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.
> 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.
First of all, there's a known, deadly problem of disinformation spreading via WhatsApp forwarding [1], and I'm pretty sure WhatsApp notifications are chronological.
But in any case, definitely none of this would be a problem if we got rid of the Internet. What's your point?
Algorithmic newsfeeds benefit social media companies enormously (by increasing engagement) and at least some consumers (I'm not denying they also hurt some consumers). They'll never voluntarily give them up, and banning them would be an extremely oddly specific measure that's probably unconstitutional and definitely has lots of loopholes ("we're not an algorithm newsfeed---we just prioritizing your notifications, like Gmail's Priority Inbox").
They're here to stay. We can fix them or come up with something better that eclipses them, but there's no banning them.
I never suggested banning anything. I'm merely asking questions. But sure, to play devil's advocate, is there some precedent here? Maybe with cigarettes for example?
Nicotine cigarettes benefit tobacco companies enormously (by increasing addiction). They'll never voluntarily give them up, either. Yet we have approaches for dealing with addictive consumables; taxes, health warnings, education, etc. I wonder if similar approaches might work when applied to social media.
I don't think cigarettes are a relevant precedent. It's not like cigarettes cause cancer in some people and make others healthier. (I guess it can make you thinner? But yet it still increases your likelihood of heart disease.)
Algorithmic newsfeeds are a much better experience for many people, who don't want thoughtful discussion and wedding and family photos buried under people announcing to the world that they're pooping.
You also didn't respond to my point that deadly viral WhatsApp forwards refute your contention that "99%" of disinformation problems are due to algorithmic rather than chronological newsfeeds.
Other than rate-limiting, I don't know how you can avoid WhatsApp forwards becoming a problem without violating E2E encryption. However, WhatsApp seems to act more as an amplifier than as a net originator of content, so it makes sense to look at places where misinformation is first published.
With pure timeline-based views, the ability to reinforce misinformation is diminished -- yes, people can repost and troll news mechanically, but that can be rate-limited. So I don't think we should throw the idea out the window just yet.
I'm not sure what you mean about acting as an amplifier---how is that different from social media like Facebook?
You might be right about the reinforcement being diminished, just like misinformation existed before the Internet, but getting rid of the Internet would surely diminish the reinforcement. Like I asked above, so what? There's no going back.
And who is that problematic authority? The social network defers to the fact-checkers, of whom there are multiple independent ones, and who should be corroborating the government's story not taking it at face value.
A government body doesn't become an "authority" automatically, in the sense of being trusted as an authoritative source. It has to establish such a reputation over time. If it has established such a reputation, I'd be happier to trust its information than something circulated on Facebook from an unknown source.
After all, we generally can't check each observation or theory ourselves first hand. Deciding which sources are trustworthy and which are not is a critical issue.
Actually, if people are willing to be influenced by disinformation on the Internet, I suspect they are not using an "authority" model of information at all. Perhaps all they care about is whether the "information" is useful to whatever causes they believe in, not its source.
E.g., an anti-vaxxer reading a post on Facebook that agrees that vaccination is harmful, by this concept would be likely to approve the post (like, share) without wasting time with authorities or fact-checking.
>making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship.
Devotion, a small Taiwanese horror game, is an example of people abusing these types of control on steam
>Devotion, which came under fire over the weekend because of the presence of a piece of art that appears to mock Chinese president Xi Jinping. That quickly led to a massive review-bombing campaign (that has now bled over into Devotion's predecessor, Detention)
Anything that's crowdsourced and likely to be manipulated needs to have a plan for handling coordinated inauthentic activity. I imagine Steam's existing measures are designed more around preventing game developers from using fake positive reviews to promote their games rather than fake negative reviews as a form of censorship.
I wouldn't be so quick to imagine that. Especially recently, Steam has seen many legitimate, organic negative review bombs. The truth is likely closer to the fact that Valve is known to just not really care about the quality of their storefront
> making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship
That is not what was described,
> this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will 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.
This gives me some weird feelings. I mean, if you ask a website to turn some content "unpreferred" without user consensus, isn't that also some type of censorship? In fact, many Chinese websites are doing it right now, and it's very effective in terms of censoring contents.
However, I support the idea of content flagging, but instead of making them "unpreferred", maybe add a mark saying "Propaganda from XXX" so people can be more cautious about those information themselves?
