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How to Beat Back AI’s Threat to Democracy with Audrey Tang

Published May 24, 2024, 4:00 AM

Bad actors using machine-learning, generative artificial intelligence and the power of digital networks are seeding ever-more distrust in democracy, warns Audrey Tang, former digital affairs minister for Taiwan. Tang joins this week’s episode of Voternomics to discuss the risk of foreign interference in the many elections happening around the world, as well as lessons learned while combating efforts to distort the political debate in Taiwan. 

Plus, Bloomberg political correspondent Nancy Cook discusses the latest Bloomberg News/Morning Consult polling which reveals the unease voters feel around the US election—from misinformation to political violence and foreign interference.

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

It is about having this narrative that democracy only leads to chaos and democracy never delivers. That is the overarching narrative for the authoritarian attacks. So I think one lesson is to let the people know that this has happened. Any If you'll let everybody know that this is the narrative, they're going to push the people built immune system and hype bodies in their mind even before that attack actually happens.

Welcome to Voteronomics, where politics and markets and everything else collide. This year, voters around the world have the ability to affect markets, countries, and economies like never before, so it created this series Photonomics to help you make sense of it all. I'm Stephanie Flanders.

I'm Adrian Wooldridge, and I'm Allegra Stratton.

And you heard at the top of the show the former recently stepped down Minister of Digital Affairs of Taiwan, Audrey Tang. Now you might wonder why on earth, you know, we have all these illustrious people on this podcast, not least people I'm talking to right now, why would we have a recently stepped down Minister of Digital affairs. But Audrey Tang for the last several years has been absolutely the front line of the misinformation war, which of course we're all worried about being above and beneath the surface of these big elections that we're facing in the UK and the US and other countries, because Taiwan, as she says herself, has been the country most subjected to cyber onslaught on all fronts, whether it's around the senior US politician Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan and most recently the election where China clearly didn't want to have someone win the president see in Taiwan who was considered to be sort of pro independence or some form of independence for Taiwan. I mean, allegra you and I spoke to her and it was just a fascinating conversation.

About It was fascinating and it was quite chilling as well, because when I was asking her if she the incidences that we've seen in the UK of possible disinformation and Russian bots stirring up division and so on, and you know, and she said yeah, and some like you know, yes, and it will have been much more than that. A And then the other thing that I that really resonated and I liked a lot was this idea of jury service on social media, so you could we as citizens should all be dipping into various different pieces of social media and kind of observing in quite an intense way.

Yeah, I'm very much looking forward to hit to hearing it. Absolutely fascinating subject.

But of course we're interested in these things, even more interested in elections right now because we have one. And actually we had that was a snapcast that we did earlier this week of voting when we had first got that news the announcement for Rissi Sinek of the election in early July. And I think that's the one thing we didn't talk about, actually, is the risk of misinformation.

Well, it's interesting. I think that experts are divided. I think that they feel that actually, in the elections that we've already seen in twenty twenty four around the world, that it hasn't actually played a huge role, but it is certainly right to be vigilant.

I think there's absolute truth in that. But I think the extent to which this is going on is increasing all the time, and the extent to which the sort of the Russian model of deliberately spreading its spreading misinformation and agit prop is being taken up by China, and push forward is really quite important. And also I think if you look at the what you might call the states that are but Russia, you know, the Baltic States and the rest of them, you see it. It's a lot more of a problem it has been here. So I think the future is it's quite dark when it comes to misinformation.

It's very hard to say definitively what's happening. And that's part of the issue is that you have this sort of echo chamber of different forms of social media, self selected groups who are then having damaging messages amplified. And Audrey Tang talks about it. But actually I was struck by Anne app Obama's done this fantastic big story for The Atlantic and this month's June issue of The Atlantic magazine, the New Propaganda War, where she just maps out how China, Russia and other sort of semi rogue nations are making common cause with sort of make America great again Trumpian Republicans to spread a message around sort of undermining liberalism and undermining kind of normal democrats.

