of divergent roles in Tang: she is the high-school dropout made good in a government whose ministers are mostly graduate degree holders, and the policymaker who peppers her wonky talk with pop culture references, such as the Star Trek-inspired message for Hong Kong people: “Live long and prosper.”

Political ideals in the geek were the force behind her sacrifice of a Silicon Valley career in favor of democratic progress in her homeland. “I have to leave immediately because democracy needs me,” she messaged her workplace’s internal chat room in 2014, according to an account in WIRED magazine, and promptly left California for Taiwan’s Sunflower student movement. In Taipei, about 200 students and other activists had seized the main parliamentary chamber on March 18 to force a government backdown on closer trade ties with mainland China. Insider news of the occupation of the Legislative Yuan, which eventually lasted for 24 days, was distributed to the outside world on social media in as many as 14 languages. Tang’s first direct foray into politics, as a protester, evolved seamlessly alongside her background in technology, culminating in an integral role as a member of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s cabinet.

Over the last year, Tang has closely followed mass protests in Hong Kong triggered by a now-withdrawn extradition bill. The decentralized nature of the demonstrations was astonishing, she said. “In the Sunflower movement, there were about 20 NGOs that occupied parliament. It was poly-centered. Later on, we saw a similar configuration in the Umbrella Movement” of Hong Kong in the same year. “But when it came to the so-called ‘Be Water’ movement [in 2019], instead of 20 centers or so, there were easily 2,000 or more centers. Anyone could start something. It was like flash mobs all the time.”

Now that a new national security law is in place, Hongkongers have even more of an uphill task trying to reform their government. Tang’s response to that is: "Gandhi said that you should be the change you want to see in the world, and this kind of movement is a really large-scale reconfiguration of society. People who have participated in Occupy movements feel that the real change is not the four or five demands the protest has, because it may or may not meet all its demands.

“However, people who participate learn to trust each other in a brand new way. People see that with sufficient communication infrastructure, wide peer-to-peer trust is really possible — much more desirable than the old hierarchical or label-based trust.” Tang sees such social change growing on digital platforms, such as Hong Kong’s networking website LIHKG, which allows for decentralized collaboration among users.

As Taiwan’s digital czar, Tang uses technology to counter misinformation, which is often spread by outlets and operatives of mainland China’s Communist Party to influence Taiwanese politics and public opinion. “Taiwan was caught in an ‘infodemic’ long before the pandemic,” is how she puts it. Her ministry’s “Humor over Rumor” campaign helps journalists and government officials popularize online fact-checking and official advice by packaging practical tips in amusing ways.

The light-heartedness aside, half-truths and falsehoods were to be taken seriously, Tang told her cabinet colleagues. It took some effort to win them over. They brainstormed in a meeting where she stressed the need for fast and transparent identification of misinformation, she said. “I also shared internet memes with all the ministry officers. Of course, it took them a year or two to really absorb it and convince themselves that it’s something a dignified ministry can do.”

Entertainment as a strategy has become especially effective during the pandemic. Zongchai the dog mascot, a cartoon that presents government health initiatives, was deployed earlier this year to break the news about travel restrictions with mainland China.

Tang believes that the crucial aspect of any anti-misinformation campaign is a healthy and trusted journalistic sector which can be relied upon to check the facts. When asked whether Taiwanese people trusted their government enough for officials to debunk rumors, Tang interrupted and said: “Our model doesn’t need trust in the government. It requires trust from the government to journalists, and also trust from citizens to journalists, but is really the journalistic sector where the trust is placed.” Indeed, she felt it would be impossible for the government to conduct an effective anti-misinformation campaign: “If you say a government organ did attribution-tracing or fact-checking, then citizens would be suspicious of the motivation anyway.”

To effectively fight misinformation, Tang endorses a digital revolution in the fourth estate. What she calls the “democratization of journalism” will allow ordinary people to become “civic journalists.”

“It’s not about just putting a few journalists to the very large burden of fact-checking everything, but rather making sure that anyone can become a part-time civic journalist,” Tang said. As one example of democratic journalism, she brought up the 2019 Taiwanese presidential debates, when thousands of “civic journalists” volunteered to verify every claim made by the candidates.

Another facet of Tang’s anti-misinformation strategy is an emphasis on public attribution of sources. This proved effective in quashing claims circulating in Taiwan that a Hong Kong teenager had been paid to kill the city’s police, a rumor which was traced back to the accounts of the Communist Party’s propaganda units on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter-like platform. Instead of removing the story, Tang’s ministry tagged it with an attribution to the propaganda source, an approach she believes allows the public to educate themselves. “Public attribution is more effective than taking posts down,” she said. “With public attribution, people learn about the source of disinformation campaigns, and what people learn about, they can spread.”

The potential for application is broad. The Communist Party, and other autocratic powers, use digital misinformation campaigns to influence and weaken democracies across the world, and Taiwan’s use of humor, decentralization and public attribution of sources to fight mainland China’s formidable propaganda machine should give hope to other nations battling misinformation.

In yet another way of bringing Taiwanese government into the digital age, Tang’s ministry runs a program of “crowdsourcing” policy ideas from ordinary residents. People can propose and support policies for any ministry on the official website “vTaiwan” (the "v" standing for “virtual”). Every month, ministries choose two popular ideas to implement. One prominent example of a crowdsourced policy was the regulation of Uber after it debuted in Taiwan in 2016. Current debate on vTaiwan includes thrashing out which regulations should apply to driverless vehicle trials.

To crowdsource services, ministries may turn to “civic innovation.” This route involves individuals, or “civil technologists,” independently developing prototypes of possible government services that ministries can then adopt. They can do so the “Gov-Zero” way: pick a government service whose URL ends in .gov and post an improved version on a page ending in .g0v. Tang calls .g0v “a shadow government” and encourages ministries to integrate residents' prototypes into their services. By way of example, Taiwanese individuals early in the COVID-19 crisis developed a mask-availability map that was then adopted by the government.

At the end of the day, to Tang everything still boils down to democracy — to involving the voice of the masses in better governance. Having witnessed the power of digital democracy in the Sunflower protest movement, she saw it grow in Hong Kong and is working to harness its power in the Taiwanese government. Her final advice to the like-minded is: “Leave the world a better place when you log out than when you logged in.”

(Jack Crovitz is a writer based in New York City who covers the NY metro area as well as technology-related issues. He is a senior at Horace Mann School.)

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