The hacker turned politician using digital tech to reimagine democracy

Taiwan’s first ever minister of digital affairs has transformed politics, using online platforms and AI to give power to the country’s citizens – with lessons for us all

By Laura Spinney

In 2014, the approval rating of Taiwan’s government was less than 10 per cent. Popular dissatisfaction culminated in the Sunflower Movement, with students occupying legislative buildings to protest a proposed trade deal with China. Three weeks later, their demands were met. A decade on, this is seen as a turning point in Taiwanese democracy.One group to emerge from the movement was the civic technology cooperative g0v (pronounced “gov zero”), which included the well-known hacker Audrey Tang. g0v proceeded to build a virtual platform for democratic deliberation called vTaiwan. The “v” stands for “virtual”, but it could just as easily stand for “vulnerable”, says Tang. Born with a heart condition that nearly killed her as a child, she has since become the country’s first transgender minister, and she draws parallels between the fragility of her own life and that of democracy.
Tang was invited to join the government in 2016 and set about implementing her vision of “radical transparency”, starting with vTaiwan. After the first covid-19 cases were declared in mainland China in late 2019, she became a central player in the Taiwanese government’s response as a cabinet member for digital affairs. By 2022, Taiwan was being universally lauded for its handling of the pandemic and Tang was given her own ministry, becoming the country’s first minister of digital affairs. In her new book, Plurality, she argues that Taiwan – often seen as a potential flashpoint for future global conflict – is now a thriving democracy that has much to teach the world. She stood down from her post in May following January’s elections, which is when we caught up with her.


Laura Spinney: How has technology contributed to an erosion of democracy?
Audrey Tang: Democracy depends on a citizenry being informed and engaged in the conversation, and technology that’s used to censor communication or to conduct surveillance – to make people transparent to the state rather than the other way around – has definitely hurt democracy. Even in places where there is no such top-down pressure, the sheer polarisation that exists online has harmed the discourse that is the backbone of democracy. The backslide has been quite acute in the last few decades as it has become harder for people to see democracy as something they can contribute to, or that delivers.

This is a bumper year for elections globally, and some worry that democracy will take a (further) beating. Do you see it as a watershed moment?
Taiwan successfully overcame the many attacks on our democracy because we had 10 years of experience working against very well-funded adversaries. We know, for example, that collaborative fact-checking inoculates people against disinformation better than looking at a checked fact. For democracies that are less well prepared than ours, yes, I do see this year as a possible watershed in terms of amplifying counter-democratic trends, if only because online discourse has become so central to democratic processes and the artificial intelligence tools that let bad actors manipulate the facts have become accessible to all.

Does AI have the power to save democracy as well as erode it?
Only people – the demos in democracy – can save democracy, but AI can help if it’s deployed to assist or augment collective intelligence. There are already narrow AI systems that detect online toxicity, for example, but the new generative AI, including large language models, can detect more nuance, including affinity, compassion, curiosity, reasoning and respect. If social media platforms embrace these models to foreground pro-democratic, pro-social conversations, research suggests that people will spend the same amount of time online, but they will engage in conversations that bridge, rather than exacerbate, ideological schisms. They will begin to see democracy as something they can do here and now, rather than something they only experience at election time, or that they delegate to parliamentarians.

Taiwan had a scoreboard ranking people’s preferred covid-19 vaccines
REUTERS/Ann Wang

In Taiwan, this starts by educating children to be digitally savvy. How is that achieved?
Even before I became a minister, I was a member of the committee that advised the government on curricular reform. The overhaul took effect in 2019, and our new curriculum has now been deployed to all primary schools [ages 6 to 12]. Instead of a one-size-fits-all education, based on critical consumption of information and standardised tests, the new curriculum emphasises autonomy, interaction and the common good. Co-creation replaces literacy at the core of it. I think the results speak for themselves. Surveys show that vTaiwan now leads the world in civic education.

Taiwan has been criticised because the government is free to dismiss policy proposals, and often does. How do you judge vTaiwan’s impact?
vTaiwan served as a proof of concept that, using open-source technology alone, civil society can deliberate policy matters in a fully participatory way that leaves nobody behind. That is important given that 10 years ago, the administration was enjoying an approval rating of 9 per cent and people automatically distrusted anything it said or asked. To begin with, the platform addressed mainly digital issues, but it ended up delivering quite impactful policies – for the regulation of the ride-hailing company Uber, for example. And the project later broadened its scope to non-digital issues, such as consultations for the Open Parliament Action Plan [which aims to bolster democracy through transparency, openness, participation, digitisation and literacy]. vTaiwan helped rebuild legitimacy.