I think one of the many fascinating things that she said is that these countries are collaborating with each other. I mean both and said this, and Audrey Tang said this, And I think we should be looking certainly to what Taiwan has been doing. But again, I also think we should be looking to what some of the Baltic states or some of the states on that are closest to Russia have been doing. I think a really interesting example of that is Finland, which has in its schools a civic education program which teaches people how to resist foreign propaganda because they're being constantly bullied and acted by the Russians, and that's actually woven into their education system. So I think when we're thinking about what our defenses should be, we shouldn't just be thinking about the military. We should also be thinking about a much broader set of defenses against foreign interference, which include public opinion, public education.

Do you think it would work here?

Yes, well, I think it's just and I'm also just struck. We had our guest last week who was saying, when he goes to talk to students, and they all are sort of many of them are parroting the same sort of somewhat sympathetic to Russia line about Ukraine, and she actually Anne Applebam sites having had talking to other Western diplomats who have sort of been been in Africa and then are sort of shocked by everywhere they go people with a completely different narrative around the war in Ukraine, and many of them believing this particular story around the US using biological warfare early on in helping Ukraine to commit biological warfare at the beginning of the war. So I think it is there is a fear that even if you're doing all these things within your core core education system and on your mainstream media, the segmentation of the voices that people.

Are getting you just have there's an enemy agate problem. But there's also just rumors and just nonsense that that that is there on that we have Arnold's and I think, you know, as this British election unfolds, I think it's very important that we take a pretty broad view of public opinion, not just reading the Times, but also looking at some of the weirdest stuff coming out on the Internet or gb News and the rest of it.

While we're talking about you know, there's the risks of what might happen in the UK election I think you know, we also have that US election. We've been running a swing state pole because as you as you both will know, the seven swing states, they are the ones that will decide the outcome of this election. And actually the latest poll has just come out had some quite interesting results, particularly on this subject of foreign interference and also the risk of violence in and around the elections. We can go back to a friend of voter nomics, Nancy Cook, our top reporter in Washington covering all things campaign and economic qualicy and much else. Nancy, I know you've we've had quite a few of these swing state poles, but what are the top lines from this one?

Well, the taplines are that former President Trump still leads Biden about forty eight percent to forty four percent across the seven swing states that we have been surveying for the last several months. And you know, this sort of builds on the success that we have seen in other polls with him where he has been leading Biden. I think what's interesting is that about forty six percent of the people we surveyed expressed some concern about foreign interference. And then the other sort of big takeaway is that Trump is leading in states like North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, which is a state with a lot of African Americans, which will be key for Biden to win, and then they're tied in Nevada, Nancy.

One of the things we're picking up on during this voter nomics is this idea of echo chambers and that different voter groups are sort of talking to with themselves and not really straying outside. And the poll underscoores that it's deeply partisan. So you have nine out of ten Republicans saying the economy was better off under Trump and only one out of ten Democrats thinking that. So you've got this very very strong expression of how partisan this election is.

Absolutely and you just see that across the board with almost every policy area. I mean, you see that, you know, Trump really earns high marks on the economy from you know, all Republican voters. You see that also with foreign policy, housing, immigration. It's just it is so polarized that it's almost like two different countries at this point, the Democratic States and the Republican States. And that's why we have focused on these swing states, because you know, there's so much of the US that's basically you already know how people are going to vote, and these states are the ones that are kind of up for grabs.

Nancy, are you surprised that the current Trump trial hasn't had more of an impact on voting intentions so far?

I I'm actually not because I think that one, we're still many months away from the election. Two, I think Americans are very disengaged right now from this particular election. I think most Americans don't want either President Biden or former President Trump to be their candidates, and so I think people aren't paying a ton of attention to the trial. The fact of the matter is is that the first indictment that Trump had actually was great for him. It helped him with fundraising, It helped him with Republican base, it was something that boosted him actually, So you know, I just think it hasn't hurt him at all. And I think if there is a conviction, which we have to wait and see, it will only help him.

