and good local time, everyone.

David Biello: So, tell us about --

Sorry to --

Tell us about digital tools and COVID.

AT: Sure.

Yeah, I'm really happy to share with you

how Taiwan successfully countered the COVID

using the power of digital democracy tools.

As we know, democracy improves as more people participate.

And digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation,

as long as the focus is on finding common ground,

that is to say, prosocial media instead of antisocial media.

And there's three key ideas that I would like to share today

about digital democracy that is fast, fair and fun.

First about the fast part.

Whereas many jurisdictions began countering coronavirus only this year,

Taiwan started last year.

Last December, when Dr. Li Wenliang, the PRC whistleblower,

posted that there are new SARS cases,

he got inquiries and eventually punishments

from PRC police institutions.

But at the same time,

the Taiwan equivalent of Reddit, the Ptt board,

has someone called nomorepipe

reposting Dr. Li Wenliang's whistleblowing.

And our medical officers immediately noticed this post

and issued an order that says

all passengers flying in from Wuhan to Taiwan

need to start health inspections the very next day,

which is the first day of January.

And this says to me two things.

First, the civil society trusts the government enough

to talk about possible new SARS outbreaks in the public forum.

And the government trusts citizens enough

to take it seriously and treat it as if SARS has happened again,

something we've always been preparing for, since 2003.

And because of this open civil society,

according to the CIVICUS Monitor after the Sunflower Occupy,

Taiwan is now the most open society in the whole of Asia.

We enjoy the same freedom of speech, of assembly,

[unclear] as other liberal democracies,

but with the emphasis on keeping an open mind

to novel ideas from the society.

And that is why our schools and businesses still remain open today,

there was no lockdown,

it's been a month with no local confirmed cases.

So the fast part.

Every day, our Central Epidemic Command Center, or CECC,

holds a press conference, which is always livestreamed,

and we work with the journalists,

they answer all the questions from the journalists,

and whenever there's a new idea coming in from the social sector,

anyone can pick up their phone and call 1922

and tell that idea to the CECC.

For example, there was one day in April

where a young boy has said he doesn't want to go to school

because his school mates may laugh at him

because all he had is a pink medical mask.

The very next day,

everybody in the CECC press conference started wearing pink medical masks,

making sure that everybody learns about gender mainstreaming.

And so this kind of rapid response system

builds trust between the government and the civil society.

And the second focus is fairness.

Making sure everybody can use their national health insurance card

to collect masks from nearby pharmacies,

not only do we publish the stock level of masks of all pharmacies,

6,000 of them,

we publish it every 30 seconds.

That's why our civic hackers, our civil engineers in the digital space,

built more than 100 tools that enable people to view a map,

or people with blindness who talk to chat bots, voice assistants,

all of them can get the same inclusive access to information

about which pharmacies near them still have masks.

And because the national health insurance single payer

is more than 99.9 percent of health coverage,

people who show any symptoms

will then be able to take the medical mask,

go to a local clinic,

knowing fully that they will get treated fairly

without incurring any financial burden.

And so people designed a dashboard

that lets everybody see our supply is indeed growing,

and whether there's over- or undersupply,

so that we codesign this distribution system

with the pharmacies, with the whole of society.

So based on this analysis,

we show that there was a peak at 70 percent,

and that remaining 20 percent of people were often young, work very long hours,

when they go off work, the pharmacies also went off work,

and so we work with convenience stores

so that everybody can collect their mask anytime,

24 hours a day.

So we ensure fairness of all kinds,

based on the digital democracy's feedback.

And finally, I would like to acknowledge that this is a very stressful time.

People feel anxious, outraged,

there's a lot of panic buying,

a lot of conspiracy theories in all economies.

And in Taiwan,

our counter-disinformation strategy is very simple.

It's called "humor over rumor."

So when there was a panic buying of tissue paper, for example,

there was a rumor that says,

"Oh, we're ramping up mass production,

it's the same material as tissue papers,

and so we'll run out of tissue paper soon."

And our premier showed a very memetic picture

that I simply have to share with you.

In very large print,

he shows his bottom,

wiggling it a little bit,

and then the large print says

"Each of us only have one pair of buttocks."

And of course, the serious table shows

that tissue paper came from South American materials,

and medical masks come from domestic materials,

and there's no way that ramping up production of one

will hurt the production of the other.

