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- [00:01]
A
When democracies were first founded, there exists some communication technologies that communicates across distances like telegrams. There exists very quickly some broadcasting technologies such as radio and then later on television. What did not exist was called broad listening technologies. So it was possible for one person to talk to another person. It was possible for one person to broadcast to millions of people, but there were no technologies that led one person to listen to conversations from a million or so people, and for that million or so people to also listen to one another to facilitate understanding.
- [00:43]
B
And now the Good fight with Yasha Monk. There are two topics which I find to be really interesting and important, but about which I find it hard to read. Very insightful contributions. The first is misinformation. It's obvious that there is a genuine problem with our information ecosystems, and yet I find so much of the standard political response to it to be knee jerk censorious, not really reflective about the dangers of setting out to combat misinformation, but possibly getting it wrong and censoring things that turn out to be true. The second is the fact that our political institutions were founded in the 18th century in a deeply analog world, and that today we clearly could use digital technologies to augment the way in which we deliberate about policy, the way in which we involve citizens. And yet most of the ideas for how to change that tend to be utopian, harebrained not to take seriously the constraint of the real political world. Well, my guest today thinks about these topics in a genuinely innovative way. Audrey Tang was the first Taiwanese Minister of Digital Affairs. She is the co author with Glenn Weil of a new book called the Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy. And she is, generally speaking, one of the most insightful thinkers and practitioners in the space of using technology in innovative ways to solve our social problems. In this conversation we talked about how to combat misinformation without censorship, how to focus on facilitating dialogue and counteracting polarization rather than censoring on the basis of a content of what people say. We talked about new ways of facilitating public participation in decision making processes, whether that is how to use municipal funds, or whether that is more ambitious questions like resolving a big moral issue about which a country is divided. And finally, we start to talk in a more exploratory way about what it would mean to rethink and reinvent our democracies for the 21st century. What would it look like to hold on to the fundamental values of liberal democracy, individual rights like free speech and collective self determination, while rethinking their institutional embodiment? That last part of the conversation is reserved for paying members. If you want access to that, please support this podcast by going to yashamonk.substack.com and becoming a paying subscriber. That's yashamonk.substack dot com and you would be helping us bring this content to as many of you for free as possible. Yashamonk.substack.com finally, one little note. Unfortunately, while I was recording this conversation, there was a lot of construction note outside of my window. So. So you may every now and again hear the squealing of some bulldozer in the background. I hope it won't distract you too much. Audrey Tang, welcome to the podcast.
- [04:22]
A
Hello, Good local time.
- [04:24]
B
So we've had a lot of debates over the last years about misinformation, and I feel really torn on the subject because on the one hand, I recognize that misinformation is a real problem. If you go on social media, there's all kinds of false statements, doctored videos, conspiracy theories, just crazy stuff that gets a lot of attention and that really informs how people think about the world and think about politics. And clearly that's a problem. At the same time, I have this concern that a lot of the time when we talk about misinformation, first we might get wrong what is true and what is wrong. During the pandemic, for example, some ideas were labeled as misinformation that later turned out to be plausible or perhaps true. And secondly, that sort of this whole discourse about misinformation can really be an excuse for censorship. Right? It can be an excuse to say we in power are going to tell you what's right and what's wrong, and we're just going to censor anybody who disagrees with us. What is your approach to this field? Because you take the problem very seriously. But I think you share my suspicion that censorship is not the way to respond to it.
- [05:22]
A
Definitely. So I served as the cabinet minister in charge of digital since 2016 to last year. Now I'm the cyber ambassador, and in Taiwan, we're ranked top in Asia when it comes to the Internet freedoms. We're also top of Asia in terms of the civic space, so on and so forth. And so we've never believed in censorship because we had martial law for almost four decades and people don't want to go back. Now, I do feel that the term misinformation is a little bit misinforming, if you will. Since 2016, when I went into the cabinet, when we tackled this issue we always call it zheng yi xunci, or contested information. That is to say, it is not about whether it's absolutely true or absolutely false, but rather it is its potential to drive engagement through enragement, so to speak. And so we measure instead of the. The usual metrics about the fact checking and things like that, we measure instead how polarized people are because they receive such information and how they retweet it or post it because of the kind of enragement that is derived from these. And the reason why is that since 2015, many of the online platforms switched their algorithm from a shared feed or a follower feed to what's called a for you feed. And that for you feed basically only maximize one metric, which is the addictiveness, how much time you spend on the touchscreen, essentially. And so along with it, a lot of the autoplay, a lot of recommendation algorithms that kind of strip mine the social fabric so that people no longer have shared experiences and then just drive this individualized kind of rage machine so that people can waste a lot of time basically shadowboxing on the extremes. And so if you look at the content as you witnessed, it is not necessarily true or false. Sometimes it has nothing to do with factual information. All it has to do is about polarization. So this is the lens that I go. And that is also because Taiwan is one of the most Internet connected. So in 2014, the trust level from the citizen to the government was 9%. So in a country of 24 million people, anything President Ma said at the time, 20 million people against him, was extremely polarized at the time. And we want to fight that polarization instead of any specific bits of misinformation, informed information that is either true or false.