But that is interesting, Nancy, because as you know, polls of Republicans had suggested that around a third of his support would consider it material if he got a fatherly conviction. You think that's just gone away now.

I'm just not sure that that will hold and that will be the thing that will sway people on election day versus things like immigration and the economy. I think that people's sense of the economy, in their dismay with it is so strong that I'm just not sure that that will overshadow a conviction.

The very top line I saw in one of the headlines around the poll is that you know, a half and that's Democrats and Republicans fear violence around the election, which I'm not sure whether we were asking people that in the last election or certainly you know, last twenty years, but that seems very striking.

It is striking, and I think that's all because of January sixth and the violence and the attempted insurrection that happened after the last election. It has been so interesting covering politics in the week of that because a ton of the Republican Party has basically rewritten history on that and come to see them as a protest. You know, not that big of a deal. But I think that regardless of who wins in November, Democrats or Republicans, there's a fear that whoever is the loser, there will be a lot of protests and there will be violence. And I think it's really a stark data point in this poll.

I did notice we had a fascinating piece by Josh Green earlier the last couple of days that the posters and focus people taking focus groups on both sides weren't looking for it, but kept on tripping up over people concerned that President Trump, if re elected, would then try to stay in office beyond the four years and violate the constitutional limit on two terms.

Yeah. I love that piece as well, and I think that it is a concern among particularly Independents, and it's something that Trump keeps joking about. I mean, it's not really something that's just in voter's minds. It's something that he keeps talking about. He spoke before the National Rifle Association in Dallas, Texas, on Saturday, and he joked about, you know, winning a third term. You know, in the US you can only win two terms. That's what the law says now, and so he joked about serving even beyond that. I mean, he has made these comments before, so it's not really out of left field that this is something that is on the minds of American voters. But I thought it was interesting that it's coming up in these focus groups.

Now as Joshua, it's NANSI. Do you enjoy the TV debate spin rooms?

I think they're fine. I mean, you know, it's interesting though, is that the debates that they recently agree to, you know, they will have the spin rooms, I'm sure, but they're not going to be before an audience, and so it will be interesting to see, you know, how those ended up looking on TV, but then also what they look like afterwards.

Why have they not going for an audience?

I think that they It was one of the conditions that Biden and his team put forward to debate Trump. I think Trump is so masterful at sort of owning the media, owning the room, sort of overtaking a situation, and we saw that in a CNN town hall that he did just with him and a CNN moderator. He kind of just flipped the whole situation to his advantage. And it was a very sympathetic audience and they kept sort of interrupting the moderator, interrupting the follow up questions, and I think the Biden people wanted to feel like it was you know, President Biden really had a fair shot to make his points, and that people stuck to the time limits, and they felt like if there was a studio audience that person, you know, it would have just been even more disrupted.

But it's a huge gamble which we will be looking at to see how it turns out. Nancy Cook, thank you so much, thanks for having me. So now onto that interview with Audrey Tang, Taiwan's former Minister of Digital Affairs. She's literally just stepped down and she feels Taiwan has been many years ahead of the rest of the world in having to respond to the threat of misinformation and cyber wars influencing elections. So I started by asking her how does she think we're doing so far and what do we need to learn before going to the ballot boxes later in the year.

Taiwan has been on the forefront because we're the most heavily targeted according to v them for the past decade. Every year, we're at the top of the world in terms of the our information manipulation received, and we know something about information manipulation and it's not just elections. When the Ministry of Digital Affairs first started in August twenty twenty two, a few weeks before that, Sensi Pelosi, then US Speaker visits the Taiwan in historic visits, and we saw the whole spectrum of destructive attacked, tack and leak, encouraging physical protests and all that in a very coordinated way. It's about creating a information vacuum. It is about having this narrative that democracy only leads to chaos and democracy never delivers. That is the overarching narrative for the authoritarian attacks. So I think one lesson is just to pre bunk, to let the people know that this is happening. This is not about pro a candidate or against a candidate. This is about an overarching narrative that says democracy never delivers, democracy only leads to chaos. And if you pre bunk it, if you'll let everybody know that this is the narrative, they're going to push the people built immune system antibodies in their mind even before that attack actually happens.

