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Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship

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

#81

Post by komali2 »

jhedwards wrote: post #65
wil421 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is the exact one I see on HN and reddit. Yet the USA and EU have democracies with close to a billion people combined. India is an example of a developing democracy with a population close to China and all the issues that come with a huge population. Yet India is a democracy and the people have gone from a population ruled by the British to a democracy. The people of anywhere should get to decide what the…

> The people of anywhere should get to decide what they want. I don't dispute this. I dispute people in their comfy first world homes pontificating about how China should have democracy, when they haven't been to China and experienced: 1.) the kinds of problems China faces and 2.) the difficulties facing solving those problems in China It smacks of arrogance and youthful naivety. Yes we have a democracy in the US and…

First off, a fantastic example of a massive democracy at scale is India. It hasn't "figured it out" entirely but it is doing an admirable job.

Second, China actually does have a voting infrastructure in place - locals "elect" their prefecture "representatives," who go on to elect upwards further government officials.

But yeah, the Party is not going anywhere without a fight. The obstacle to democracy in China isn't size or culture, it's Xi Jinping and his cronies.

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

#82

Post by vehementi »

NicoJuicy wrote: post #18

I can't wait to go to Taiwan, the country seems to be amazing and this confirms it. I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it gets resolved one day.

Just imagining how disappointing it must have been for Taiwan when democracy failed, again, in China (on my mind due to the Tiannamen Square massacre 30 year anniversary)

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

#83

Post by neves »

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…

It really looks like some people does not have the minimum idea about the magnitude of the concerted misinformation campaigns. Tang is the first one that offers effective ways to counter attack these efforts. This is the best article that I read about the subject. There is a great menace to the democratic world. Everyone should take it seriously.

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

#84

Post by zachguo »

Isn't this sort of media manipulation? How is it philosophically different from censorship?

> We're developing a very similar system here where people online and other instant message systems, they can forward a suspicious disinformation to a bot. Currently the most popular bot for that is called CoFact, for collaborative fact, but very soon, in June, LINE will build that as its core functionality so all you have to do is to press a message, or a long tap, and then you can flag it as disinformation.

Is it making the whole system more vulnerable to manipulation? Trolls only need to click twice now instead of drafting a comment. In the end, it would be a race of who has the biggest troll farm.

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

#85

Post by XuMiao »

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…

In fact, Taiwan has suffered from DPP for many years. The president Tsai has spent quite bit of funding to control the social media. They organize and spread rumors to attack other political figures. Double standard has become the new standard for the government. The laws, the judges, the elections, are controlled by DPP. People in the government, in the media do not care about the truth. They only care about the ideology, the party. Very typical results of the bipartisan politics.

It's going to be a turning point for Taiwan next year. They need a leader to pull the society out of this ugly bipartisan fighting.

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

#86

Post by laughinghan »

autarch wrote: post #48
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.

Can you explain how you came to that conclusion?

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

#87

Post by throaway5533 »

vehementi wrote: post #82
NicoJuicy wrote: post #18

I can't wait to go to Taiwan, the country seems to be amazing and this confirms it. I feel bad for them, for the pressure that China is pushing though. I hope it gets resolved one day.

Just imagining how disappointing it must have been for Taiwan when democracy failed, again, in China (on my mind due to the Tiannamen Square massacre 30 year anniversary)

Just a nitpick, Taiwan wasn’t yet a democracy in 1989. It was close, but they had to wait until 1996 before having their first democratic elections.

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

#89

Post by laughinghan »

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…

> 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.

Yes, that's why you need an independent media, as mentioned in the article: "The mainstream media, of course, then picks up this counter-narratives and then do a balanced report."

> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it [...] all of the information that people in a country can see

From the article, emphasis mine: "stop being preferred to show on people's newsfeed, but it's not censorship. If you look specifically for that friend, that post is still there, but they have a warning that says it's already fact-checked as false."

They key word here is preferred. It's not blocked, but rather deprioritized and contextualized.

Obviously, there's good reason to still be uncomfortable with this, because this advantages the dominant worldview. Fundamentally though, tradeoffs have to be made, to prevent things like the Rohingya crisis and the emboldening of the far-right. Deprioritizing and contextualizing of fringe worldviews, without fully blocking them, seems like a good tradeoff to me.

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

#90

Post by markdown »

mikepurvis wrote: post #77
komali2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why the free press is imperative. It sort of "lends confidence" to anything the government puts out. It keeps them honest, because they know they'll be torn a new one if they put out falsehoods. The USA technically has this as well but the existence of entertainment shows billing themselves as news, such as "Fox News," has found a way around this system - foment distrust of everyone BUT "your side" for a full…

To be fair, "entertainment as news" covers the spectrum— The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight are absolutely in that category as well. Of course, those are also a few hours a week rather than a 24hr barrage, and I suspect that a greater proportion of their viewers understand that their mission is to generate laughs, if necessary at the expense of a total commitment to the facts.

> The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight are absolutely in that category as well.

Don't be ridiculous! You can't put them in the same category as Fox News. Neither of those shows even pretends to be news.

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