Audrey Tang: bringing digital diplomacy to the world

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? the History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts with the European Athletics Championships the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport and the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists More Than The Score for the BBC World Service.

1:05Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:31at some pace. Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years. That's enough. I don't have army. I don't have missile rockets. I have my body. I have my voice. I love singing. And so my goal was always to do better and better at it. I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me. For this interview, I met Audrey Tang, Taiwan's cyber ambassador at large from Taipei. She was instrumental in transforming the fortunes of Taiwan's government through the use of technology after a student protest against a trade deal with China led her into government.

2:11A champion of transparency and citizen engagement, you're going to hear how her team used social media and polling apps and worked on closing the digital divide through universal broadband access. As a result of these measures, Taiwan was better equipped than most to deal with the COVID pandemic, reducing concerns over data privacy and trusting government information. She went on to become Taiwan's first digital minister and was key to preparing citizens for election interference in 2024. Audrey overcame a life-threatening heart condition as a child, so reading, philosophy and the internet became the bedrock of her life.

2:50Perhaps as a result of this, Audrey is insistent on putting humanity firmly at the centre of our digital world. I think one in 10 people report that when they have an extended conversation with AI chatbot, it is the chatbot controlling the direction of conversation. They're out of control, which is very interesting considering that it has to wait for you to type the next sentence. But already people are feeling pulled by synthetic intimacy. So in the next five years, we're going to see more and more of that. If the AI systems we use empowers communities, then we should see less isolation, more people-to-people interaction.

3:29But if they are synthetic intimacy replacing human connection, then we're going to see more and more isolation. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Audrey Tang. I was born with a heart defect when I was almost five years old. doctors told me and my family that I only had a 50 % chance to survive until heart surgery. So for the first 12 years of my life, I could not get too upset or too happy. Otherwise, I faint and I find myself waking up in the hospital. I learned Taoist breathing to meditate and to make sure that I don't go too joyful or too angry. And I learned that before I go to sleep, I publish everything I learned every day.

4:23I call this publish before I perish because it felt like a coin toss. If it doesn't land well, then maybe I don't wake up. So first in cassettes and then floppy disk. And finally on the internet, I don't accumulate. I just share what I learned that day. That's an extraordinary response for a child. And it must have been frightening for you to grow up in that shadow. Yeah. And I think I only was able to cope with this situation because I really learned, especially on the Internet, actually imperfection is an invitation. If I post something too perfect, people just press like and then they scroll away.

5:09But because I don't have time to be perfect, people see those vulnerabilities, those cracks as invitations to chime in, to contribute. And so I made many good friends simply by publishing the drafts that I did not have time to perfect during the day. Let's just keep up with your life story here, because you were involved in a protest movement in 2014. And that led to you working with the government in Taiwan. That's quite an extraordinary journey in itself. Yeah. So it started, I guess, as a protest in March 2014, where people did not like the fast tracking of a trade deal with Beijing that would have invited Huawei, ZTE and so on into our new 4G infrastructure and our publishing industry and so on.

6:02But very quickly, we turned the protest into a demonstration. So not just against the trade deal, but for a new way of democracy that invites the half million people on the street and many more online to in small groups like groups of 10 to have a real conversation about our preferences was acceptable when dealing with Beijing and trade deals in general. So after three weeks of non-violent Occupy, we actually converged on a set of uncommon ground, surprising common ground that people can all live with. And the Speaker of the Parliament at the time said, well, the people's version is better than the MP's version.

6:45So let's go with it. So it's one of those very rare Occupy that is not just about taking something down, but building something new. Did you expect it to work? Yes, certainly. Already at a time we understood if we use the social media or the anti-social corners, it only amplifies the polarisation, the extreme. But the way we constructed the conversation network through broad listening, not just broadcasting, is to amplify the middle ground and mute the extremes. Did you start out thinking this was going to be an act of rebellion or did you always intend to shape your country legitimately? Well, I think this is a little bit of both.