- [08:04]
B
And one of the interesting things about Taiwan, for those who don't know the island well, is that even though it is a relatively small place with a population, that there's actually some significant ethnic minorities, but of course a clear majority of population is Han. So it is compared to someone like the United States, a reasonably ethnically diverse, ethnically homogeneous country. But the polarization of a country is very extreme, you know, about questions of the future status of Taiwan. And that polarization often runs right through families, right through institutions. When I was in Taiwan for a month to try to learn Mandarin, I had some teachers that were very vocal about supporting greater independence for Taiwan and some teachers that were very vocal about wanting a much closer relationship with the mainland. And so these kind of divides run through every household and every institution in the country. So how does that change our frame for how to think about this. I mean, I'm really struck by the fact that these algorithms really drive how we behave online. And what was true of the old Twitter, and what is true, I think, of a new Twitter or X, is that it shows you first in your feed the post that's going to be most divisive, that some people are going to love and other people are going to hate and it's going to stir up controversy and people are going to shout at each other and it wants to get you involved, certainly as a spectator and perhaps as a participant in this kind of barbed role. When you look at something like Reddit, which has some problems of its own, but I think it tends to be much better in part because the first thing that it displays under a post is the argument that has the biggest net positive. Right. So if 100 people like that post, 100 people dislike it, it's not going to be very high up. If 50 people like it and one person dislikes it, it's actually going to be displayed further up. So is part of a solution just to animate providers of these social media companies to go through algorithms that don't prioritize divisive content the same kind of way? And can that work because it feels like Twitter actually has a bigger part in our conversation than Reddit? Perhaps in part because ultimately users are drawn to the thing that makes them full of rage, that makes them sometimes full of joy when somebody manages to dunk on the partisan opponent in the right way and so on. Even if current social media companies change the algorithms, would that just allow a new set of social media companies that offer this more adversarial model to take over market share? Because that's actually what we're drawn to.
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A
I would note that it's not just Reddit, but also LinkedIn use a much more bridge making algorithm. And there are Also people using LinkedIn and feel I guess subjectively better quality feeds. So it's not like the antisocial feeds are the only ones on the market. There's also pro social feeds.
- [10:57]
B
I will note I'm not on LinkedIn, but whenever I vicariously see a little bit of LinkedIn it seems to breed a culture that's awful in its own way of these kind of like fake Kumbaya. Here's the 17 things I learned by walking my dog this morning form of corporate humble brag self promotion. But that may just be my taste. And perhaps I'm being unfair to a
- [11:20]
A
lot of what's on LinkedIn I totally see that. I hear you. That the point I was making was just about whether it is kind of divisive in uplifting the content that's most likely to result in extreme views of one group toward the other, like a caricature, as you witnessed that the X algorithm does. So I'm just saying that LinkedIn doesn't do that. I'm not saying that LinkedIn is actually high quality.
- [11:46]
B
No, no, you're certainly right about that. I guess I thought careful what you wish for, but on the whole, of course, that probably is a better thing.
- [11:53]
A
So within X there's also a algorithm that is more bridge making and it is the community nodes algorithm. And basically what it does is that for each trending post people can volunteer to add more context to clarify. So not necessarily fact check, but rather just provide useful context. And it's not that the most upvoted note will display, but rather they will first use algorithm to separate people into different clusters. Clusters, and the clusters are people who would consistently upvote certain kind of nodes. And the other group is the people who would kind of consistently upvote some other kind of nodes and they don't overlap. Now if a vote from both sides, like the upwing from both the left wing and the right wing, propel a note to the top, then that's more likely to be sticky and it will be displayed next to the post and the original poster cannot take it down. So that's the model that X.com uses to basically uplift the upwing instead of using third party independent fact checkers. Now this model has been taken by YouTube and very soon Meta on Facebook as well as a kind of different, more horizontal way compared to the vertical institutions of specialized journalists and fact checkers to provide essential context. So within X actually two algorithms coexist for the mainstream. For the main post, that is the divisive one, but for the clarification, the community notes, that's actually the bridge making one.
- [13:31]
B
And explain to us the value of that community node system, because I think of it quite highly. It sounds like you think of it quite highly as well. I was really struck. And perhaps this is itself part of the polarized reactions we now have to everything in our politics that when Meta announced that it was no longer going to fact check, but rather rely on the community nodes model, the reaction to that, certainly from my kind of circles and from people who care about democratic institutions, who see a danger to democratic institutions and right wing populace, was nearly uniformly negative. And I understand that in terms of A context, it was in a context where Mark Zuckerberg was making these kind of overtures to Donald Trump and so on. But I thought, I felt, and I know less about this topic than you do, that there was a mistake, that it was a kind of knee jerk reaction, that you know, we must prioritize fact checkers over any other kind of system. Even though the community model to me seems like the best feature of a new Twitter. So to people who may be skeptical, maybe coming to this conversation thinking, no, no, Zuckerberg is giving up on democracy by getting rid of the fact checkers. What case would you make for the benefits of Community Notes model of this form?