So just to explain that Nancy Pelosi visit, you know, obviously the Chinese government had not wanted any senior US politician to visit Taiwan, so that's why you had that kind of concerted attack. And the more recent time when people were concerned about Taiwan was around the time of the election at the start of this year, were you applying some of the same lessons for that.

Yeah, definitely. For example, in every election, we already know that the counting process is going to be the main attack for not just every attack, but mostly information operation. People would accuse that the counting was rigged. People would accuse the election officials of siding with one particular candidate, People would dispute the result of the election, and so on. These are all traditional information operation targets. In Taiwan, we countered that by participatory counting. So for the past few years we restructured our accounting process. We have a paper only ballot, and so when people count those paper only ballots, they take each and everyone out, they show it to three different angles, and the three major parties, their YouTubers, their quarders, their participatory counters, they all film the process, and so each and every paper ballot was counted this way. So we didn't use digital technology to speed up the tallying process. Even though maybe electronic talenting can finish what used to take four hours in forty minutes, we conclude it's not worth it. The participation is important because when the inevitable information operation happens right after the counting process concluded that there was rigged counting and so and so forth. Actually it didn't spread very far, even though we have evidence that foreign information manipulators put a lot of resource in getting all those conspiracy theories to spread. All the three party leaders, they have their YouTubers and their campaign people in that particular counting station. It's all documented. So all they can say after the fact is that there's no riaking of the election. So it limits the basic reproduction number that are zero value of those information manipulations. So even though they threw a lot of resources into spreading this particular message, we fixed this problem by inviting everybody into the counting process. This is something that extronic tally cannot do as easily, oh do.

The way you're describing recent events is very sophisticated digital literacy. Tell us your observations looking at these huge elections in the UK in America and how resilient you think those electorates really are.

In Taiwan, we don't even use the word digital literacy or media literacy anymore in our curriculum. We always say digital media competence because literacy is when you are viewing the news, maybe with a critical eye, but still mostly as a consumer, whereas competent is when you're a co producer of information. And the great thing about getting high schoolers or even primary schoolers into the collaborative fact checking is that it changes their family dynamic, usually the children when they introduce a new platform, a new ecosystem, and so the parents and grandparents are sympathetic to it. And what we have found is that it is not the check facts that inoculates the mind. It is the act of going through fact checking, a thinking like a journalist that inoculates the mind, which is why it's so important to combine that with the curriculum and with this or family exercise.

When you look at America and the UK and the many many other polls taking place this year around the world, do you think people know what's coming?

I think what's really needed is that it comes from not just credibly neutral sources, which I understand in the US it's difficult to combine now, but rather from each and every party, from each and every denomination, from each and ever even religion and so on, community leaders and so on, such as published a book on this is about collaborating across people who were like ideologically or politically opposite of each other, but each side agreed that democracy is a process that requires some commonly agreed facts, and for that we need cross checking instead of just taking one institute and upholding it as the most rigorous. So a cross checking ecosystem is always superior to just a single like this Information Overside institute or things like that when it comes to pre bunking and debunking issues. And the other thing, especially for career public servants, is that even if you didn't anticipate something and you cannot pre bunk it, as long as you respond within an hour, it's as good as if you've pre bunked it. So we ensure in Taiwan that if we missed some pre bunking targets, we always respond with a hopeful, slightly humorous message mes media sixteen minutes or less after we detected that it is going to trend. And the reason why is that the career of public service through the press release channels, actually reaches more people than conspiracy theories, and if it's a little bit humorous, it also spreads faster than the conspiracy theories. So for everag person they actually received the clarification first before they received this information.