And so that went absolutely viral.

And because of that, the panic buying died down

in a day or two.

And finally, we found out the person who spread the rumor in the first place

was the tissue paper reseller.

And this is not just a single shock point in social media.

Every single day,

the daily press conference gets translated

by the spokesdog of the Ministry of Health and Welfare,

that translated a lot of things.

For example, our physical distancing is phrased as saying

"If you are outdoors, you need to keep two dog-lengths away,

if you are indoor, three dog-lengths away," and so on.

And hand sanitation rules, and so on.

So because all this goes viral,

we make sure that the factual humor spreads faster than rumor.

And they serve as a vaccine, as inoculation,

so that when people see the conspiracy theories,

the R0 value of that will be below one,

meaning that those ideas will not spread.

And so I only have this five-minute briefing,

the rest of it will be driven by your Q and A,

but please feel free to read more

about Taiwan's counter-coronavirus strategy,

at taiwancanhelp.us.

Thank you.

DB: That's incredible.

And I love this "humor versus rumor."

The problem here in the US, perhaps,

is that the rumors seem to travel faster than any response,

whether humorous or not.

How do you defeat that aspect in Taiwan?

AT: Yeah, we found that, of course,

humor implicitly means there is a sublimation

of upsetness, of outrage.

And so as you see, for example, in our premier's example,

he makes fun of himself.

He doesn't make a joke at the expense of other people.

And this was the key.

Because people think it hilarious,

they share it,

but with no malicious or toxic intentions.

People remember the actual payload,

that table about materials used to produce masks,

much more easily.

If they make a joke that excludes parts of the society,

of course, that part of society will feel outraged

and we will end up creating more divisiveness,

rather than prosocial behavior.

So the humor at no expense,

not excluding any part of society,

I think that was the key.

DB: It's also incredible

because Taiwan has such close ties to the origin point of this.

AT: PRC, yes.

DB: The mainland.

So given those close economic ties,

how do you survive that kind of disruption?

AT: Yeah, I mean, at this moment,

it's been almost a month now with no local confirmed cases,

so we're doing fine.

And what we are doing, essentially,

is just to respond faster than pretty much anyone.

We started responding last year,

whereas pretty much everybody else started responding this year.

We tried to warn the world last year, but, anyway.

So in any case,

the point here is that if you start early enough,

you get to make sure that the border control

is the main point where you quarantine all the returning residents and so on,

instead of waiting until the community spread stage,

where even more human-right invading techniques

would probably have to be deployed one way or the other.

And so in Taiwan, we've not declared an emergency situation.

We're firmly under the constitutional law.

Because of that, every measure the administration is taking

is also applicable in non-coronavirus times.

And this forces us to innovate.

Much as the idea of "we are an open liberal democracy"

prevented us from doing takedowns.

And therefore, we have to innovate of humor versus rumor,

because the easy path, the takedown of online speech,

is not accessible to us.

Our design criteria, which is no lockdowns,

also prevented us from doing any, you know,

very invasive privacy encroaching response system.

So we have to innovate at the border,

and make sure that we have a sufficient number of, for example,

quarantine hotels or the so-called "digital fences,"

where your phone is basically connected to the nearby telecoms,

and they make sure that if they go out of the 15-meter or so radius,

an SMS is sent to the local household managers or police and so on.

But because we focus all these measures at the border,

the vast majority of people live a normal life.

DB: Let's talk about that a little bit.

So walk me through the digital tools

and how they were applied to COVID.

AT: Yes.

So there's three parts that I just outlined.

The first one is the collective intelligence system.

Through online spaces

that we design to be devoid of Reply buttons,

because we see that, when there's Reply buttons,

people focus on each other's face part, not the book part,

and without "Reply" buttons,

you can get collective intelligence

working out their rough consensus of where the direction is going

with the response strategies.

So we use a lot of new technologies,

such as Polis,

which is essentially a forum that lets you upvote and downvote

each other's feelings,

but with real-time clustering,

so that if you go to cohack.tw,

you see six such conversations,

talking about how to protect the most vulnerable people,

how to make a smooth transition,

how to make a fair distribution of supplies and so on.

And people are free to voice their ideas,

and upvote and downvote each other's ideas.

But the trick is that we show people the main divisive points,

and the main consensual points,

and we respond only to the ideas

that can convince all the different opinion groups.