- [14:35]
A
So full disclosure, I'm in touch with the people who implement the Meta committee notes and also another group in Meta that implements so called community forums, which is a kind of deliberative platform like a jury system where people can go online and steer the meta system. I would note that neither of these two systems are kind of completely proof against sabotage. So that if you really want to take over it, if you really want to mount an attack, to pollute it with a lot of resource, then there's a chance that you will succeed. And so I'm not saying that this is a foolproof system. With that said, our experience in Taiwan for both this kind of bridge making algorithm and the kind of online community forums did show that it is actually possible to strengthen civic muscles, to strengthen people's solidarity across the differences if you implement well these kind of mechanisms. I'll use two quick examples. In 2015, after an entire year of experimenting with this in person way of conversations, facilitations to uncover uncover the uncommon grounds of the people who are drastically polarized. First tried out in March 2014 when we occupied our parliament peacefully for three weeks to demonstrate that this kind of method works. We've been working since then with the Cabinet on an online version of this process. So in 2015, when Uber first came to Taiwan, we asked people how do you feel about a driver with no professional driver license picking up strangers they met on an and charging them for it? And so people just share their own feelings. And just like Community Notes, the polis system that we used has upvote and downvote, but there's no reply button, so no room for trolls to grow. And there's a visualization that shows whether you're in the camp of, you know, pro taxi driver, pro Uber driver, pro rural unions, and so on and so forth. There's different clusters that are grouped automatically and then every day People see more and more of those bridging statements. For example, undercutting existing meters is very bad, but search pricing is fine. So that is one sentiment that actually all sides can agree on. And so after a while, people start competing on the widely acceptable bridging items. And then at the end of the process, the nine or so statements that get more than 85% approval from all the different groups became the agenda. And then we made a law based on those consensus ideas. So what it does is that it's a friendly competition, how much distance you can cross to talk to people on the other side. And so that has really informed Taiwan's rulemaking so that we put up a national participation system at that year. And by 2020 already the approval rate is from 9% to more than 70%. And so this is one small story. Another story is last year we use the same kind of method, but in a synchronous way. So we ask people, how do you feel about the online fake advertisements like Jensen Huang of Nvidia. If you last year scroll the Taiwanese Facebook or YouTube, you see fraudulent advertisements featuring Jensen wanting to sell you some stock or crypto all the time. And if you click it, Jensen actually talks to you. Of course, it's a deepthink. And so we add asked our population what to do and we sent 200,000 SMS text messages to random numbers in Taiwan. So it's like a lottocracy and ask people how do you feel? And people gave us ideas. And then we asked people to volunteer and thousands volunteered to join each other on online conversation. And we chose 450 people statistically representative of Taiwanese population. And then in 45 rooms of 10 people each, facilitated by an AI system, people just came up with really good idea that does not extend the state censorship power, but successfully limited this fraudulent advertisement issue. For example, one room would say Jensen Huang's advertisements need to be digitally signed by Jensen. If it's not, you should assume it's scam and display it as such a probable spam. And then the other room would say if Facebook showed this kind of scam ads and somebody gets scammed out of $5 million, Facebook needs to be liable for that $5 million. You don't just find them, they'll just pay the fine. And the other room would say if they still don't comply and implement such a system, maybe you slow down connection slightly to Facebook so their business goes to Google, so on and so forth. And so again, we did a sense making using AI models to weave those things. Together and pass a law in just a couple of months after a consultation. And so today, if you open Facebook or YouTube in Taiwan, you don't see those fraudulent ads anymore, but we're still free in terms of online freedom. So these two examples show that when designed with care, with good sense making capabilities, it can strengthen the civic muscle in a sense that people join together with people who they would not have thought as allies and then propose something that is very acceptable to both sides.