One of the problems with this is that there is not general agreement on what constitutes, "propaganda". The Taiwanese official cited in this article refers to it as, "disinformation" and many people wrongly assume that the government is referring to "fake news" or factually false information when it refers to propaganda. In fact, many governments and other organizations in a position to distribute information arbitrarily refer to any information that counters their narrative as "propaganda" whether or not its factually correct. You can be certain that the Chinese government regards any accounts (let alone praise) for the Tank Man as hostile propaganda, no matter how factually accurate it is, just like the US government treats narratives that reflect negatively on the US government narrative to be propaganda ("sowing dissent"). I'd be more much receptive to a system that had a way to flag information as "factually inaccurate" (as difficult as that may be) than a system that flags messages as "propaganda" which is far more arbitrary and subjective standard.
It may be that Facebook does not want to show articles in its news feed with the "disinformation" tag attached.
For the government to be more transparent, I suppose you could just publish the articles you marked as disinformation, and let people debate whether they were truly fake or not. Doing nothing, right now, does not seem like an option, in the face of propaganda coming from other countries.
I really like the "unpreferred" idea, but I think it should be just a setting. Sometimes the filtering/"unpreferring" should be opt-out (e.g. gore, porn), other times opt-in (left-wing propaganda, right-wing propaganda, ...), but at all times configurable by the user.
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 was a source of misinformation in the past, but now is the source of truth (as in the past). How is that reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus being propagandists?
Now, I get that the PRC has definite identifiable goals so it might be easier to suss out here, but what about other areas?
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 generation, and no amount of fact checking will unseat your viewers' biases.
Taiwan doesn't have this problem yet, but it is a very small place compared to the USA, and as the article indicates its free press is very young. I'm very curious how they'd handle the uprising of an organization like Fox or Breitbart.
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.
"Entertainment as News" fits a lot of what people consume.
News Business contains overlapping elements of Show Business. Production, post-production, dramatization, acting, advertising, storytelling, actors, agents, a whole lot of money, etc. Both are sometimes owned by the same networks and parent corporations too. There's a difference between "news as a business" and just "news".
If a news business were to broadcast plaintext news with only raw pictures, videos, and audio, and bare-minimum graphics to the masses, then their broadcast would be super boring to the layperson and not grab people's attention the same way explosions, special effects, and hypothetical opinions would. As the saying goes, "it's just business". (Imagine a content comparison of 'weather.gov' vs. 'The Weather Channel' for context).
Entertainment is the sauce businesses add on top of the pasta that is the news to make their product more appealing to consumers.
Now, politics is the most popular flavor addition to news (and has been for the last few years). News Businesses have self-politicized their news products because that is the "entertainment" trend of news that is a hot seller. This is more than just "news" - it's finding ways to innovate facts and opinions to sell a particular "product" to a particular demographic.
Whether it's the government or a corporation, someone in a suit sitting in an armchair at the top is going to favor pushing the version that benefits themselves the most. Don't just hate or like sources blindly because they say "we are the good guys!"[1]
> The host of “The Daily Show” promised to double down on informing his audience, many of whom he acknowledged use the Comedy Central series as a primary news source.
Well, to be honest, the free press is often its own source of misinformation, often simply parroting the government / big business position, for a variety of reasons - since way before stuff like Fox or Breitbart.
There is sadly no simple answer to the problem of obtaining The Truth...
"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?
I think because the Taiwanese government is taking the "responsible for public safety and security" role to a natural conclusion for the 21st century - fake news is dangerous, the government is doing its role to combat that.
The free press still exists and can fact check away. And, since Taiwan is democratic, if a minister takes the piss, the press can report on it, and the public can elect someone else.
> But the minister herself indicates the government did just that in the past
In that more autocratic era, the people who called out the government would have been arrested and imprisoned. That has now changed and that the public and press are now more freely allowed to challenge what is being said by their government.
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.
Mainstream press doesn't like to call the government out on bald-faced lies, because then they get cut off from government information sources.
This is currently happening with the White House. Nobody has enough of a spine to be sufficiently critical of the firehose of garbage that it broadcasts, because their press correspondent credentials will be revoked.
Yeah by making your own counter-message, you're being humble with respect to that possibility. Let there be two propagandas dropped at the same time and hopefully the truth will tip the scales.
> How is that reconciled? How does one know when the government is being truthful versus being propagandists?
If there are multiple conflicting narratives, at least some people will be motivated to do more research to resolve the contradiction. If the government is being more truthful, its statements can point to resources that provide independent verification, accelerating the process. At a minimum that will blunt the effect of the lies.