7:28It is a rebellion in a sense. It's direct action, right? We seized the means of communication. We literally crowdsourced the internet connection. I personally brought 350 metres of internet cables to the occupied parliament. Did you? Yes. And you connected everything? Right, exactly. So that people on the streets can see the occupied parliament. And this is called humor over rumor because the rumor only spread in the vacuum of communication. But if you make the live stream interesting, humorous, so people feel engaged, then there really is no room for the polarization attack, for the disinformation and so on.

8:13And because of that, we always expected to work as a demonstration. So the rebellion was the direct action, but the demonstration was in a new form of democracy. And so from that moment, you started working with the government and you helped to introduce a lot of changes that dramatically improved the approval ratings of the government. Tell me about some of those initiatives, things like VTaiwan. Yes. In 2014, when the sunflower movement happened, the president, Ma Ying-jeou, was enjoying 9 % of approval rating. So in a country of 24 million people, anything the president says, 20 million people didn't really trust him.

8:56However, we understood to give no trust is to get no trust. So the government need to radically trust the people. So the VTaiwan process invites the divided ideas from, for example, Uber drivers and taxi driver when ride sharing first came to Taiwan and use the same method to amplify the smaller groups' ideas that can cross-pollinate across ideological differences. For example, saying that undercutting meters is bad, but surge pricing, raising the price is fine. So that is a bridging idea. And by making the bridging ideas viral, not the extreme ideas, we agreed on a set of law that is not just fair to taxi and Uber, but also takes care of the rural places and so on.

9:44And so after 100 or so of such collaborative meetings, by 2020, the approval rating of Dr. Tsai Ing-wen at the time was over 70%. So a massive difference. And you went on to become Taiwan's first digital minister, didn't you? Yes. So I was digital minister starting 2016, but at a time with our portfolio. But we founded the digital ministry in 2022. And then the pandemic hit, of course. Do you think that Taiwan was well placed to handle things like the misinformation and the fake news that exploded at the time because there was so much fear and uncertainty? Certainly, we understood that the only way to counter these polarization attacks is through journalism.

10:33And I don't just mean institutional journalism. I also mean civic journalism. In 2019, we changed the curriculum of our basic education. So all our primary schoolers, high schoolers learn not just media literacy receiving information, but rather media competency producing information. So they learned the whole journalistic process, fact-checking, balancing perspectives, as well as measuring the air quality, water quality, noise levels, and publishing it so that everybody share the same common knowledge, knowing everybody else knows this as well. And so entering the pandemic times, we repurpose this civic infrastructure instantly so people can visualize, for example, where the next available mask are.

11:23And people together depolarized the conversation around mask, anti-mask, vaccine, anti-vaccine, contact tracing, privacy, and so on. So uniquely, we only lost seven people on the first year of pandemic. And we never locked down any city during the three years. And the TSMC and all the factories keeps running. And fast forward to 2024, last year, there is an election in Taiwan. And there were fears about sabotage by Chinese-sponsored fake news, particularly. how did you preempt this building on what I guess you'd learned during that time? Well we pre-bunked these attacks so it is not debunking after the fact but rather already two years ago I deep faked myself showing people how easy it is at a time already.

12:18Were you nervous about doing that? Not at all. I had an actor play me, basically spoke as me and then we showed exactly how this is done. And I said, you know, this currently takes two hours on a laptop to produce, but soon it would only take 20 milliseconds. And when that day arrives, you cannot really trust anything on content alone. You have to check digital signatures. You have to check the behavior, not just the content. So people already had inoculation against the fakes. So arguably, the attempts, and there were plenty of attempts, accusing of election rigging and so on, but they all backfired.

12:58Our president now, William Lai, got elected more than his polls at over 40%. And we also learned that these attacks from foreign sources and the fake scam and so on, the red lines around which can be drawn by asking the people what to do together. We sent a text message, 200 ,000 random numbers around Taiwan, invited a microcosm of Taiwan, 447 people, and they together talk about mandatory digital signature, liability for investment scams, throttling connection to TikTok if they do not agree our liability rules, which were put in effect last year. This conversation to draw the red lines around deepfakes online was facilitated by what I call assistive intelligence.