- [20:03]
B
That's very interesting. I was kind of thinking of this space in terms of three different buckets. And I'm starting to realize that the way you're thinking about them mixes some of them up. But perhaps let me lay those out and then we can sort of of think through what the solution to each of these buckets is and to what extent. Actually they're the same solutions. Right? So one is you have a problem of misinformation. This is a great example, right? This is just prudent advertising, pretending that this influential figure who you would respect is asking you to buy something. In fact, it's a deep fake. There's an obvious public interest in trying to rein that in. But of course, if you give the government power to declare anything misinformation or deep fake, it's quite easy to see how that could be abused. So how do you deal with that kind of of misinformation? The second is something that political theorists have thought about for a long time, which is how can you inform decision making? You have legislators off in a chamber in Taipei or in Washington D.C. or in Rome. They're somewhat insulated from ordinary people just in the way that elites and politicians often are. How can we use digital technology in order to facilitate more public input, both in terms of great ideas that people in the capital may happen not to come up with in the same way, and in terms of getting a sense of where public opinion really lies, giving people a sense of ownership over political decisions. And then a third kind of question is just we have democracies that were designed in the United States literally in the 18th century, in many countries, on the basis of the basic institutions that were founded in the 18th and 19th century. But now we live in a very different place with very different kind of technologies. It's clear that if we'd invented democracy from scratch today, it probably would look different in some kind of ways. How should we rethink the democratic space? Is there a need for sort of renovation from scratch? It feels to me like some of these examples you were just giving straddle at least the first and the second bucket. Perhaps we don't quite go to the third bucket, but they straddle the first and the second bucket. So to round out our conversation about the first of these questions, so what's the paradigm of how we should think about misinformation? How do we combat misinformation without censorship? Does that always have to involve these kind of processes that really make people participate in how a law is formulated? What other kind of metrics are there? How should we think about that?
- [22:20]
A
So what I believe is that instead of lumping together the actor, the behavior and the content layers, actor is Jensen, not actually Jensen. Behavior is one account, 5,000 account controlled by a single person. Content is whether it's true or not. These are different layers. And most of Taiwan's responses appear in the actor and the behavior layers. And we don't quite go to the content layer. And the reason why is that the content layer is the most abusive when it comes to government overreach. The government can easily say anything with the content triggers triggering this keyword X, where X could be a minister's name or something like that, should be clarified by the minister and the minister can force the journalist or any online content to be taken down or mandatory, noticed given, and so on. It's very easy to abuse, which is why the Taiwanese population doesn't want the government to do any content level countermeasures. But if you don't have that, then you need to focus on the actor level. Which is why we rolled out this KYC requirement for advertisement, not just financial or political ones, but all advertisements, so that when people claim that they are Jensen Huang, they better sign as Jensen Huang. And this is not moderation. This is basically saying our constitution does not give fake robots freedom of expression. And I think that's a generally understandable position. Of course, people worry about what if non advertisements like the communications where you say that you're a whistleblower or in an information asymmetry situation where you want to reveal something but you don't want to reveal your actual identity. What about that protection? Which is why by the end of this year we'll roll out in Taiwan the infrastructure for what's called selective disclosure. So you can sign with just a male name, part of a name, saying for example, that you're 16 years old or older, but don't reveal your birthday or that you're a resident in Taipei or citizen, but without revealing your address, and so on and so forth, so that you can show that you're not a robot. You have a person who credential or you can attach a verifiable credential so that people know that you're who you claim roughly, but not kind of dox yourself not to reveal your identity too much. So that's on the actor level, on the behavior level, we believe in what's called pre bunking over debunking. So pre bunking works by making sure that most of the society receive a depolarizing message, showing how that polarization message will become before that actually goes viral. So it's like inoculation. A couple years ago I deep faked myself and showing everyone how it's done. And so by the time the last year's January election happened and deepfake did start to appear, people are already inoculated because they're exposed to two years of such pre bunking material. And we also invite people like civic teachers, people in middle schools, high schools and so on to participate in collaborative fact finding. So it's not just a single checked fact that inoculates those young minds, but rather the process of going through the fact checking, thinking like a journalist in a group, in conversation networks that inoculates those young minds. So taken together, this kind of pro social fact finding behavior inoculates minds against this sensational outrage. Quite predictably,
- [26:18]
B
the road to the NBA Finals ends here with star guard setting the tone. The Cavs eye another upset while the Knicks carry the dreams of all of New York. The Eastern Conference finals continue on ESPN and abc. Yeah, that's really interesting. And again, I mean that speaks to both in an American context, obviously the legal constraint of the First Amendment. In a more philosophical context, certainly my commitment to the idea of free speech, my deep awareness of how easy it is for governments to abuse that, and it shows that there's ways to actually tackle more effectively sort of the infrastructure of the Internet without giving government bureaucrats or powerful tech executives the power to decide what is in and what is out, what is true and what is false, which we've gotten wrong in a lot of important contexts where the misinformation paradigm has been implied and what is sort of morally acceptable and what is morally beyond the pale. Which is again a power that in my mind, the government and these tech executives shouldn't have. Before we move on to the next topic, to what extent do you feel like people have actually taken that on board? I mean, you are very influential in this field and you're sort of a little bit of a celebrity when it comes to misinformation. Those topics. But when I look at certainly the way that European politicians talk about this topic, that politicians in a lot of places talk about that topic, they revert very quickly to, we have to have a set of laws around hate speech, a set of laws around falsehoods that we put in place, and they will allow authorities to decide when something is dangerous, and then that'll get shut down. And if social media companies don't comply with that, we can fine them so much that they basically become capable of operating here. So even though you're a big participant in that conversation, it sometimes feels to me as though you're sort of invoked and then ignored. Is that fair, or are you more optimistic about what, for example, countries in Europe are doing to tackle this problem?