What happens when the misinformation is coming from inside the government? A problem in, for example, the UK, where there is an internal conflict within the Cabinet over Brexit, and where ministers are willing to spout some things that are, frankly, bullshit.
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.
It is ultimately up to the people to decide which side of the story to believe. All the usual heuristics apply: Do they have a history of lying? Are they acting as if they're trying to save their own asses? Did they just casually forget to mention a piece of information that happens to contradict their argument?
Governments are often so awful at passing this test that even when they're telling the truth, a lot of people would rather believe crazy conspiracy theories. This is especially problematic in countries with a recent history of dictatorship like Taiwan and South Korea. If Ms. Tang can instill in her ministry a culture of responding quickly, effectively, and earnestly to current issues, that would be a major contribution to the public discourse even if the government isn't always truthful.
Also, this is Taiwan, not PRC. Very different government.
I don't agree, I think this approach is completely legitimate. Because it is prominent politicians who are spreading this message, it is clear where it is coming from and what the motivations are. It isn't manipulation, like seeding articles with a subtext of some idea or another. It is just, here's the governments view of this issue. And then it seems like the idea is for people to think about that, and they will compare to the other idea.
So everyone, including government leaders, get to share their thoughts, people get to choose what is best. If what was described is actually what happens. In the past, the government ideas would be the only ideas shared.
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.
lol, for the few comments that did this, that's most likely just standard internet posting. The "location [X] is in the title, thus I'll make a comment about location [X]" is particularly common. With little relation to the substance or intentions of previous comments.
Though, I admit I'm not sure if this post is being tongue-in-cheek, since it was made by a completely new account. Thus demonstrating in itself another way that online discussions can be influenced.
I would posit that this differs _significantly_ as it's being done with transparency and the motives for it are being clearly expressed by those pursuing the efforts. This stands in stark contrast to the assumed and obviously nefarious motives of those responsible for the disinformation. What better approach, I wonder?
You don't seem to really be contradicting my point. You're just assuming that the 'good guys' don't lie while the others are the 'bad guys' who obviously do lie.
There are indeed fighting propaganda with counter-propaganda, which is an age old strategy. They do seem to have adapted it for our era of instant communication and social media.
Now, working out the facts in any given situation is not always easy. Everyone tends to spin things, or to omit things, or to simply make things up...
One difference is that they can be held accountable for their actions, something that doesn't apply to freedomeagle69.facebook any more than it applies to people working at the PRC ministry of "cultural well-being."
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 within which the market competes, and this is a great example of that.
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.
For a very brief time, late in the Cold War, the US State Department had a very shoestring team called the "Active Measures Working Group" who worked to investigate and counteracting disinformation. They had some success, such as uncovering the Soviet origins of the lie that the US created AIDS in a military lab, but the effort was wound down after the Soviet Union fell:
Off the top of my head, I don't have a bunch of links, but it is my impression that propaganda and counter-propaganda are extremely important strategic ongoing activities for all major governments including the US. This is due to the relationship between overt state activities (i.e., they need to be motivated by ethical concerns) and the press.
One of her projects, EtherCalc, is my preferred spreadsheet software of choice. So it's a bit of a context shift to see political interviews! But her position on combating disinformation without censorship seems pretty on-point, and where I'd really like to see the conversation shift here.
She was talking about this article's tactics at Open Government Partnership Summit last week, but mostly emphasized the feline nature of some of the counter-propaganda :)
https://twitter.com/audreyt/status/1134532549957394432
And for a look at how she's rockin transparency in gov, check out her log of ALL convos she has with ANY non-gov stakeholders: https://pdis.nat.gov.tw/en/track/
Combatting disinformation will become more and more important for every organization. I'm glad to see at least one government taking it seriously and pushing social/media companies to actually do something and add tools. When will we have degree programs in Disinformation Prevention and Control, Anti-Manipulation, Discourse Integrity? How about job titles like Discourse Protector, Media Accountability Officer, Fact-Checker, and Truth Wielder? I think companies usually hire PR firms to do this work. That's like hiring thieves to protect your valuables. It can work, but is it really the best strategy?
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative.
a very interesting approach that seems to be working for taiwan. i think that European countries may be able to implement something similar with good results. of course, it relies on the government ministries being uniformly oriented against disinformation -- something that we in the US cannot manage, as many elements in our government benefit from certain kinds of disinformation.
notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship. i don't have enough context to tell whether this is the case or not, but at the core the entire taiwanese plan relies on the ministries as being able to tell the difference between disinformation and facts. in other words, it's fundamentally a critical-thinking based system.