13:49So it's also AI, but it's civic AI, it's communal AI. The AI is not a huge see-everything, do-everything, Skynet-ish ruler that replace human relation and judgment, but rather is more like a facilitator. So throughout this year, there's just no defect scams anymore on social media in Taiwan. Do you think the examples that you're sharing of the way in which you're using tech in Taiwan, in governance, in democracy, you have a population of 23 million. Do you think that could be shared across other countries, perhaps larger countries? How about the US, for example? Yeah, definitely. We have just concluded a very successful experiment working with Google Jigsaw Unit, as well as the Napolitan Institute in the US called We the People 250, in which two conversations, one on freedom and one on equality, were held by five people from each congressional district in the US.

14:51So together, these 1 ,000 or so people, again, is a statistical representation of the entire U.S. population. And it turns out, using assistive intelligence, people share their personal lived experience of what freedom means, what equality means. And we were able to build a social translation between people who care, for example, about climate justice and people, for example, who care about biblical creation care. And they both, although they often talk past each other on social media, was then able to see through social translation that they actually share the same concrete actions and can understand each other using this bridging translation layers.

15:34So I'm very happy to report Taiwan is no longer the largest quality to try these methods. You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? the History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts with the European Athletics Championships the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport and the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists More Than The Score for the BBC World Service.

16:50Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

17:01For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Audrey Tang. Audrey is constantly on the move carrying out her tech diplomacy. She told me she's been to 27 countries this year alone. I asked her how she relaxes and she told me it's on long-haul flights. She also writes poetry. And at the end of our interview, to my surprise, she asked if I wanted to hear a poem that she penned in New Zealand in 2016, just after she heard she was going to be Taiwan's first digital minister. It's kind of a job description. When we see Internet of Things, let's make it an Internet of Beings. When we see virtual reality, let's make it a shared reality.

17:44When we see machine learning, let's make it collaborative learning. When we see user experience, let's make it about human experience. And whenever we hear that a singularity is near, let's always remember the plurality is here. Okay, let's return to my conversation with Audrey Tang. Are we taking the threat of AI seriously enough? Well, I think for many people, the threat of AI is already now. It is not sometime in the future. There are people who, for example, reports, one in seven people, I believe, reports that somebody close to them encounter reality-distorting episodes through synthetic intimacy.

18:29So that is a big problem for many people already today. Not just young people, but also people who have vulnerabilities, who suffer from trauma, and so on. And we also know that they trust the chatbots much more than the companies that make the chatbots, which creates, I think, 30 % difference. So I think a way out of this dilemma is instead of saying banning chatbots, we should make sure that the chatbots are aligned to the community's needs, not to the big tech's needs. And is that what you mean when you say that AI alignment is fundamentally flawed? Yes, what I meant with that is that I think it would be much better if the designers of AI systems stay humble and instead of making tech progress at the expense of the local communities, empower the local community in what I call techno-communitarianism so that each community can steer their own AI model toward their own local norms.

19:34We see time and time again the way in which technology, social media, all of these tools can bring out the worst in people and can be damaging and toxic to society. And we also see a growing call from some places to ban them or to delay the introduction of them. We've got Australia banning social media for under 16 year olds. Is that the answer to ban it or delay it? Well, I think equally important is to provide safer alternatives. When the ozone was being depleted by Freon, we didn't just say, oh, let's ban refrigeration, which would be quite devastating. Instead, through the Montreal Protocol, people said, let's double down on safe alternatives.

20:21And we commit ourselves to switch to such alternatives after X years. And so I think the same needs to happen. Of course, if you ban anti-social media and promote pro-social media, that's very good. In Taiwan's classrooms, most classrooms now ban the use of small touchscreens. But each student, we have a one laptop per child policy so that they have large tablets, large laptops. So they see screens as something that they can share with other people to build their relational health, their civic muscle with, instead of isolating oneself into. So I'm not saying that banning is the complete solution.