- [28:23]
A
Well, a lot of the digital signature selective disclosure and forced interoperability are taken up by the eu. So the same decentralized wallet is now also being rolled out. And I think by next year, the Europe decentralized identity wallet, the EU DIW will go online, so maybe slightly later than Taiwan, but roughly at the same year. So I think that's a positive sign. And also I think the interoperability argument has taken really some, for example, the Digital Markets Act. So previously, if you think about EU enforced interoperability, you probably think about Type C, which is the kind of connector that basically says you cannot force your customer to bring like five different charger connectors for five different kind of electronics is very wasteful. And so everybody need to standardize on Type C. And Taiwan doesn't have that. But we benefit from that, which is why my phone now uses Type C instead of lightning. And so in the Digital Market act, you can see this principle applied to online platforms, for example, WhatsApp. So what the Digital Market act says is that once you are large enough to be a gatekeeper when it comes to instant messaging, you cannot trap your customers in the same messaging system. You have to provide interoperability. So if they want to switch to a different system that offers a better experience, they do not lose the contacts, they do not lose the existing conversations they have. They can actually send the same message. You know, we have the same number portability when it comes to atm. So if you have a bank card, you can withdraw cash from other participating banks, not necessarily the same bank. And even internationally, or if you change a number on your telephone to a different provider, actually the provider change does not need to coincide with a number change. You can keep your old number even a new provider is selected. And so all these interoperability portability measurements, I think, is now shaping up to be part of the EU toolkits when it comes to digital governance. And you can easily think about the next step, which is, for example, for X.com or TikTok to not close off the access to the firehose, so to speak, so that if you post on TikTok, you should be able to view the same piece of content on bluesky or on Truth Social or on the Fediverse. Like any of these participating interoperable networks, what it will do to the dynamic is that then it becomes almost impossible for those big tech operators to dictate the censorship rules, because if people do not feel safe in a certain circumstance, they can just take their connections and their content to another Mastodon instance, another Blue sky instance, and then just enjoy a different regime of lawful but awful content now being kept instead of being moderated away or the other way around. And so I think this kind of interoperability conversations is really taking hold. And so I'm cautiously optimistic of the EU also seeing interoperability as one possible.
- [31:42]
B
Tell us a little bit more about this interoperability. Obviously, it sounds very appealing that if I build up a big profile and following on one network, and I've put a lot of work into that, if for any arbitrary reasons, that network can then close me down. That is a very powerful form of censorship. It means that perhaps my livelihood comes from advertising on that platform or from other things. It can be wiped out from one day to the next in very arbitrary ways for which normally I don't have any legal recourse. Now, if I can take my followers to another platform at the drop of a hat, then obviously I have suddenly the power to evade that kind of censorship. And that's a very positive thing. Now, you know, from the other experience, you know, I'm not a very avid user of social media in general, but, you know, I certainly wouldn't want for some of the people who I follow on Twitter, because I think they have interesting political insights, to suddenly show up on my Instagram and now I'm getting the photos of families or whatever they may be doing. It's a very different platform. So how do you, on a technical level, sort of combine my ability to port followers from one platform to another to the ability of my followers to say, well, hang on a second, I'm in for your political content, but not for your holiday pictures. Why are you suddenly picking up on my Instagram?
- [32:59]
A
Yeah, definitely. So Blue sky is a good example. BlueSky is one application that kind of is a reimagination of the old Twitter on a different substrate by many of the same team that did old Twitter. So if you go to bluesky, you can see that there is a Twitter like timeline, you can follow people in a Twitter like way. And there's also the Discovery feed, which is something you can curate and share with your friends and so on and so forth for us. But what differs from Twitter or now X.com is that at any given time you can choose to use a different way to view Blue sky and there's different experiences like Black sky and so on, that has been built on the same substrate so that even if Blue sky one day decides to censor you for some reason, you can go to one of the alternatives and keep your existing connections. Now, on top of the same protocol called App Protocol, there's other applications. So for example, there's something called Flash, which is like Instagram, that is built upon that and that has a different social network. So that if you follow me on bluesky, it doesn't necessarily mean that you follow my photo posts, my flashes. And so just because it's interoperable, it does not mean automatically that one follow translates to follow across all the different modalities of content. It just means, means that when each application posts something or establish a connection, it cannot forbid other applications, other products from using the fact that you have posted something or you have followed someone or have pressed like and so on. That is basically broadcasted to the entire atmosphere. The Ad Protocol network and other applications can make use of it, but they don't have to make use of it. So this is a kind of technical explanation. And now, as part of the Project Liberty Institute and also advising something called Free Rfeeds, what we're trying to do is to build an alternate system to not just automatically back up everything that Blue sky happens on Blue sky, and therefore keep Blue sky in check so that it would not actually arbitrarily target people and censor them. Not that they're doing it right now, but in the future, if their shareholders tell them to do that, then the executive team can say, actually it has no effect because people already have this alternate relay. It's like a pub, a club with a fire exit that's finally installed so people will just go to the next room. And so not just building this, but also offering this as one of the common public good. So that, for example, I'm also involved in advising in the people's bid of ticking. So if O' Leary and McCord and others get the TikTok bid for the US assets, then it's also possible that TikTok will then also join the same underlying infrastructure.
