Fast, Fair, Fun: Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang On Pandemic Response

On January 21st, Taiwan’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang appeared at an online event hosted by the Intercollegiate Taiwanese American Students Association (ITASA) to take questions from students interested in her work and views.

George Tang (no relations with Audrey Tang), President of ITASA and a student at Yale University, said the student organizers were most interested in three topics: coronavirus, infodemic and disinformation, and Minister Tang’s experience with the education system.

Civic technology to gender identities 

Picking the most popular questions posed by students from a pool, Tang chatted on topics ranging from civic technologies to Taiwan’s COVID-19 responses to her own gender identity.

Responding to a question on how Taiwan can defend itself against disinformation that threatens democracy, Tang brought up Facebook’s political advertisement transparency library and how Taiwan was the first jurisdiction where Facebook has introduced such a system. The introduction of these systems to promote transparency, Tang argues, has helped prevent foreign-sourced targeted political advertisement from affecting Taiwan’s election.

While responding to a question on whether she has faced struggles in the public sector over her gender identity, “which is whatever, for the record,” Tang added as she repeated the question, she called on the need to move past a binary type of thinking on gender.

“By not identifying with any interpretation of gender identity, I am saying that I can’t be offended; use any pronoun!” Tang told the audience.

George Tang believes that ITASA “can learn a lot” from Minister Tang’s unique identity and experience, since many students are also in the unique situation of being connected to Taiwan despite having been raised or educated abroad.

“It’s important to learn how we can truly be inclusive and accessible as an organization,” George Tang said, and “for the people in our community who also have an unconventional education path or non-binary or a different gender identity to be able to manage these identities and achieve their goal.”

Speaking on the apparent discrepancy between her affiliation with g0v, a collective with the aim of promoting “open source, open government” in Taiwan, and her title as a member of a cabinet that is attempting to push through with a Digital ID card, an issue that has raised much controversy, Tang pointed out that she has been calling for greater level of accountability.

Throughout the pandemic, privacy is increasingly viewed as important, and Tang is optimistic that this public sentiment will translate into efforts to draft a law to protect digital identity, given that even legislators of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party are demanding more accountability.

While several students posed questions asking her opinion on US politics and social media “censorship” of former US President Donald J. Trump, she did not directly respond or take a position. “My work is on social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, and social innovation.”

Integrating innovation: the Face Mask Availability Map

Tang mentioned in length specific cases of her direct contribution to Taiwan Government’s COVID-19 pandemic response, centered around the challenge of making applications and technology introduced by Taiwan civic society’s COVID-19 responses more user-friendly.

For example, Tang faced a challenge when two “social innovations” were created to facilitate the rationing of limited medical masks, but were incompatible with each other.

In February 2020, the Taiwan government began rationing medical mask distribution. One particular challenge that arose was that mask buyers would often queue up at pharmacies for masks, but go home empty-handed because the mask ran out before they are able to make a purchase.

In response, a website hosting an interactive map was developed by civic hacker Howard Wu to show the number of masks available at the nearest pharmacy. Having seen such an innovation, Tang asked the Taiwan government to share real-time mask data, in theory allowing the website to effectively and reliably communicate to people who want to buy masks.

However, unbeknownst to Tang and Wu, Taiwan’s pharmacist community also came up with a social innovation to distribute masks efficiently amidst chaotic queues: they would take health insurance cards early in the morning, and ask visitors to come back during the evening to pass out masks.

This made the “mask availability map” redundant, since real-time data would show a higher number of masks available than the actual number that can be purchased. Pharmacies would sometimes pledge to sell masks to people who line up and hand in their cards first in the morning, but not actually registering the sale until later in the day.

Though the two systems would independently save time, the combination led to confusion among mask-buyers. Tang recounted that a pharmacy local to her residence would put up signs urging visitors to disregard data shown by the “mask availability map,” and, instead, make a direct visit to the pharmacy.

Soon, Tang realized that what pharmacies needed was a button to take pharmacies off the map once masks have run out, and so coordinated with the National Health Insurance Agency to add such a button onto the interface used by pharmacists.

Later in 2020 when the Taiwan government distributed the “triple stimulus vouchers,” the same system to coordinate central government policies and local communities was used, and was more successful, according to Tang, due to optimization and lessons learned from distributing masks.

According to Tang, Taiwan government’s approach to adopting radical transparency – such as a government minister spontaneously responding to an audience of students without pre-selecting questions or using an interpreter – is increasingly seen as a leading example.

Tang believes that Taiwan’s government as a whole is moving in the direction of adopting radical transparency: across political parties in the legislature and through jury reforms in the judiciary branch.

Taiwan government’s public relations strategy during COVID-19

At the event, she revealed that the Taiwan government’s two-pronged plan for COVID-19 is to ensure that no lockdowns will be necessary to contain the spread of COVID-19, and that no take-downs will be needed to address disinformation associated with the pandemic.

Delivering a keynote update to another group of panelists the following week at the Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. think tank, Tang went in a little further on Taiwan government’s public relations effort.

Tang said Taiwan’s government made sure to avoid “surveillance capitalism” and other “authoritarian measures” in its effort to communicate with its citizens during the onset of the pandemic.

Much of the infrastructure, such as the “1922” hotline for pandemic questions, were built prior to COVID during the SARS pandemic. The hotline proved useful in addressing public concerns. Tang raised the example of a schoolboy who called the hotline because he was ashamed of wearing pink, instead of blue, masks to school. 

In response, every official at the daily pandemic update press conference wore pink masks for a day, sending a message that there are no “assigned colors” for genders and that anyone should be able to wear any color they’d like. The campaign became viral and many took the challenge of wearing pink masks.

“I call it the three pillars of social innovation in response to the pandemic: fast, fair, and fun,” Tang describes. Whereas “fast” represents the spontaneity of civil society actors to create new social innovations to contribute to pandemic response, while “fair” is the government’s effort to ration masks and trust to put open source API data in the hands of the civil society.

Fighting the infodemic, Tang took the approach of “humor over rumour,” trusting that people can better work together when there is a common cause. Tang revealed that there is a government office, set up after the onslaught of disinformation during the 2018 election, for every government ministry to dispel disinformation within two hours.

For example, responding to disinformation attempting to stir panic amongst citizens that portrays a shortage of raw paper material used to make tissue paper and masks, a humorous infographic dispelling such disinformation was posted on Premier Su’s Facebook page.

“But this is not a one-time thing,” Tang said, since these efforts need to persistently detect and dispel disinformation. Tang then brings out the example of a Shiba Inu dog that has been a part of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s social media efforts. The social media manager of the ministry is the owner of the Shiba Inu, and can therefore easily use the same theme to broadcast messages in response to different types of disinformation.

Overall, Tang’s various appearances this week and throughout the past months in front of groups has helped clarify the role of the Taiwan government as well as the civil society in the COVID response. As Tang herself connects the two together, and often preferring to say that she works “with” instead of “for” the government, civil society has increasingly taken up a role in helping Taiwan respond to multiple crises, from infodemic to the pandemic.

Tang, as one of the few ministers who is able to present in fluent English without interpreters or pre-selecting questions, will likely continue to play the role of the charismatic representative showcasing Taiwan’s tech-enhanced governance.

(Feature photo by audreytang on Pixabay)