The point being that it can be very easy for something from China to...if it successfully enters Taiwanese society and maybe gets people scared or gets people talking, and they find out that it comes from China, whether or not...As you’ve said, IP addresses can be manipulated.
The whole population is not working on disinformation, but it presents itself as a looming threat. Some of the conversations I’ve had have said it’s not this big scary thing on the level that it’s been made out be in some circles.
As a member of the media, I also want to describe this in the correct way. I think that it can be easy to visualize what...I mean it’s very vague. It’s an abstraction. It’s not something that we completely know what it is. How do you see it if you’re looking at Chinese content forums specifically? How do you think of what they are? How do you visualize them in your mind?
With Chinese content forums specifically, you mentioned the PRC’s surveillance efforts of its own citizens. For Taiwanese people seeing that content farms are receiving some form of state support most likely, and then they’re penetrating...
It can create fear or chip away at people’s hope if a content farm makes a significant impact on the Taiwanese news cycle, as we’ve seen, where false stories, disinformation stories have...
Right, even when they’re disproven very quickly. I think we kind of look back, and I imagine that just everything is eroding.
I think it’s true. As you mentioned, the occasion where we lost a diplomat is where people collectively look back and start to think, "Oh, maybe we rushed to conclusions. Maybe we should have stopped and said, ’Is it true or not?’ Maybe we should rework our news cycles a little bit," which is great.
We’re the first generation that can do democracy. Of course, we get something wrong. It’s good to stop and think once in a while, but preferably without losing diplomats. [laughs] It is a silver lining that people are slowing down and looking at the media landscape.
When that happened, it galvanized a lot of fears of there is this undemocratic threat, this blunt-shaped large object that can...
Absolutely. In this reflective moment, I think there was also the fair bit of finger-pointing at China too. When that happened, it came out on PTT in a few hours that there was a Chinese IP address, but once that happened, fingers started pointing across the strait.
There was some reflection, but just through that reaction, because there was the fair bit of blame, thinking, "Look what China did," whether or not that’s appropriate, that was a thought process of quite a few people.
There is also a sense, "China is doing this. We need to defend ourselves."
I wonder, though, when people engage on social media and start to do their own analysis of pieces of information that they come across and as you encourage and you provide outlets with the government for them to do that...
...do you think that there’s a risk of the classic herd mentality building where, especially with something like the current government has an open society, allows people to interact in a very directly democratic way in many cases, which is very novel.
There are vague threats outside of that or vague opposition forces, both within and outside of Taiwan, whether political or otherwise. As we’ve seen with disinformation and social media in general, it has the tendency to polarize.
Like something with the cabinet’s clarification website, any sort of public presence of the government, we see this in the most free societies, where the robustness of debate can lead to increased polarization.
I wonder what you think about that because this is a really new conversation we’re all having.
In the greenest countries.
I also want to ask about at the TFD conference there were representatives from the US who spoke about how the two could collaborate in combating disinformation. I know that you visited the US quite a few times the last few months and gone and spoken at workshops.
What could those collaborations consist of, potentially?
Is there anything else that you would want to add, especially on transparency in general and promoting dialogue in general? You’ve called it a vaccination for disinformation several times. On how that can be expanded and continued? For example, your own transparency policy, do you think that’s something that the rest of the government could continue, becoming more transparent, as they have?
Potentially, if you were asked for a response to the messaging that the PRC sends to this government, to this country, would you say that it’s a response to continue being open, continue being transparent?
Is there anything else that you’d like to add? I was wondering if I have any more questions from what I jotted down. One other thing that came up, as far as things to do as responses, as prescriptions for the public for disinformation, aside from asking social media companies through a forum to take social responsibility...
I’ve heard a lot of that. I’ll start there. Once again I was at TFC yesterday, and they talked a bit about that. How do we engage? I believe they’ve tried to before and have not...At least it’s still in a very preliminary stage if anything.
This is here in Taiwan?
Taiwan Media Watch?
Another thing that I wonder -- it’s more in the ballpark of the NCC probably than yours -- the importance of having a public broadcaster is something that I’ve also heard mentioned as a way to combat disinformation, having a trustworthy well-funded public broadcaster.
Here in Taiwan, I believe PTS gets something...For example, NHK in Japan is funded 20 times more than PTS, something like that.
Funding PTS, for instance, is that its own potential way of having a more trustworthy or a more stable media environment?
It does seem like having a public broadcast or public media outlet with, of course, full editorial independence and a strong, robust system of doing very quality project work...
Of course. How does that currently work? I’m not quite sure how that works with PTS.
That brings me back to what you had said before about how you had a conversation with Ko Wen-je about how he said clickbait can be characterized as fake news. At the same time, and you mentioned this too, a lot of media organizations try and use those very attractive, clickbait-y headlines.
I’m an editor, as well as a writer. When you’re writing a headline, you want eyeballs.
Right, and you want to...
You’re right. There’s always a balance. You want eyeballs while you’re also...
The cabinet’s website, for example, I’m not sure, and I don’t read Chinese well enough to know how those headlines...
...or how the text in the articles avoids being too technical.
When people instantly say, "This is from the government, so it needs to be taken with a grain of salt,"...
That’s great?
When you see that, is that a target for someone you’d want to engage, you’d want to start a conversation with?
How do I want to put this? I know that a lot of mis- and disinformation originates domestically. When we talk about China, there’s no way to really know.
Of course.
I know that you’ve mentioned when there are messages from content farms, you’ll generally ignore them because there’s not really a way for you to engage. As we know, a lot of the content army, like the 50 Cent Party as they’ve been called in the PRC, a lot of that is becoming automated now.
As you are generally looking to engage...
...people, do you ever engage people in the PRC?
Do you ever really do?
Through that experience, when you were engaging with Chinese...
...students, could you describe how productive they were, like the attitudes of the students towards wanting to learn...
It gives them a framework to do what they may want to do.
Do you ever worry that these engagements could be limited as the climate, at least between governments here and in China, is changing?
