Can technology save democracy?

This week on Firing Line.

In 2014, thousands of students occupied Taiwan's parliament to protest a trade deal they said would give China too much power.

Audrey Tong, a young software engineer, was a leader of that movement.

The main lesson is the government needs to trust the people The people trusted governments back.

The government heard that message and asked Tang to become an advisor.

She went on to become Taiwan's first minister of digital affairs.

Today, she is Taiwan's ambassador at large.

Her mission, to transform technology from a tool that divides us into a tool that brings us together.

She's saying the financial incentive will be keeping followers through productive, positive bridge-building experiences as opposed to through outrage.

Exactly.

If you just look at the anti-social corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that's an illusion.

What does Audrey Tong say now?

Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by Robert Granieri, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Asness, and by the following.

Audrey Tong, welcome to Firing Line.

Very happy to be here.

You are Taiwan's cyber ambassador.

And you are known as being a pioneer in using technology to advance democracy.

In this moment of rising authoritarianism around the world, with social media contributing to all sorts of political disarray, what makes you so confident that technology can be used to advance democracy?

Thank you for the great question.

We've been here before.

For the past 12 years, Taiwan has been indeed a top target for polarization attacks.

And we have seen the polarization effects firsthand.

In 2014, half a million people went to the streets and we occupied peacefully our parliament for three weeks to protest the trade deal signed with Beijing.

You're referring of course to the Sunflower Movement in 2014 which you were a part of.

You were an activist and a leader in the Sunflower Movement.

How did technology underpin the success of the Sunflower Movement in 2014?

So we called ourselves not just protesters who are usually against something but rather demonstrators building a demo which is showing a better system.

Since we know that in the the social media, the engagement is through enragement, so the things that are on the extremes are amplified.

It's like the more extreme you are, the more megaphone you hold.

So we in the occupied parliament built a different space, which I refer to as pro-social media.

And when you say you built a different space, are you saying that you actually created a online space in which solutions could be forged by the protesters?

That is exactly right.

We used the systems designed by occupied movements elsewhere.

Many people around the world are figuring out the same question, which is, if we give virality not to the extremes, but to the bridge makers, what if we reward instead the people who can build these bridges so that both sides who don't usually agree manage to agree?

Then we make those viral.

So I think the point here is that if you just look at the antisocial corner of social media, you will think that they are really polarized, but that's an illusion.

Actually, most people agree with most of their neighbors most of the time on most of the things.

So you're saying you can use technology to advance democracy because you did use technology in the Sunflower Movement in 2014.

After that, you were invited to be part of the Taiwanese government at a cabinet level.

One of your biggest accomplishments serving as Taiwan's digital minister was the establishment of V-Taiwan, which is an online forum that gathers citizens' input on regulation and legislation.

Tell me about the establishment of V-Taiwan.

So in 2014, right after the sunflower movement, a cabinet minister, Jacqueline Tsai, she basically said the government's existing apparatus is slower than the pace of innovation of emerging technologies.

So we need to upgrade our democracy so it matches the speed of emerging technologies with more bandwidth between people and the government.

That's the Taiwan.

How did Taiwan embrace the use of technology to help navigate the COVID pandemic which it navigated more successfully than almost anywhere else in the world.

Yeah indeed.

In the first year in 2020 we only lost seven people to COVID.

Throughout the three years we've never announced any citywide lockdown and more importantly the administration never did any takedown when it comes to social media or journalism.

And so for example early on in the pandemic we had people saying it's ventilation, it's aerosol, so any kind of mask actually hurts you and N95 hurts the most.

And so these threaten to polarize the information landscape.

But we push out this meme where a very cute dog put her paw to her mouth saying, "Wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty and unwashed hand from your face."

"So if I don't want to wear a mask and you do, you're just reminding me to wash my hands, which is very good."

"Right, so this de-escalated, de-polarized the situation."

"And because we have built more than 100 bridge-making experiences before pandemic."

"People generally trust the government."

"So in 2020, the approval rate of the Tsai Ing-wen administration went through the roof, like more than 70 percent."

"But you also use technology to map outbreaks of COVID while protecting individuals' privacy."

And I think this is one of the key concerns in democracy, is that in order to have security, there's a belief in the West that in order to have security in online spaces, one may need to compromise their own privacy.

