Audrey Tang: Using Technology to Strengthen Democracy in Taiwan

Since the early days of the internet, Taiwan had a vibrant community of civic hackers and open-source programmers who engaged with social issues. Audrey Tang was one of them. She spearheaded the 2014 Sunflower Student Movement in Taiwan, where protestors peacefully occupied the Parliament to demand greater transparency around a proposed trade deal with mainland China. As Taiwan’s Digital Minister, Tang had been at the forefront of Taiwan’s development as a digital democracy that leveraged information technology and citizen participation. Tang referred to democracy as a "social technology." Like any technology, Tang believed that democracy could be improved by people, and experimented with ideas to make democracy work better. She supported the notion that openness and transparency created mutual trust between the public and the government and allowed for collective action. In Taiwan, hackers were seen as partners to the government. Digital technology was used to solicit ideas, build consensus, assess public sentiment, and address both domestic and international misinformation. In early 2020, Tang is faced with the problem of a potentially growing COVID pandemic and the explosion of misinformation. How can Tang control both the pandemic and the infodemic while retaining the government’s principles of cooperation and transparency?