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Audrey Tang, who served as Taiwan’s first minister of digital affairs, flashes a Star Trek Vulcan greeting at Town Hall Seattle. (Photo © 2025 Danny Ngan / dannyngan.com)
This is a story about how digital tools helped government officials regain the trust of the electorate — but it’s not a science-fiction tale about a future Reunited States of America. Instead, it’s a story about Taiwan, as told by Audrey Tang, the country’s first minister of digital affairs and first transgender cabinet minister.
“It is not inevitable for social media to polarize people,” Tang, who now serves as Taiwan’s cyber ambassador-at-large, said this week at Town Hall Seattle. “It is a consequence of the design of the platform. So, we began bridging systems using our own pro-social media tools.”
Tang traced Taiwan’s moves toward pro-social digital governance during a Seattle Arts & Lectures presentation that also featured a follow-up fireside chat with Ted Chiang, a Seattle-area science-fiction author who has written commentaries on the social impacts of technology for The New Yorker and The New York Times.
In 2014, Taiwan’s democracy was in crisis — primarily because of resistance to a trade deal with China. The government’s approval rating sank to as low as 9%. Back then, Tang was a computer programmer and one of the leaders of an opposition coalition known as the Sunflower Movement.
“There was massive outrage, amplified by social media, which was very new at the time,” she recalled. “We occupied Parliament for three weeks, nonviolently … We, the programmers and journalists, activists, everybody worked together with half a million people on the streets and many more online. We deployed open-source software to assist in live-streaming those debates. We built conversation networks.”
Government officials eventually relented and invited Sunflower representatives, including Tang, to take on policy roles. “Our initial mission was to overcome the trust crisis that was caused by this divisiveness,” she said.
Tang and her colleagues developed new channels that made use of “pro-social media” to find common ground on issues ranging from pandemic-era health measures to surge pricing for rideshare services.
“Often we see Group A and Group B at each other’s throats on social media, because they imagine a caricature of the other group,” she said. “By promoting instead these ‘uncommon grounds’ into common knowledge, we reduce tensions and reduce the sense of us vs. them.”
Tang said a “new mood of constructive collaboration” boosted overall trust in Taiwan’s institutions. “By 2020, the trust in our government has become over 70%, and it was not an accident. From 9% percent to 70%. It was the result of consistently involving citizens in bridging attempts,” she said.
In comparison, the overall trust rating for the U.S. federal government has ranged between 14% and 27% over the past decade, according to the Pew Research Center. Those levels vary by political affiliation, depending on who’s in office. When Donald Trump was in the White House in 2020, trust among Republicans was as high as 36% while trust among Democrats was as low as 12%. When Joe Biden was president, Republican trust sank to 8% and Democratic trust rose to 36%.
Taiwan’s community-bridging strategies included:
Computer-aided consensus building: Tang talked up a software platform called Polis, which traces its roots to Seattle. Polis is a tool that gathers up and distills input from large groups of people in real time. The platform powered the conversation networks that were established by Tang and her teammates.
Online citizen assemblies: Tang’s ministry teamed up with activists to convene “Alignment Assemblies” of randomly selected citizens to hash out policy questions — for example, how to create digital signatures for social-media postings. “After deliberation, we have shown the legislators and everybody that no matter which part of Taiwan they’re in, which age bracket, gender, political affiliation, more than 85% of people support these sets of measures that they feel are really within the overall window,” Tang said.
Vigorous fact-checking: Civic leaders set up a fact-checking network called Cofacts to identify disinformation campaigns at an early stage. The network is built by volunteers, including “many high schoolers that crowdsource quick responses,” Tang said. “They also train language models together, so that when new information comes that looks sufficiently like the old one, a rapid response is offered by those language models tuned by the young people. This form of youth empowerment is not limited to pre-bunking. It is also for presidential hackathons and for impactful petitions.”
Open-source approach to software architecture: Tang said open-source principles make it possible to mix and match elements of a software platform like Lego blocks. “If you do not like how they are arranged, well, you can arrange it in a very different way,” she explained. “The whole idea of ‘forking the government’ means that when people are not happy with how our digital services are delivered, they can take all the components and remix it in any way they want, and then contribute it back to commerce.”
Taiwanese cyber ambassador-at-large Audrey Tang and science-fiction author Ted Chiang discuss the impact of digital tools on governance at Town Hall Seattle. (Photo © 2025 Danny Ngan / dannyngan.com)
Artificial intelligence does play a role in the digital tools used in Taiwan, but Tang said the tools tend to rely on good old-fashioned AI, or GOFAI, rather than newfangled generative AI.
Chiang said he doubted whether generative AI, on balance, could ever be good for democracy. “It’s hard to think of pro-social uses for it,” he said.
Tang agreed that a reliance on generative AI could cause “social civic muscle” to atrophy. Even though software can help humans plot a course for public policy, humans shouldn’t give up control of the steering wheel.
“I talk to my avatar, you talk to your avatar, our avatars talk to each other. That’s like going to the gym and looking at the robots lifting the weights,” she said. “So, that’s how civic muscle withers, even though it would be very impressive, I’m sure. … I think we should push back against any human-to-human social relational work that is being partially automated by human-to-machine work.”
During the question-and-answer period, Tang was asked what advice she’d give to ordinary citizens who want to engage in dissent more effectively. She replied that advocating for positive change was preferable to merely resisting negative developments.
“Think in terms of demonstrations, not just protesting. Counter-power against something is very, very easy to amass, and frankly speaking, very addictive,” she said. “My suggestion, again, is to do broad listening, and then build a coalition based on the idea of demonstrating together.”
And what about advice specifically for people in the tech industry?
“Consider open-sourcing your work,” Tang said. “Seriously, it’s very good for your portfolio. … You get to keep the things you have developed. So there’s really nothing to lose if you open-source things. The only thing maybe you lose a little bit is your face, because people may see the shortcomings of your work, right? But then, I will quote Leonard Cohen, my favorite singer, who said, and I quote, ‘Ring the bells that can still ring. Forget your perfect offering. For there is a crack, a crack in everything, and that is how the light gets in.’”
This week’s event was part of a Seattle Arts & Lectures series called “Ted Chiang Presents: Love, Hope and Other Four Letter Words,” co-presented by Clarion West.