- [36:12]
B
That's very interesting. Now it feels to me like there's a potential paradox here where you want to give as much decision making power in the hands of users and that obviously is a way to prevent censorship. And it's also a way for us to just be more in control of the kind of digital experiences we have in general. Now of course, a lot of users preference may be to be stuck in a partisan echo chamber, maybe to silence the voices that they don't like. And certainly the experience of bluesky appears to have been that it both attracted a very particular political slice of the US population. It is actually more of an echo chamber than Twitter at any point was. And that a lot of people are using some of the these innovative technological options in order to block people en masse. Right. So you can now have algorithms that you opt into which say, you know, if anybody follows Audrey Tang, I'm going to block them. Right. I dislike Audrey Tang so much that if anybody follows her, I auto block them. And that of course also then creates a very strong social incentive for nobody to follow you because they know the moment that I follow you, all of these people who've installed this algorithm are to going to stop seeing my posts as well. So I better socially isolate this person. So are we in danger of a kind of new techno utopianism here where just as was the case 20 years ago, in the early stages of the intention of social media, we thought this would lead to all of these connections among people and it would actually help us overcome our deep divisions, it would make our societies less identitarian and so on. And what has happened is kind of the opposite. And might the same thing turn out that, you know, if we give use users of these social media platforms all of these freedoms to really curate their own experiences, which sounds like something really positive. And as you're talking I see myself nodding along and so on. But then I consider what bluesky actually looks like today and I think, well, I don't know that that in fact has accomplished these kinds of things. Is it actually making things better in the way that we hoped?
- [38:11]
A
Yeah. The two largest free software implementation of this kind of protocol are bluesky and, and Truth Social respectively. And exactly as you witnessed, they may actually be even more echo chamber ish compared to Twitter, when Twitter was still called Twitter. And so I think this is not necessarily something that we cannot recover from. So There's a recent paper that I co wrote with Glenn Weil, with Dave Rusted Darth and a couple other authors, Jacob and Emma, Emily and Luke. What we designed is essentially a way for true social on one side and Blue sky on the other to kind of keep all their like echo chambers, their different communities and so on, but also offer a way to curate what's called a surprising validator. That is to say, if people on the other side said something that actually my community very much appreciate despite fight, we don't usually agree on pretty much anything, then this is called bridging content. And there's a way algorithmically to surface that bridging content on both of the community feeds and also let both community or sub community see that the others are also watching this content. And the reason why we want to create this kind of common knowledge is that we believe that this is one of the main ways that people can see that there is a common knowledge. So despite our ideological differences, despite our differences across generations, urban, rural, gender, whatever, there are actually content that both sides really appreciate and would in fact invite more. And that becomes a business model. So the hypothesis is that, that I belong to many different communities, spiritual one, professional one, so on and so forth. And if there are some form of content, some form of creation that can heal the divides that I usually feel across all these communities, so that I can share this kind of content to all of these communities to bring them together a little bit, then it's worth me paying or subscribing for it. And many communities on the local scale or on a professional scale and and so on, would also like to sponsor the kind of content that heals their sub communities, while of course still accurately representing the balance of the divisiveness within their sub communities. So I think there is a market for that. And I totally agree that it is not just because everybody can curate any experience, it will all be positive experience, but what we have witnessed from the community notes, experiments and from Taiwan one is that people would actually really appreciate to have some of that especially humorous pre bunking content that are depolarizing. Just a very quick example in early 2020, when the science is still out, when it comes to the efficacy of musk when it comes to coronavirus, we already saw two very polarized camps that are kind of blocking each other, are really fighting each other. One camp says because of our SARS experience a few years ago, they only believe in N95, the highest grade mask. They say everything else is a scam. And the other Side says it's aerosol, it's ventilation. Wearing a mask actually harms you and N95 harms you the most. Now, if we just amplify these two extremes, we don't actually know which one is misinformation because science was still not resolving it yet. What we did is that using the same uncommon ground bridging algorithm, we found the uncommon ground, which is why we pushed out this pre bunking message very quickly. It's a very cute dog, a Shiba Inu putting her paw to her mouth, saying, wear a mask to remind each other to keep your dirty and washed hands away from your face. So what it does is change the signified of the mask signifier. What it does is that says if you see somebody wearing a mask, it's not putting pressure on you, it's just reminding you to wash your hands. And so we measured tap water usage. It did increase after. And people who laughed about this message cannot be polarized again by the two messages that I just mentioned.