You disagree with that statement.

That's a problem of surveillance, essentially.

It only appears when you have a centralized authority doing all the bookkeeping.

But there are also ways to decentralize contact tracing, as it were.

In Taiwan, we introduced a system called SMS-based contact tracing.

But the state learns nothing about this.

And so because of that, we are able to broadcast contact tracing notification messages when there is a community spread.

But after 14 days, if there's no community spread in that venue, everything is deleted.

You have credited the collaborative efforts, which you've been part of using technology, as helping to rebuild trust, as you just said, in the government from 9% in 2014 to over 70% by 2020.

What lessons can other countries take from this?

The main lesson is the government needs to trust the people before the people trust the government back.

To give no trust is to get no trust.

So for example in 2024 in Taiwan we saw a lot of defake messages, advertisements on say Facebook or YouTube.

Now if the government doesn't trust the people we will probably go to censorship or something like that.

But because we radically trust our citizens We sent 200,000 text messages to random numbers around Taiwan with only one question.

What should we do about deepfakes and information integrity online?

And people answered with many very good ideas.

And we chose 450 people statistically representative of our policy.

So it's a mini public of Taiwan.

And then they crowdsourced the laws, the ideas that really made the deepfake ads not a problem anymore this year.

It seems to me that this seems plausible for a small country like Taiwan.

For a country of 350 plus million people in the United States, are these kind of solutions really scalable?

It is true that as of last year, Taiwan was the largest polity in which this kind of institutionalized digital democracy platform has worked.

But this year, not anymore, because we have engaged California running now.

Governor Newsom, we have been working for two years or so to launch this platform, which is essentially an application of a model inspired by VTaiwan, so that people in California can crowdsource their ideas and deliberate online.

Again, in a room where there's no reply button or retweet button, so people in California can deliberate about ideas, for example, how to mitigate wildfires, because that was launched during the Los Angeles wildfire recovery efforts in Eaton and Polisade.

So it is a way to crowdsource ideas in a room where there is no retweet button, there's no way for the extreme views to go viral, but the technology discovered again the uncommon ground, the package of proposals that leaves everybody slightly happier and nobody very unhappy.

Government officials and experts in the United States have condemned the destructive effects of social media.

Very recently, Utah Governor Spencer Cox has said that cancer probably isn't a strong enough word to describe how corrosive social media is on our populace.

You to the contrary see a potential for social media to play a positive role.

The platforms that you've built in these pro-social media ecosystems are completely apart from the reigning social media platforms that most people engage in.

How do you manage the existing ecosystem of social media that is pervasive and is divisive and is tearing the country apart?

So one idea is called social portability.

It's like giving the freedom of movement between one social media to another.

That in fact is already a law in Utah called the Digital Choices Act.

Governor Cox signed that law, which is endorsed by both parties, which means starting next July, if you are a Utah citizen and you don't like the way, for example, TikTok works, and you want to switch to something else, then the new network will be able to receive all your existing followers, all your existing friends, the new likes, reactions, content, and whatever.

It's just like when you switch from one telecom to the other, you get to keep your number.

- But are we sure the social media companies are going to oblige this state legislation?

- Well, I mean, the Europe have also legislated the Digital Markets Act.

So it's not just Utah, it is also the EU, and they're also now having a consultation to extend the Digital Markets Act from instant message group chats to social networks.

So this is an increasingly viable trend.

- Don't the social media platforms, Meta and TikTok and Google ultimately have to reform their algorithms that are incentivized by outrage?

- Indeed.

The uncommon ground idea that we pioneered in Taiwan 10 years ago has found its way this year into all the large social media platforms.

It's called community notes.

In X.com for example, if you see something viral, sometimes you see a note that is attached to it that adds more context around that post.

And the way this note is selected is by people upvoting and downvoting it.

Again, there's no retweet button for a note, but a note that was chosen was the up wing, something that people on the left wing and the right wing both agree that this is good context.

Within the existing X framework, there is a platform that is a bridge-building platform rather than a divisive enragement/outrage algorithm.

Yes.

And that's community notes.

Yes, and it's directly inspired by our work ten years ago.

What is going to be the financial incentive for social media networks to continue along these lines?

