Q&A: Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship - Committee to Protect Journalists

Disinformation is a threat, especially for open societies. Especially around Taiwan lots of jurisdictions, not just PRC, use disinformation as an excuse for the state to do censorship. We don't want to go there, because we still remember the martial law. First, before a propaganda campaign or disinformation spreads, we usually observe that there is a point where they are doing some kind of limited testing or A/B testing, and that's before it became really popular. It's just testing the meme, the variation, to see whether it would go viral, so to speak. Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game. Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.