- [42:39]
B
That's very funny that it actually increased the uses of tap water. I personally find when people tell me to wash my hands, to be very aggressive, but I may be a minority. Everyone.
- [42:47]
A
If it's a cute dog, sometimes it's.
- [42:49]
B
That's right. If a Shiba Inu tells me that, I'm happy to listen to that. What's really interesting about this, I think, is sort of the frame of how to reimagine government. So one set of elements is what can institutions really accomplish in terms of smaller changes sometimes because political science has been very influenced by the institutionalist tradition over the last decades, there's this kind of hope that if we change our electoral system, that is somehow going to make an end to extremes in our politics. And people often believe that in majoritarian political systems like the United States. I've argued about why this proportional representation in America I don't think would be a solution solution to the specific problems of America. Because after all, in many systems of proportional representation, you also have extremes rising in the politics and often managing to get into government. And I think we're sort of placing too much expectation on a change in the electoral system if we think that's somehow going to miraculously make extreme voices disappear from our politics. And perhaps what you're making is a kind of somewhat parallel argument about the design of these digital infrastructures. They can make a difference. They can change incentives. They can allow us to see common ground where current algorithms, current forms of infrastructure are occluded. But of course, it's not going to miraculously transform our public space and make all of those problems disappear. And that may just be too much to ask. Nevertheless, I would like to ask sort of a set of slightly more fundamental questions, which is that we've dealt with the first bucket of misinformation. We've started to touch on the second bucket of how do we have clever ways of actually informing policymakers, making processes? But I'd like to spend a little bit of time in this conversation thinking about the third bucket. If we were designing the first democracies today, if the founding fathers of the United States, having come ashore in the new world and sundered their ties to the United Kingdom, had had available the kind of technologies we do today, what would that political system look like? And more broadly, what does it look like to. To hold on to the principles that in my mind, undergird our political system? And I assume we have a similar conception of them. But perhaps it differs in some ways. The idea that we want to make decisions collectively, that we govern ourselves rather than allowing a dictator or a religious authority or military general or political party make decisions for us. The idea that at the same time, we want to preserve certain basic individual rights, like the freedom of speech that we've been talking about so far in this conversation. We want to preserve those things, but we want to radically reimagine the kind of institutional framework of how to institutionalize those values in a digital world. What would that look like? What do we keep from the current system? And what might be reimagined from scratch?
- [45:38]
A
Yeah, that's a great, great question. So when democracies were first founded, there exists some communication technologies that communicate across distances, like telegrams. There exists very quickly some broadcasting technologies, such as radio, and then later on television. What did not exist was what's called broad listening technologies. So it was possible for one person to talk to another person. It was possible for one person to broadcast to millions of people, but there were no technologies that led one person to listen to conversations from a million or so people. And for that million or so people to also listen to one another to facilitate understanding, that was not possible simply. I mean, there's people who have tried, for example, I believe in the Obama White House, there's like letters to president, and there's this staff, entire staff of smaller language model humans that parse through all the different letters and choose like five or something every day as kind of a medley, representative sample of what people have in mind for the President to read. But of course, it's very time consuming. And also these are individualized so that these people don't actually talk to each other. It's still very much a hierarchical arrangement. Now what we are now seeing is a new generation of what's called broad listening tools. So for example, in the US in Bowling Green, Kentucky as we speak, there's this tool being rolled out called what could BG be? What could Bowling Green be dot com. And if you go there, you can see the feelings from your fellow citizens. You can see a set of listening partners, people who are like locally important in Bowling Green, who agree to respond to the uncommon code ground that is discovered. And you can also agree or disagree on other people's ideas. So what it provides is that it's not just increasing the bandwidth for one decision maker to listen to all the people in Bowling Green, but rather the ability for people in Bowling Green to see the group picture of what we have in common, what are the common values and also what are the main differences and what definitely find those differences and so on. And so this is called sense making. There's now open source tools that can provide such sense making services to arbitrarily large conversations, both online and offline. In California with Governor Newsom a couple weeks ago, we also launched a similar effort called Engage California. And what it does is again allow people to have a real time conversation or asynchronous one with each other on the common topics of how to recreate recover from the wildfire of Eton and Palisade. And again, this is a nonpartisan topic that can really resolve if people around the whole state contribute instead of just one specialized department. And it has the same shape of broad listening, not just to the governor, but people with each other. So I think what will increase is the symmetric capability of, of broad listening instead of just broadcasting.
