Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

cpj.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 146 posts

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#41

Post by NotPaidToPost »

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #9

Tang speaks of propaganda and disinformation and how historic propaganda by the government is more or less indistinguishable from disinformation at least by a significant segment of the population. ...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…

" propaganda (n.) information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. " 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.

I think it's dangerous to assume that one side are the good guys who never lie while the other are the bad guys who always do.

Disinformation comes from all sides and one has to be critical of everything.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#42

Post by jhedwards »

pcwalton wrote: post #22
komali2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll second that. 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 th…

> 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. Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.

Having lived in China though the scale issue does seem to be a problem. A brief Google shows that Taiwan has a population of a little over 23mil whereas Hunan province alone has around 67mil and Sichuan has 87mil people. Add to this that because of lack of development and the legacy of Mao many of these people either have no education or live in remote mountains or both.

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.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#43

Post by my_first_acct »

mc32 wrote: post #28
ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" propaganda (n.) information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. " 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.

But the minister herself indicates the government did just that in the past 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?

In the "past" that the minister is referring to, Taiwan was a military dictatorship; other than a few brave souls sitting in jail, there was no political opposition, and there was no free press. There was no (legal) alternative to government propaganda. Even publications from overseas were censored (by ink and scissors) as they entered Taiwan.

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.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#44

Post by NicoJuicy »

suiting wrote: post #2

Wiki page of Audrey Tang: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang She also has many very inspiring talks on slideshare about open source software.

Upvoted, just so people would read the wiki page (y)

That's who I want as a digital minister!

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#45

Post by i_am_proteus »

jhedwards wrote: post #42
pcwalton wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Totally agreed. The sentiment appears on HN regularly and it's extremely annoying when there's such an obvious counterexample.

Having lived in China though the scale issue does seem to be a problem. A brief Google shows that Taiwan has a population of a little over 23mil whereas Hunan province alone has around 67mil and Sichuan has 87mil people. Add to this that because of lack of development and the legacy of Mao many of these people either have no education or live in remote mountains or both. I'm not saying this means democracy is impossi…

What would prevent a federal system from working in China?

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#46

Post by ilaksh »

I don't know if it's the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc. I can understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister. I have never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better technical discussion in my life. And the work she did on that project scaling EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and also the creation of webworker-threads years ago, to me those were very inspiring projects. Never interacted with anyone with better technical abilities.

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.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#47

Post by jhedwards »

i_am_proteus wrote: post #45
jhedwards wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived in China though the scale issue does seem to be a problem. A brief Google shows that Taiwan has a population of a little over 23mil whereas Hunan province alone has around 67mil and Sichuan has 87mil people. Add to this that because of lack of development and the legacy of Mao many of these people either have no education or live in remote mountains or both. I'm not saying this means democracy is impossi…

What would prevent a federal system from working in China?

I believe China does in fact have a federal system. Everything is integrated all the way up to the top but every province does have its own government with some degree of autonomy as far as I know. When I lived in Hunan for example the Hunan government was doing some projects with foreign lawyers to develop laws protecting victims of domestic abuse.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#48

Post by autarch »

ilaksh wrote: post #46

I don't know if it's the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc. I can understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister. I have never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better technical discussion in my life. And the work she did on that project scaling EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and…

Yes, this is the same person.

Re: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

#49

Post by bobthepanda »

nine_k wrote: post #34
GavinMcG wrote: post #7

There's an attitude in the United States that any and all legal restrictions are "bad for business" and should be rejected out of hand. I think this article offers a counterpoint: even with the restrictions the article describes, these social media companies still find it worthwhile to be in the market and to invest staff and tools to work within the law. One of government's core jobs is to regulate the boundaries wi…

Any restriction, well, restricts the space of available business moves. 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.

Is that a sufficient criteria to say that regulation is bad? As a society we decide on minimum standards that businesses must follow; for example, if a domestic American company needs child labor to survive we‘ve already decided it‘s a company and jobs not worth having.
Post reply on HN