21:05It may be one part of the solution, but it always works best if you can provide a healthier alternative in the same place. Do you fear the redistribution of power that is going on at the moment, particularly in terms of big tech? We have a handful of enormous companies generally run by enormously powerful men. Does that concern you? If you have off ramps and on ramps across all the parts of the stack, then no matter, you call it the Euro stack, Taiwan stack, India stack, and so on, at the end of the day, one do not need to worry that much because people always have the freedom of movement among choices.

21:53But if because of lobbying, because of other issues, people do not offer the meaningful freedom of exit, then yes, one can get trapped. A couple of years ago, there was a study that asked undergrad students in the US using TikTok, how much they will have to be paid to give up the use of TikTok. And it's about$60 a month. However, if there's a magic button you can press and move everybody they know off TikTok together, they're willing to pay you$30 a month. So obviously, there's a product market trap. Everybody's suffering, but nobody wants to move out because fear of missing out. But if the governments have the freedom of movements baked in, then there is no need for each individual to suffer 60 bucks or 30 bucks a month.

22:46But rather, people can freely, one by one, move to safer alternatives while keeping their communities. How likely is that to happen, though? Well, already the state of Utah is passing that. For instant messaging and group messaging, Europe already have the Digital Markets Act, and they're now looking to extend that to social media. And already people around the world are looking for the AI companies to offer the same, something we call the context portability. So if I switch from one AI service to the other, anything this AI learns about me should be transferred to the next service, which may be open source, which may be run by the community.

23:27So again, this kind of portability, we need to plan it even before the AI systems become indispensable in our daily life, just like social media. Had we had this portability for social media 10 years ago, a lot of the worst antisocial practices would not simply be possible. And so, yeah, I think the context portability is something that we actively talk about in Taiwan in our upcoming AI Basic Act and the Data Innovation Act. I'm sure the European counterparts are thinking about this as well. But that has been a deliberate thing that the tech companies didn't want. They don't want to make it easy for you to leave, do they?

24:07I really want to push back a little bit because if you are the second or the third largest vendor, then portability is good for you. It is only bad for the top vendor, which often takes like 60%, 80 % market share. So when we introduce such kind of bridging mandatory protocols, usually the loss leaders really endorse that. But if you count all of them together, they have equivalent or even better lobbying power compared to the top layer. Do you think that we're going to see a lot of change in the way we use technology and the way technology runs our lives within the next five years? We are already going through a period where many people feel that they do not meaningfully steer the technologies.

24:59I think one in 10 people report that when they have an extended conversation with AI chatbots, it is the chatbot controlling the direction of conversation. They're out of control, which is very interesting considering that it has to wait for you to type the next sentence. But already people are feeling pulled by synthetic intimacy. So yes, in the next five years, we're going to see more and more of that, as I mentioned, like hamster and hamster wheel. And I think one of the very accurate way to show this is to analyze the human-to-human relationships and whether they suffer. If the AI systems we use empowers communities, then we should see less isolation, more people-to-people interaction.

25:45But if they are synthetic intimacy replacing human connection, then we're going to see more and more isolation. Taiwan is bombarded by cyber attacks from China every single day. How are you managing that onslaught? Well, we enjoy free penetration testing, as you said, 2 million attempts every day. Usually you have to pay for this. We get it for free. And we do that by making sure that there is resilience, not just defense. And so by working with a resilience mindset, each attack becomes some intelligence that we can share with democracies around the world so they can guard against the next attack.

26:28Because no democracy is an island, not even Taiwan. So Taiwan may be ground zero for such attempts, but all democracies face the same issue. Who do you think is going to win the AI race, China or the US? Well, humanity, for sure. If humanity do not win the AI race, there may not be a human race anymore. So we're all in this together.

26:54Thank you for listening to the interview from the BBC World Service. You'll find more in-depth conversations on The Interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts, including episodes with Google bus Sundar Pichai, Nobel Prize winning journalist Maria Rassa and economist Frances Fukuyama. Until the next time, bye for now.

27:24If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport.

28:09And the More Than The Skull podcast will be following all the action. bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists. More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now. Search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.