You were a pioneer, Audrey, developing open source technology before going into government. But also you've been a force for this very collaborative, transparent process which you were just describing. I mean, I think that's built up a level of trust which you're not always going to get with other kinds of government fact checking in other countries. In fact, I was struck by a recent example in Senegal where there'd been a fake news law that actually was associated with the cumbent government in effect trying to prevent a lot of opposition discussion on TikTok and in other places. And funny enough, that law backfired because this opposition leader had been somewhat silenced by those laws, but there was so much curiosity about him that people went out and found out about him and they ended up voting him into office. But in a lot of cases, you know, don't we see that it is in fact quite authoritarian governments that are then using the language of fake news and talking about citizens needing to be protected from it. So how do you develop trust and avoid that problem?

Yes, I think this is a great observation. How one is the tub of Asia when it comes to not just freedom on the net, but also journalistic freedom. And because my parents were both journalists, I would never say the words fake news to them or to anyone really, because to me, information manipulation is fundamentally about getting people to distrust the democratic process. This is not about pro or anti establishment pro or any parties and so on, or the polarization attacks that we have seen for most of this year. After the generative AI capabilities getting enjoyed by all the information manipulators, the easiest way is not to push for fake narratives, but just to amplify the parts of the opinions that looks like hate messages across party lines, across ideological lines, and just put a lot of resource in amplifying those polarized messages and then the polarization person the democracy by yourself and fact checks can do little about such polarization attacks because it's not factually wrong, right, So I think a lot of the work that we're now doing is again pre bunking. We introduce new laws like the Anti Fraud Act currently in the Parliament that says, if you want to have freedom of reach through everard, you have to digitally sign your message, and not just the people paying it, but also the people appearing in it. It's from a celebrity, the celebrity need to sign it digitally, and that applies to foreign advertisements too, so there's no exceptions. It wants to ensure the authenticity of the actor without saying anything about the content. We've seen more and more that the content level laws do a lot of collateral harm, even with the best intentions, exactly as you pointed out, because it also interferes with the journalistic work. And I understand that there are similar laws in the works in both US and the UK, and my sincere hope is that these can be passed before the election, because otherwise it's not just fake versus true anymore. It is a lot about just inauthentic portrayal of celebrities and so on.

Audrey, I would say, when we've spoken in Taipei the end of last year, I would say you were quite calm about some of the sort of straightforward deep fakes that people have talked a lot about here in the context of the election, Things coming out just before the election that show one of the candidates saying something or doing something but I noted that you were much more concerned about the potential for Ai to produce very kind of individualized fakes. So you know, not just a fake video, but technology allowing manipulator to build up a relationship with an individual person. So maybe just talk us through talk us through that so we too can be frightened.

So after the election in January, I think I was right in not worried about the polarization attacks because the effective polarization, how people hit each other cross party line, went into a historic love All three parties felt that they have won a little bit, so there's no winner takes all, loser loses all dynamic and it's very good for the health of our democracy and mental health for everyone involved. But I do see that this direct communication, this precision persuation as an ongoing threat. The idea is that if you have an addictive app that people use in Taiwan, for example, the short form videos, people like it just like any other country. We're a little bit fortunate in that we've been seeing for quite a few years that TikTok is a harmful product for cybersecurity. So it only has about a quarter of installation based in Taiwan. And only about one tenth of that use it as their primary platform. So we're not as addicted as some other jurisdictions are to TikTok. But TikTok is just one example because what it does is already has a reward model, right, it knows what takes you and what addicts you. And so instead of just spreading one single message to try to get people to retweet or whatever, that was like the previous wave of information manipulation, nowadays decision targeting AI can just push a series of messages, let you feel a little bit more disenfranchised, a little bit more disempowered, a little bit more empathy around the democratic process. But if you are addicted to it, and if you watch it hours and hours every day, then the end result is that you lose energy to participate in the democratic processes. So it is even more insidious and chronic than polarization. And I think this is something that we need really to watch out for.

Talk us through that. But how can one pre bunk or pre inoculate against that. It just feels so sophisticated.

