Taiwan's digital minister on combatting disinformation without censorship
I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s the same person, but I believe I may have spoken to Tang about a draft of work she did in the POSA book about EtherCalc.  I can understand from just that interaction how she became digital minister.  I have never had someone parse and respond to an email so thoroughly or had a better technical discussion in my life.  And the work she did on that project scaling EtheCalc with Node and LiveScript, and also the creation of webworker-threads years ago, to me those were very inspiring projects.  Never interacted with anyone with better technical abilities.<p>That interaction gives me the idea that if I am critical and she happens to enter this thread, it will not fall on deaf ears.  I don&#x27;t really like sounding negative, and especially in this case they are much better than most countries.<p>What is described is better than China, but it&#x27;s not ideal.  However I do think they should be commended from explicitly avoiding censorship to the degree that they do.<p>However, communications from the government to counter other communications identified as disinformation are government propaganda.  If they are not identified as such, then they have the same problem as the original disinformation.<p>Secondly, making it easy to flag propaganda in apps and then blocking it as she describes is in fact building in a type of censorship.  It&#x27;s just a brilliant type of crowd-sourced censorship.  I know the theory is that that would only be applied to false information.  However, censorship doesn&#x27;t work like that.  The end result is going to be a worldview that is reduced and shaped by a dominant group rather than the free flow of information.  Especially if it relates to all of the information that people in a country can see.  This can be very dangerous.<p>So I will just say what I think would be ideal even if it may not be very realistic. The history of government propaganda and censorship should be part of the public context.  I think it is good to be able to flag articles as being propaganda and from what source.  However I think that removing things from being visible entirely is very dangerous for freedom.  Taiwanese&#x2F;US&#x2F;Chinese&#x2F;etc. government propaganda or counter-propaganda should be identified as such if possible.  Perhaps a generic way to say something is propaganda or bias and a generic way to indicate where you think it&#x27;s coming from (could be a political party or country).  However the news that I see from large media, about 90% of it qualifies.  I don&#x27;t think it should be possible for these flags to remove information from the stream.  Although certainly there can be standards related to removing things like gore -- but this needs to be monitored to make sure that it does not get used for political censorship.