From anarchist to defender of democracy
How Taiwan’s minister debunked and beat the bots
In the contest between technology and democracy, the temptation is to play defence.
Audrey Tang has a different playbook. As Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs, she is on the front lines of cyberwarfare, information wars and disinformation disruptions.
Last week, her ministry was put to the test when a massive earthquake struck the island with a force of 7.4 on the Richter scale, with a handful of deaths. Last January, the ministry braced for a political earthquake when Taiwan held presidential and parliamentary elections that were targeted by Beijing for destabilization, yet delivered democratically.
External threats are only part of the challenge. Internal polarization is no less insidious a force for division, exacerbated by “deep fakes” and armies of bots in the age of artificial intelligence.
In a democracy, debate and division are features, not bugs. New technology, however, scales up those actions and interactions at warp speed.
“Democracy is a technology — it is a social technology for collective decision-making,” Tang told me at the Democracy Forum I moderated at Toronto Metropolitan University on Thursday.
“The more people contribute to democracy as a social technology, the better it gets.”
From Athenian democracy to today’s technology, the key difference is the speed and scale at which voting and decision-making take place. Instead of looking over her shoulder, Tang wants to look ahead — not merely defending but also modernizing democracy.
Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in AI last year. She also made the list of 100 global thinkers published by Foreign Policy magazine.
A digital pioneer from a young age, she dropped out of high school at 14 after finishing her homework. She went to work rewriting two computer languages, learning three foreign languages and helping Apple communicate with Siri before retiring at age 33.
She made history as the first transgender minister, and perhaps the only self-described anarchist so high up in government. She famously persuaded the party in power to let her write her own job description in the new ministry, then wrote an eight-year Digital Nation Plan.
Today, she speaks the language of not just reinforcing but also reinventing democracy, borrowed from her self-made mandate. She’s a big believer in “radical transparency” in a democracy — she posts transcripts or minutes of all her government meetings and decisions online.
Her latest book is, unsurprisingly, open-source: “Plurality — the Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy.”
As much as she supports opensource material, she is keenly aware of securing democratic government against intruders and disrupters. To inoculate voters against distortions and disinformation, she pushed for pre-emptive “pre-bunking” in real time — by armies of fact checkers and reality checkers relying on “humour over rumour” and memes to disrupt falsehoods.
Pre-bunking a fake beats debunking after the fact.
“The idea is to depolarize people and to anticipate potential polarization points,” she told our audience (disclosure: I’m a Senior Fellow at TMU’s Dais, which hosts the Democracy Forum).
“It reaches people before the disinformation reaches people, which usually means that you have to debunk in a matter of two hours or even one hour. Given today’s information
‘‘ Democracy is a technology — it is a social technology for collective decisionmaking. The more people contribute to democracy as a social technology, the better it gets.
environments, if you know there’s going to be such information anyway … you can prepare.”
Post-election, polarization fell to a record low, Tang argues. But complacency is the enemy of democracy.
At all times, her ministry assumes the worst. That means multiple layers of verification relying on different systems to prevent infiltration.
“Basically we assume breach, meaning that we think that each and every system probably is already breached, but not at once.”
While Tang talked about the threats facing Taiwan, our other panelist talked about the challenges in Ontario: Hillary Hartley, who served as Ontario’s first Chief Digital and Data Officer and a deputy minister from 2017 until last year, was on the frontlines of the pandemic.
She made the case for transparency and accessibility, while demystifying the complexity of technology and AI. In a democracy, governments are still judged more on service delivery than ideology, especially when private platforms are becoming so reliable in giving people what they want.
“I can whip out my phone right now, order some toilet paper, and it’ll be at my house tomorrow — and people just expect things to work in that way,” Hartley mused.
People expect no less of governments, demanding that the public sector keep up with the private sector. In the pandemic, governments in both Taiwan and Ontario were able to iterate, adapt and pivot with unprecedented speed, so it can be done.
“This technology — the ecosystem of apps that we use every single day — is … for better or for worse, foundational now, in a similar way that democracy is. And if you want to participate, if you want to get anything out of it, you have to understand it.”
AUDREY TANG