>notably, for all its merits, the taiwanese system still positions the government in an information vetting capacity, which may lead some to think that it is merely another system of propaganda or quasi-censorship
This is kind of how I see it too. I think if your goal is to combat disinformation or propaganda you should just come out straight up and say it because it's a perfectly defensible position to hold, but creating a government counter-narrative isn't any more harmless than just censoring something, it's just sounds nicer than having to use the word "censor" which tends to make people in some parts of the word jump up in panic.
> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will 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.
That'd be very interesting if the Taiwanese government was in direct communication with Facebook over something like this. CPJ wasn't able to get a hold of Facebook, I wonder if anyone here has visibility into something like that? Given that the US government took a more "combative" approach (dragging executives in front of Congress) I'd be curious how more tame approaches like this were being received.
It is censorship though. Part of the job of the censor is to determine whether the likelyhood some information will be seen, justifies the censorship in question.
You can read the censor reports from the estado novo for example, and in many of them the censor declined to ban the book because even though it was objectively illegal, it would naturally be a book that wouldn't be sought after by the general public, and so only those who knew about it would look for it.
I'd say this is an even more pernicious form of censorship because you dont know what you dont know.
It should be noted that dragging executives in front of Congress might not have been received well, but it did "its job" by nudging these companies into expanding their outsourced moderation practices to topics important to the US government [0], without the US government itself being too directly involved.
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)
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.
is anyone interested in an hn meetup in taipei? found it hard to like-minded tech focused people, talking English, that dont mind a beer from time to time, and would like to talk about the last google cloud downtime or it's current side project
While two dogs are fighting for a bone, a third runs away with it.
What people saw is disinformation that looks like from China, or China looks like is the most beneficial one from the disinformation. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's from China. There might be third parties faking it to sabotage the relationship between China and Taiwan. Aka false flag.
Or simply put, I could create disinformation about me, then I crack it. That will probably discredit my competitor, even though he/she did nothing.
Of course, people could call this conspiracy theory, because lack of evidence. Similarly, people shouldn't consider that so-called China's effort is true. At least to me, I won't be so sure before I see some solid evidence.
Taiwan is a critical democratic ally off the coast of communist China - why would US intelligence agencies attack the public perception of the sovereignty of the nation?
Great approach, and a smart minister. Living in Taipei I can only congratulate the country for this lively and young democracy. If you consider moving to Asia, Taiwan is the most forward, fair and open society.
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 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.
Not to mention the absurdly low cost of living, one of the best public transit systems in the world, socialized healthcare, strong education system churning out competent professionals, and mountains... My partner and I are preparing a semi permanent move in the next few years.
> 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.
Interestingly, the sentiment doesn't appear only when China is discussed. There are a number of comments that boil down to "democracy has failed" or "democracy will fail in the next few years" (usually when automation is discussed).
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of neoreactionary theory that is slowly seeping into public discourse.
There are a number of comments that boil down to "democracy has failed" or "democracy will fail in the next few years" (usually when automation is discussed).
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of neoreactionary theory that is slowly seeping into public discourse.
My hunch is that it's a cornerstone of the newest progressive agenda to give more power to the federal government and to California and New York. What's been slowly seeping into the public discourse is, "Freedom? Meh."
Don't like someone's speech. "F Free Speech!" The trend is to give either the government or big corporations more control over people's interactions at work, how employers pay employees, what information we receive, and how much privacy we have in commerce and the information we consume.
The people must always fight the power and speak truth to power. What we have forgotten in recent years, is that the insurgents need to amass power to do so, and by amassing power, they often become the established power. I remember a quip about Postmodernism by a PhD student -- how it started out as something disruptive and edgy, then ended up as the stuff you had to spout to get your degree. The edgy, subversive media and academic movements of the 60's are now the media and academic establishment of 2019.
When in doubt, always go to first principles and universal principles. Be skeptical of feelings -- governments and corporations have long been using emotions to manipulate people. Governments for thousands of years, and corporations started in earnest well over a century ago.
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.
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 they want.
> 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 how is it doing? We have garbage voting machines that are easily hackable, rampant gerrymandering, and coordinated disinformation campaigns that contributed to Trump of all people being our president.
Don't get me wrong, I'd rather have it than not have it, and I think we can solve these problems. I'm optimistic. But those are just the problems WE have in a developed country one third the size of China, and with better infrastructure, education, and quality of live overall. I can't imagine trying to implement an _effective_ voting system in a country like China where many people do not even have clean water or basic sanitation yet. Not to mention the fact that they don't have division of powers, so before democracy was implemented they'd require a whole bottom up restructuring of their entire governmental apparatus.