- [49:10]
B
That sounds really interesting. I guess it feels to me like it's somewhat limited in ambition and in impact. And I mean that in two ways. The first is that it feels like a kind of reinvented form of a traditional New England town hall. Rather than coming together once a week or once a month in order to speak at this town hall, we now are able to do that asynchronously. And that obviously makes it easier for people to participate, has all kinds of advantages, but it feels sort of somewhat limited in the extent to which it transforms the functioning of government. Particularly because the ultimate decision making power remains with bodies like a city council or like a national legislature that are elected on kind of traditional forms. The second concern I have about this is that it also retains, and this is perhaps inevitable, inevitable, the problems of participatory democracy. Which is to say that you know who is most likely to participate in this kind of forum? Well, it's a little bit easier now. Perhaps the busy mom who can't get a babysitter can post this once the kids are asleep, rather than having to miss the meeting because it's at the time when they have to take care of their children or something like that. But I'm sure there still continues to be a very strong skew in terms of terms of socioeconomic status, in terms of educational status, and particularly perhaps in terms of political ideology where we see, and this is the fundamental problem of a primary system in the United States, of course, that the more ideologically extreme you are, the more motivated you are to participate in politics. And so if you have a system like traditional elections, in which hopefully 50, 60, 70, in some countries, 80 and more percent of the population participate, you're not giving extra voice to the extremes. If you have something like a primary or like a caucus in the United States and perhaps some of these forms of participatory democracy where you have a town hall, the people who show up are 10, 5, perhaps 1% of the population, and they're not representative. They are selected to be more ideologically extreme. And so actually you're boosting ideological extremes. You're kind of doing the opposite of the infrastructural things we've been talking about in the context of social media. So I guess my question is both how do you avoid that pitfall and don't we need to actually reinvent government in an even more radical way? Don't we need to think in a more radical way about is there a way of having deliberation be the core of our political system that doesn't involve elected city councils or parliaments in the same way, is there some way of, of reimagining what the ultimate decision making power is in a modern democracy or is that just not the case? Is it in fact the right model and we just need to augment it through these digital channels?
- [51:57]
A
So to your first question about avoiding the pitfalls. The good thing about the pro social algorithm, the bridge making algorithm, is that it's clone proof in the sense that if somebody mobilized, ideologically motivated thousands of people coming to the polis platform voting exactly the same way, then it has no effect on the outcome because again, to recap, the algorithm first calculates the clusters, the people with different thoughts. So even if, say in two clusters, one cluster is 5,000 people, another cluster is just 50 people people because it measures the area, the plurality of their thoughts. 5,000 people voting exactly the same way, it's just one.it's actually smaller in area. And so the design of the clustering algorithm means that Even if it's 5,000 people this side, they still have to get the more than 85% approval from the other smaller group in order for their statement to be counted as bridge making. So the same property that protects the community nodes algorithm protects this kind of algorithm. But I totally agree with you. There's maybe people who are not even motivated to upvote or downvote in the first place and then this system will systematically exclude their voice. Which is why not only like broadband as a human right is important, but in the Taiwan case it's actually a lottocracy or a sortition. When I say we sends SMS to 200,000 random numbers is truly random numbers. And it says that if you want to volunteer some time to consider this, we actually pay you for it. So it's like jury duty, but for the administrative functions. And so in the in person case of course you can pay them even more and call it a citizens assembly. So there are already a lot of especially local level successes with citizens assemblies in Japan and in many other places around the world. So this is an existing form of decision making, this is not a future form. And what I'm describing is essentially using the current generation of AI that does not hallucinate, that is grounded to speed up the summarization phase and the reflection phase and some of the informed phase of this kind of citizen assembly. So this is to your first question about how you avoid pitfalls. The second question is interesting because parliament also starts as a consultative group. It did not start as a very binding decision making group. It is after, after people start comparing the system with Parliament and the parliament's quality with the Monarchs team and so on. After a while people are like, actually this is consistently higher quality, let's switch over to it. So it's like the Buckminster Fuller quote, right? It's not a picture about destroying the old system, it's about building a new system that gradually makes the old one obsolete. This is what I believe in.
- [55:10]
B
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. In the rest of this conversation, Audrey and I talked about how you can actually make young people feel empowered to participate in politics in a meaningful way and how it might build the kind of civic muscle that would allow them to grow up to be responsible citizens of a democratic society. And we also talk about whether we should be pessimistic or optimistic about the future of our democracies, whether the rise of social media is the beginning of a technological world that just isn't hospitable to democracy, or whether we will think of it as a moment of turn turbulence that we're able to master if we figure out the right, the smart, the clever ways of actually channeling all of this participation, channeling all of these energies in a productive direction. I ended up being a little bit more optimistic about the world at the end of this conversation. If you would like to be optimistic as well, go and become a paying subscriber. You'll feel good about the world and about yourself for supporting this podcast. That's at Yash. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your support. Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be like them. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, share it on Facebook or Twitter. And finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com
- [56:55]
A
this recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.