Fighting coronavirus with democracy
In Taiwan, democracy itself is a technology. Like any technology, it can be improved by people. And democracy improves as more people participate. In Taiwan, the generation that worked with the worldwide web is the same generation who worked on democracy, so we think that digital technology remains one of the best ways to improve participation.
I’m really happy to share with you what we have learned, and how Taiwan successfully countered the coronavirus using the power of digital democracy and social innovation.
Fast: Whereas many jurisdictions countered coronavirus this year, Taiwan started last year. In December 2019, Dr. Li Wenliang, a People’s Republic of China whistleblower, posted on social media that there were seven new SARS cases on the Huanan Seafood Market. In the same hour, this was reposted in the PTT Board, Taiwan’s equivalent of Reddit, run by the National Taiwan University.
Our medical office noticed this and immediately issued an order stating all passengers flying in from Wuhan to Taiwan the next day would need to start health inspections. This is the first day of 2020.
This means that, first, civil society is operating in a sufficiently free environment to talk about possible new SARS cases in a public forum. And second, the government trusts the citizens enough to take it very seriously and treat it as if SARS is happening again—something we’ve always been preparing for since 2003.
According to Civicus Monitor, Taiwan is the most open society in the whole of Asia and one out of only two in the Asia-Pacific, along with New Zealand. We’ve been countering the pandemic with no lockdown and countering the infodemic with no takedown.
We enjoy the same freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, of the press, and so on, as other liberal democratic countries—with the emphasis on keeping an open mind to novel ideas from the society and from social innovators because our democracy is so young.
One of the inputs from collective intelligence is as simple as a toll-free number, the 1-9-2-2. Anyone can pick up the phone, call 1-9-2-2, and get all their questions answered by the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC). The CECC also has a daily livestreamed press conference, where journalists ask all they want. Whenever there’s any new idea coming in from the civil society, it gets amplified to the entire country very quickly.
Fair: Fairness is our guiding principle. When we ramped up the face mask production, we made sure everybody can use their National Health Insurance card to get masks from pharmacies. This card covers more than 99.99 percent of residents and citizens.
The actual visualization is not done by the government, but rather by the “g0v” (gov-zero) movement. “g0v” is an online space where anybody can participate to remake the government in their own vision. For each government website like gov.tw, they can change the URL from an “o” to a zero, and then get into a shadow government website. This site offers the same features, the same data as the official government website but always in an interactive, engaging way.
Another example is the mask mapping technology. When we first started rationing masks, a civic technologist named Howard Wu coded a map where anybody can report on where the mask has been stocked and where masks have run out. The day after his mask map went viral, I met with the premier of the National Health Insurance Agency to say that we really need to trust citizens with open data.
“g0v” and community contributors built over 140 tools to enable people to use whatever way they want to access this information. People can choose to view it as a map; visually impaired people can use voice assistance, chatbots, and so on. Everyone can get the same access about which pharmacies near them still have a mask. The entire map is open-sourced; you can access the code at our GitHub.
Just a month after we rolled out the mask map, the South Korean civic technologists convinced their government that if Taiwan can do it, certainly South Korea can do it too. When South Korea started mask rationing, they used the same app, which was actually written by a Taiwanese, Howard Wu.
Fun: I want to stress that because this is a stressful time, people do feel anxious. There’s a lot of panic-buying and conspiracy theories. Thailand defines disinformation as intentional untruths that cause public harm. In Taiwan, we established a counter-disinformation strategy that counters the infodemic—no takedown necessary. It’s called humor over rumor.
When there was panic-buying of tissue paper, there was a rumor that said, falsely, that ramping up the mask production from two million to 20 million a day would cause tissue paper shortages since both are made of the same material. To counter this, we made an internet meme with our premier wiggling his bottom a little bit, while saying in very large print that “each of us only have one pair of buttocks.” In the same photo, we also included a table, which lets people know that tissue paper is made from South American materials, whereas medical mask materials came from domestic sources. One doesn’t affect the other.
We made the meme less than two hours after the panic-buying rumor started, which is essential to countering the rumors. The meme went absolutely viral, and the conspiracy theory just died down within a day or two. Humor over rumor.
This is not just a single shot. In each ministry, we have parliamentary officers that talk to MPs, press officers that talk to journalists, and we have participation officers that talk to hashtag officers. Hashtag officers are creative! We make internet memes.
That’s how we make sure that clarifications about rumors and ideas from the science community travel faster than fear, uncertainty, and doubt. That’s how we make sure that Taiwanese people still feel calm and collected even during the pandemic.
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Audrey Tang is the first and current digital affairs minister of Taiwan. This column is an edited version of her remarks in MBC and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s “Digital Democracy” webinar last August 2020.
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