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.
Honestly I could name a few things but it's such a massive, complicated place that it's hard to say anything about it. Certainly if you go there and travel around a bit you will learn a lot. You will only scratch the surface but it's a start.
One big issue unique to China is related to fallout from the cultural revolution, which affected a huge number of people. Read this section of the Wiki about education to get some idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
Another is the lack of a separation of powers. The geography of China carries a lot of challenges as well. One of the advantages the US had was being able to develop in an extremely protected place in the world. China has had pressure from a wide variety of neighboring states for almost its entire history.
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.
> every province does have its own government with some degree of autonomy
That's not a federal system as generally understood.
Generally, the distinction between a federal system and a unitary state with somewhat-autonomous subdivisions is that in a federal system, the powers of the subnational entities are constitutionally entrenched, whereas in a unitary state, the autonomy of a subnational division is at the will of the national government.
The overwhelming majority of countries have some form of autonomous regional government, because it's impossible to run any sufficiently large country any other way, but the majority of countries are not federations.
For one, you'll get the same problems as all the homeless pouring into California, or poorer Central Americans pouring over the border, and the subsequent backlash. Democracies will not support the sort of development model that China has pursued of massive wealth transfer and development of the hinterlands. Developed areas will want to wall themselves off but less developed areas will want populist policies. Add on top of that ethnic issues that would be easily exploitable by demagogues. More likely than not the country falls apart.
Don't be so smug, the US and EU are only getting a small taste of the sort of problems that China has been facing for several thousand years as a diverse centralized state, and are already resorting to the sort of things that China ended up having to do with respect to social control and stability.
Well yes, the other model is India where they tolerate certain problems and let them go on forever, but people can bitch about it. Analogous to the phenomenon of adults peeing and doing drugs on the streets of downtown SF.
Not saying it's better or worse in the end but at the least, the experiment goes on.
Regarding peeing specifically, India has a Nationwide push for increasing toilet infrastructure. The change over the past five years, let alone ten, is dramatic. Possibly faster than anything in human history.
I also don't understand why you think nobody is doing anything about people using the restroom on the streets of SF - new bathroom trailers are being added. It's not much but it's something, and more are coming.
If you have other ideas, would you like to join me tomorrow at 2pm for the next board of supervisors meeting to present them to the city?
Taiwan, is trying really hard to attract foreign talents. If you're interested, check their Golden Card Permit. It's a visa+redisent card allowing you to stay and work for anyone there up to 3years. The only requirement is to justify of a salary of 160k NTD/month(~USD 5210/month), anywhere in the world, if you don't earn that, try the skills application[1].
I'll not talk about all the positive things about Taiwan, just read the other comments.
Spending a considerable amount of time in both Taiwan and China for work and personal reasons over the last 10 years I'm always shocked to see the huge difference between those two countries that have a common origin.
As a European I think Taiwan would be one of the easiest and best places where I could relocate in Asia. Mainland China on the other hand would be a nightmare.
Do you include in your evaluation uregulated political status of the state on international forum?
When I read about it, technically ROC should be the real china in the international law sense, but de facto it's PRC. (I think so, correct me please) I dont think it's officially resolved at all, even how many chinas are there...
From the middle of europe I am not afraid of Chinese (mainland ofc) army but close there, when PRC says the island is PRC, and ROC say it's ROC while they don't lost UN recognition, I consider it a serious risk. Unless one fancies fighting for freedom at some point.
Also looking from the middle of europe I am skeptical in the general international reaction, when even much stronger mandate, it achieved no practical result with Ukraine/Russia dispute.
All above saddens me deeply, because otherwise I find it hard to argue.
Statistically speaking, I should spend far more mental energy on ensuring I don't get hit by a car on my bicycle ride home this evening, than I should worry about getting nuked by China.
If China invades Taiwan while I'm there, I will deal with the situation, or perhaps I'll be killed. That's life, and that's life no matter where I am (maybe I'll get hit by a car tonight, maybe I'll get killed in a freak sparring accident, maybe I'll crash my motorcycle). I won't let these concerns stop me from living, while taking reasonable precautions when I do partake in risky activities.
As for international law - the USA de facto recognizes the sovereignty of Taiwan in many ways. For example, Taiwanese citizens can apply for an ESTA visa waiver - Chinese cannot. The USA sells arms to Taiwan, not to China. Taiwanese citizens are eligible for Global Entry, Chinese aren't.