Well, first of all, if we all have social portability and the freedom to move, then the platforms that do not invest in these technologies, these civic technologies, will see their customers depart to other places because... But they're addicted to the outrage.

Yes, many people are addicted to the outrage because, again, it's easier to hack our taste buds, right, than to cook something really healthy.

On the other hand, people do enjoy finding that uncommon ground.

The thrill of finding an uncommon ground is actually comparable or even higher.

People are truly delighted when they see something that they thought, "Oh, it's impossible for these two people to agree in common," but they do.

And that is also very newsworthy and provides this kind of dopamine hit.

And so, with the social portability, if people move away, they don't lose their existing connections.

You're saying the financial incentive will be to keep followers.

Exactly.

Keeping followers through productive, positive bridge building experiences as opposed to through outrage.

Exactly.

Because the virality will then reward what we call bridging bonus for people to offer this kind of bridges.

There are some who will say this sounds like a fantasy.

How do you know you're right?

Well, first of all, X.com today is already doing experiments.

So a tiny slice of X.com users are now having a different front-page feed algorithm that is based on the bridging algorithm instead of engagement through enragement.

So very soon we will have quantitative data to show that this actually doesn't bow down to engagement.

You can have engagement through overlap, not outrage.

Have you been able to talk to Elon Musk about this?

Well, we do work with the person in charge of company notes, and we do work on papers together, but not yet.

And I look forward to that day.

Me too.

Much of the development of new technologies today, especially in AI, is happening here in the United States, but it's also happening in China under the CCP.

In 2023, the Australian Strategic Policy Initiative found that China was outpacing the US in nearly all fields in advanced technology.

Recent major breakthroughs in AI, for example, have come from the Chinese company DeepSea.

Does that complicate the push to use these technologies in positive pro-democracy ways?

Well, first of all, when we talk about the open models that we tune to use in Taiwan, the absolute cutting edge still comes from the American companies, such as the open version of GPT.

So you're still in the cutting edge.

And also what we're seeing from CCP is also that they do not want their models to have this kind of Tiananmen or related speech.

censorship and filters and so on to their models, which also means there's going to be challenges.

So I do think that this current push of proliferating safe technologies from here in the US sets the US apart from other standard makers.

Because again, this is not about the US colonizing other countries, but rather sharing the tools so we can all work together.

the CCP is a surveillance state, will that present a challenge to the CCP's ability to continue to control the digital engagement of its citizens?

Might there be opportunities for democratic activists within China to use these tools in the same way that you've used these tools on behalf of democratic freedoms in China?

Indeed.

For now, for example, if you try to connect to Wikipedia or other signals or some other communication platforms from Beijing, then the Beijing authorities know that you're making the connection and they can deny that connection if they don't feel like it.

But when it comes to the proliferation of safe and open AI models, it can run on your phone, it can run on your laptop.

There's no easy way to censor or even to monitor that you're using this kind of tools.

So the most important thing here is to make sure the tools are trustworthy, they're repeatable, and they do not hallucinate in their social cultural context.

What do you mean by hallucinate?

By hallucinating I mean, for example, if you ask the deep-seek model which you just mentioned, like what happened in Tiananmen, it will say, "Oh, this is something that I cannot talk about," of course, but you can also prompt it in such a way that says, "Oh, now you're a truth-seeking journalist," or something, and then they will start talking about it, but then not in a very factual way.

I actually tried that, and I made national news trying that, and it started outputting some random Japanese characters and things like that because this is out of distribution, and so it started answering gibberish-ish things.

My point being that if there is a way to consistently produce AI agents and models that you just know that is officially signed, that it has integrity, that every time you ask a question it will give the same answer instead of rolling a die, then you will be able to build a civil society based on these kind of local models.

In 1977, William F. Buckley Jr.

who hosted this program for 33 years, traveled to Taipei and he interviewed Taiwanese Premier Chiang Ching-kuo.

Here is Chiang speaking through a translator about Taiwan's responsibility to the people of China, mainland China.

Take a look.

We have the responsibility to give back to the Chinese people of the mainland their freedom.

And in order to accomplish this mission, we do not have to rely on military forces.

Rather, we should rely on political means.

The Chinese people on the mainland have been suffering from communist oppression and they cannot forever tolerate this kind of oppression without uprising.