Yeah, one way is simply to let people know that this form of addiction, everything else being equal, is not good for him. In the US, of course, as we know, or TikTok in particular, they are now setting a timeline so that it needs to divest right and need to sell to a US operator who hopefully will instill a more digital democracy capabilities into the app, because if they're already addicted to it. Nowadays, there's research that says if you adjust the sorting algorithm a little bit to promote, for example, authentic self disclosure, or promote a little bit more vulnerability, a little bit more ideas of communicating across society differences, a little bit more collective sense making and all that instead of the addictive entertainment stuff, it actually results in the same amount of engagement, whereas it makes people care more about democracies or maybe OI techs is a few hyper parameter changes and then it gets people on social media to be more pro social rather than antisocial. So maybe that's another experiment that whatever cause TikTok can try.

Got it. I love the idea of after an election, all parties feeling like they want a bit and feeling like they hate each other less. We can only hope you mentioned the US approach. There's obviously been a specific bill there addressing to which may end up applying to other platforms. The EU has had its own package of digital services legislation which it brought out at the end of the year. I mean, how would you compare the EUSE approach to that of say the US or the UK.

Yeah, I think that you approach of assigning more liabilities and more duties to the gatekeepers is definitely a robust approach because as soon as some platform reaches a certain protest percentage of the people, it doesn't matter where it comes from, it now has to comply with these duties. In fact, in our INTI Fraud Act, that's precisely the approach that we take. So even if you're a foreign operator, as long as you hit x percent of active Tawanese user space and new advertisements, you're required.

Audre, you've been really eloquent describing all the different policy leavers and mechanisms that democracy can put in place to try and protect itself or in your phrase, inoculate itself against the the problems. But can you just reflect for us just taking a step back on the threat, the enemy, the stimulus, the people that are seeking to spread these untruths, and I want to give you an example in the UK a few years back. There's obviously been incidents since, but there was a very high profile example where our footballers missed a bunch of penalties in the Euros a few information I prov on football tournament. There was abuse and they huge abuse. Some of that abuse may have come their way anyway from domestic social media accounts, but equally there was evidence that some of it was also stirred up from abroad. It seemed to be compounded, whipped up, amplified by foreign social media accounts. Can you just describe for us? Is that kind of phenomenon here to stay? Is it going to get worse? Is it already very bad and we just don't realize it. Just give us a stock take.

So when it comes to elections, we can always start from the ordinary, right, the classic sever trusions so we're enabled to vote, Tempering and authorized access data theft and things like that, and ransomware and so on, all all these are still here to stay. They're not going away. What worries us is that it's now evolving into what's called hybrid capabilities. So instead of just addos attack denying the service of governmental agencies, websites, coupling that with amplifying information operation material so that when fact checkers want to access the source of truth they found the source of truth is denied service, whether it's a media outlet or whether it's a ministrial website or as we mentioned, a heck and leak about a campaign and so on, but then using the leak material to do AI abuse and defaikes and so on, as literally putting words into the heck victim that they didn't say. But because the heck material contains maybe videos or sufficient amount of sound files, it sounds and looks very real and so on. So these are the new capabilities new as of last year or so that were extra word because then the severate intrusions are bad enough. But previously it would take a very resourceful adversary and many different trines before it reaches the common people. But now amplified by this precision persuasion and abuse and defails, they can afford to do each try with minimal or negligible cost, and so they can just keep trying until a narrative hits and then we have a viral information manipulation. So which is why it is so important to have this digital signature scheme because it means that one person can only have one account. If you want to open pseudonyms, that's fine, but you sign it in a way it's called zero knowledge that still lets people know that it is just a single person, maybe anonymous, a single person behind it. No longer can one simply register ten thousand accounts and wait for most of them getting fund or whetherver it, but still activate the rest of the account to look like it's astroturfing and so on, look like there's a ground swell support and so on, and all these are going to be very difficult to tell from actual groundswell support because if you click into each account's profile, live history, interaction, it looks completely real. It's now generative AI made. So I think digital signature really is one of the new bedrocks that we need to instill into those larger platforms this year.

At the time, there was a debate, you know, on the one hand, with suggesting that this has been uniquely whipped up abroad and that this would never have happened if it weren't for foreign media accounts making things worse. But equally we have to focus and analyze ourselves, don't we.