>The act further stipulates that the United States will "consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States".
Taiwan is a sovereign nation, but the whole world has to tip toe around a fragile PRC ego about it. I'm not afraid of living there and shouting to the world that the ROC is the superior version of Chinese government.
From their About page, they are focused on disinformation coming from the government of Russia. Do you know if they do anything like Taiwan's 60-min response goal with accountability?
The real nugget in here is their solution for dealing with fake news spreading on private social networks: it needs a centralized list just like with email’s spam problem!
> Back in the early 2000s we, the Internet community, convinced each and every mail operator to add that flag button to its interface so that when you flag that as spam you're essentially donating the signature of this message. It's not involuntary. It's a voluntary donation to a global system called the Spamhaus, the Domain Block List, and so on.
> There's a whole system for that. It's like the email's immune system so that after sufficient people flag it they do a correlation. After they correlated the sender of the spam, once the sender sends another email it still reach the recipient, it's not censorship, but it goes to the junk mail folder so it doesn't waste people's time by default.
> 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.
> First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited testing or A/B testing, and that's before it became really popular. It's just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so to speak.
I have definitely seen this happen in real time. Suggest it publicly and you'll be accused of being Alex Jones, but it happens. Glad to see a public official acknowledging this.
> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.
An interesting approach, might be an oversimplification of real-world dynamics though.
> Once they do that, Facebook promises, by June, that this will inform the Facebook's algorithm so that it will 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.
This is much better than removing the post, but it still makes me nervous. Just imagine that we're in the early 2000s, and you can envision a banner saying "The claims in this article are FALSE. As confirmed by the intelligence community and the New York Times, Iraq is actively working on its nuclear weapons program." Perhaps they should have a policy limiting the use of this tool when it comes to issues that may lead to war.
I can tell you all about how the propaganda campaign to justify the Iraq invasion was pulled off. They had agents on message boards and all over the Internet even back then. They even drafted the comedian, Dennis Miller, to go on late night tv shows multiple times and push the propaganda there. I was astounded that very few people were talking about what a sell job it all was.
Just to refresh everyone's memory: Saddam didn't have WMDs. It was a total put up.
We need to somehow get these intelligence agencies and their deep state buddies put back in a box.
IIRC didn't they get bad intel from Iraqies who wanted an invasion (because they didn't like Sadam)? I think they might have known the intel was suspect, but didn't ask too many questions.
I grew up among conservative US expats who didn't have message boards and mostly didn't watch television. I think you underestimate the desire of some Americans to relive their glory days and "liberate" other countries.
Edit: I think most of them didn't really even care about WMDs, they just knew Sadam was an evil person (and to be fair, he was).
For those that don't know, Audrey Tang was involved or wrote one of the early Perl6 VMs in Haskell iirc. I can't remember if it was Pugs or Parrot. The language still has Haskell roots.
Haha. Always good to be corrected by the subject in question :)
Thanks for the hard work in helping to get that project off the ground btw. As a language user and not an implementor, I sometimes feel bad that I use so much open source software without giving anything back except word of mouth approval.
I haven't read the full article yet, but I'm sure it is an immensely complicated situation balancing individual freedoms versus the spread of "disinformation". That is what I got from skimming last night. In the US we have so much of this right now with anti-vaxxers and people turning against medical science in favor of fraudulent cures like "essential oils".
In the interview concerns of government over-control did turn up, but it wasn't well addressed I think. The journalist skipped this part in the published article.
>Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative.
why wait? In many situations/events it is very predictable what fake news and disinformation will appear in say the next hours, so it is possible to do totally preventive Truth "injections" well before the disinformation appears (sometimes even before the originating situation/event happens itself).
One of the most important aspects in fake news and disinformation spread is the receptivity of the given populace to the fake news and information. That receptivity is based on many factors, like education, prejudices, economic and social situation, etc. For example, by systematically performing daily "ground Truth" disinformation "vaccinations" government can work on decreasing the prejudices and thus decreasing the disinformation receptivity of the populace.
The comparison of disinformation to a virus and proactive counter-messaging to a vaccine understandable. It's also interesting because the words "virus" and "vaccine" only make sense in relationship to the host. In this case, are the people of a country the "host" or just the government in charge?
I'm intensely curious why you thought to include this line here. Are you willing to share your thoughts on why it was necessary? Judging from your comment history, you seem intelligent enough to know that not only would such a line not be very well received here (obviously), it's also in opposition of a bunch of the HN guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.