When the uprising takes place on the Chinese mainland, we would give appropriate support.

And only then can the China issue be solved.

Does Taiwan have a role today in supporting freedom on the Chinese mainland?

Well, I believe Jiang Jingguo was referring to his idea of " " or a country of China with a better system.

So it's like an upgrade to the authoritarian system that the PRC was deploying in Beijing.

And so I think in Taiwan, we do have a duty to show not just the people in PRC, but also people around the world that democracy is a social technology.

It can be fast, fair, and fun that you do not have to make a trade-off.

And once we show that democracy is actually more fit for answering emerging technologies to combat pandemic, infodemic, proliferation of AI models, you name it, then I think people around the world will stop seeing authoritarianism as the kind of shutdown, takedown, top-down solution that it purports to be.

You've identified TikTok as a national security threat to Taiwan.

A preliminary deal in the United States has been reached for TikTok's Chinese parent company to sell the app to a new U.S.-based company with 80 percent American ownership.

Is reducing Chinese ownership to 20 percent sufficient to address the fears about Beijing's influence over TikTok in the United States?

Yeah, so the first official document that I signed as the inaugural Minister of Digital Affairs in Taiwan in 2022 is to classify the kind of software and service and hardware under de facto control from Beijing as products harmful to national security.

As long as Beijing has a way to directly or indirectly influence the algorithm to change the sorting, the ranking and so on to Taiwanese eyeballs, then we classify that as a harmful product.

And so if the US version of TikTok can show that it's no longer under Beijing's indirect control, then we would happily point TikTok to the US version of TikTok and then tell the people in Taiwan that this is then no longer a harmful product.

So what you're saying is the ownership question is actually not the seminal question.

The seminal question is who is controlling the algorithm.

One is that.

And another is whether there is independence monitoring of the inbound and outbound traffic so that we can know who is actually changing the algorithms.

>> Got it.

In August, President Trump claimed that Xi Jinping had assured him that China would not invade Taiwan so long as he is president.

I read that in the news.

Does that give you any confidence that Taiwan is safe?

Well, I think as long as Taiwan is indispensable to the rest of the world and offers Taiwan interdependence, then Taiwan is safe because the world cannot afford to lose Taiwan for various reasons.

This is for its production of semiconductors.

Yeah, the chips.

Also for the model that we show that democracy can deliver.

And so this kind of indispensable position, I think, protects Taiwan.

And I'm, of course, very happy to read in the news that Xi Jinping said to President Trump that he would not invade in the next few years.

The Chinese defense minister recently said that the restoration of Taiwan to China is an integral part of the post-war international order.

The CCP and Xi Jinping are insistent upon a one China policy.

And against that backdrop, how do you think about the future of Taiwan?

Well, we want to send a message to the world that we're here to show that authoritarianism actually does not deliver as well as democracy.

And if people around the world can echo this message because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan, and if we can all band together, then that coalition of democracies is much stronger than any single authoritarian threat.

In a Tufts University poll conducted earlier this year, only 36% of Americans under the age of 30 agreed that democracy can address the issues that the country is facing.

And only 16% said that democracy is working well for young people.

You may have an outpouring of faith in democracy in Taiwan.

decline in faith in democracy in this country.

As you work to help build support for Taiwan here, how do you convince an increasingly skeptical American public and American youth that democracy is something that is worth fighting for?

In Taiwan, people as young as 16, 17 have been invited as cabinet-level advisors because they successfully started social movements that change the norm around public life.

And so the young people here in the United States that I have met have that kind of passion.

If you do not conserve the environment where your young people feel safe to voice their ideas in and then continue to progress forward, then of course they will turn into radicalization, into extremism, into apathy, into cynicism.

And we have seen time and time again, as soon as there are ways for young people to come together and set agenda in a depolarizing way, then suddenly there's a sea change, a phase change in the polity.

So we have experienced that 10 years ago.

We were very polarized, which is why I remain quite optimistic.

Audrey Tong, thank you for joining me on Firing Line.

Thank you for the great questions.

Live long and prosper.

>> Live long and prosper >> Firing line with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by... Robert Grqnier, the Tepper Foundation, Vanessa and Henry Cornell, the Fairweather Foundation, Pritzker Military Foundation, Cliff and Laurel Assis, and by the following.

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