That is certainly true. And also if you're on x dot com or Twitter, there's this jury duty that you can enter called community notes, and I participate in the community notes just to improve my media competence. And if you participate in the community note community, very quickly you can see all sort of information manipulators going on, trying to weigh the public opinion one way or another. And I attended the Google Jigsaw conference a couple months ago, and there were a lot of conversations around these and Google Jigsaw did release a new set of capabilities, a new set of API. Instead of just detecting the toxicity and so on, it now also measures democratic bridge making abilities. So for each and every note, you can actually gauge how much pro social it is compared to your ordinary hate messages and so on. So it's not just weeding out the toxic or the hate, but actually nudging people to provide pro social services online. And I think this is also very helpful if it can be applied to more social media platforms.

So I guess I mean, before we finished that, just there's one fundamental thing which comes out of what you said right at the beginning, and you said the common feature of a lot of these attacks. What you're trying to pre bunk is the idea that democracy doesn't deliver, that it produces chaos. I mean, I guess you know you have to then also, as well as doing all the things you're talking about as a government, you have to work on that not being true, actually on actually delivering for people, because if their lived experience is chaos and political dysfunction we've seen in many places, you know, there's no point trying to debunk that if actually people are feeling in their daily lives like democracy is not delivering.

Yeah, I think exactly as you observed. If people think of democracy only as voting every two years or four years, very small bandwidth, just a few bits, very long latency for change to happen or to see it to actually not happen, then obviously there's going to be a pathy. Right. But I think a lot of the online ecosystems, the fact checking ecosystem, the covacs, the participatorying, the initiatives of not just referenda but community initiatives and so on, they're there because it's a continuous democracy. It is something that people can feel every day. As long as people employ those democratic tools in their lives more, maybe in their community, in their schools, in their churches. I think the word democracy will have a much more nuanced meaning. The more people have the stage to show affinity, compassion, curiosity, newance, sharing personal stories, reasoning, and respect of each other, the more people are going to associate the word democracy with some lived experience that is actually pro social. So I'm not saying that let's just protect the election. I'm saying that, leading up to the election, let's protect our lift experience around democracy on a smaller scale, lowercase the democracy.

But yeah, but the elected politicians actually have to deliver on things people care about, like education and health.

Yes, which is why we need to do both. We need to build a grassroots legitimacy that's hopefully higher than any of the particul parties, and then we need to hold those parties into accounts actually delivering what the people want.

So, Audrey, you've now stepped down. I think you were one of the youngest ministers when you joined the government, and you're now we're hearing from you going to be traveling a lot more outside Taiwan, so I hope you're going to be able to spend lots of time with our governments and help them protect everyone against protect ourselves against some of the things that you're talking about.

Yeah, how I can help and stand ready to help. In fact, I'm going through a bunch of European countries as we are airing this episode, going across seven different countries in just twenty two days. The idea is that trying to come to each jurisdiction like three or four months before they are having a election, and just connect with the officials, societyal leaders to share what worked in Taiwan, and also to share the kind of community grassroots toolkits that everybody can just adopt and if people coordinate, I'm sure that this year will be not a democratic setback, but rather a democratic rebatalization.

I hope so too. Maybe in a few months we'll have to we'll have to find out from you how you mark each of these countries that you've met.

Great, happy to be back on the podcast.

Audrey Tang, Thank you so.

Much, Thank you Liveline Prosper.

Okay, that is more than enough for this week's second episode of Voter Nomics. Thanks for listening. This episode was hosted by me Stephanie Flanders, Alegra Stratton and Adrian Woodridge. It was produced by Sammasadi with help from Chris Marklu and Julia Manns, editorial direction from Victoria Wakely. Brendan Francis Newnan is our executive producer, and Sage Bowman is Head of Bloomberg Podcasts. With special thanks to Nancy Cook and Audrey Tank. Please, if you like it, subscribe, rate, and review this show wherever you listen to your podcasts.

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