How do the Join platform and your latest initiative, Alignment Assemblies, move things on?
Join is a government-run – as opposed to a civil society-run – platform. It was launched a year after vTaiwan, and its most important function is to serve as a petition platform. Anyone who gathers 5000 signatures for a proposal can force a ministerial response.
Alignment Assemblies are conversations designed to steer the development of AI in ways that benefit society. It takes on board three lessons that we learned from the implementation of vTaiwan. First, we reach out to hundreds of thousands of people via SMS from what they know to be a government number. Second, once we have chosen a representative sample of several hundred citizens, we ask them to meet online in video chat rooms with AI facilitators – something that only became possible with recent advances in conversational AI. Both those measures have massively increased inclusivity, including of senior citizens. Third, we summarise the conversation using AI. A recent Alignment Assembly on the accuracy, reliability and consistency of information led, in just a few months, to an anti-fraud act that is currently awaiting deliberation in parliament.
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How did your digital approach help in Taiwan’s response to the covid-19 pandemic?
Around the world, polarisation over vaccines hurt many more people than was necessary, but in Taiwan there was no anti-vaccine faction. That isn’t because Taiwanese people are homogeneous, it’s because we turned the conversation into a “my vaccine is better than your vaccine” race. We had a national online scoreboard where we kept track of people’s preferences for four vaccines by age bracket. It became a friendly competition, as between rival sports teams.
The idea, then and now, is to anticipate a conspiracy theory and prebunk it, instead of trying to debunk it after the fact when it might be too late. Prebunking works like inoculation: a weaker virus takes hold so a more potent one can’t. We applied the same strategy before the general elections in January to scotch the conspiracy theory that they would be rigged.

A decade ago, dissatisfaction with Taiwan’s government spawned the Sunflower Movement
REUTERS/Toby Chang

Did digital democracy have a positive impact on those elections?
Definitely. After the election, hate across party lines reached a historic low, and that’s despite Taiwan being the most targeted place in the world for disinformation and interference aimed at increasing polarisation. We have playbooks against such interference, including collaborative fact-checking and prebunking of conspiracy theories, so that it backfires and actually increases solidarity across Taiwanese people. The upshot is that, after the election, all three parties and their supporters feel that they have won a little bit. Our radically transparent approach to ballot-counting helped too: votes, which were on paper, were read out in front of observers with cameras.
Have other countries asked for your help in introducing digital democracy?
Very much so. I’m about to leave for a book tour in Europe, where I’ll meet my counterparts in European governments as well as civic society groups. I’ll spend a few days in Finland, which is one of the few countries in Europe to use the collaborative sense-making tool Polis for national consultation, as vTaiwan does. Digital ministers form an assembly of sorts, with experimental platforms all around the world, including Policy Lab in the UK and sitra in Finland.

Taiwan has a very high level of digital inclusivity. Could these processes work in other countries?
From 2016, we insisted that mobile broadband was a human right and the penetration rate of that alone was more than 80 per cent in 2022 – up from 67 per cent six years earlier. That’s even before you consider fixed broadband. We are one of the top countries in the world when it comes to internet inclusivity. But yes, what we have done is absolutely feasible in other countries. The point is that we bring technology to where people are. We’re not asking them to adapt to the technology – and offline options remain available. Accessibility is our top priority.

As a hacker-turned-minister, someone who has tried to renew democracy from the inside, is your ultimate goal to bring down the existing system?
I’m a Taoist, meaning that I don’t think in terms of bringing things down. I prefer Richard Buckminster Fuller’s metaphor in which an individual affects society like a trim tab – the tiny rudder that steers the actual rudder that steers the ocean liner. I don’t steer, I nudge. I want to persuade people to think of democracy as a social technology and to invent new ways of living together. The documentary Good Enough Ancestor, which is based on my book and my life, makes it clear that for me, it isn’t about trying to solve everything or closing down possibilities. It’s about opening them up for future generations, who will have different challenges and different tools, and harnessing diversity through co-creation. The same word in Taiwanese means “digital” and “plural”. I always thought of myself as both digital minister and minister of plural affairs.
Laura Spinney is a writer based in Paris, France