What Canada Can Learn from Taiwan on Building Digital Resilience for Democracy
2024 will be a record-breaking year for elections with 2 billion voters in 50 countries voting worldwide, including the United States, India, Europe, South Africa, and Mexico. In this context, the proliferation of AI-generated content and the vast potential for cyber interference in elections highlight an urgent need for democracies to reevaluate their protective measures and foster global cooperation against threats.
Elections face a wide range of risks, including vulnerabilities in voter registration systems, electronic voting machines, and election management systems, all of which can undermine the integrity of the electoral process. Additionally, malicious use of AI can exacerbate these risks by facilitating the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and deep fakes, challenging traditional defenses against such threats. While technology companies have signed onto an accord committing to safeguard elections from misuse, these steps are voluntary, include no oversight, and have been largely given a failing grade by researchers.
Addressing these challenges requires election authorities, policymakers, civil society organizations, and technology providers to collaborate to strengthen transparency, secure election technologies, introduce policy measures, and strengthen civic engagement around disinformation and election fears, both of which undermine trust in democracy.
Taiwan’s Democratic Resilience Strategy
In January 2024, Taiwan - under routine threats of interference from China - held its most recent elections, under the guidance of Taiwan’s formidable Minister of Digital Affairs Audrey Tang. Their experience navigating emerging concerns offers important lessons to Canada and other democracies to better secure trust in democratic processes.
In a Feb 29, 2024 podcast interview with the Centre for Human Technology, Tang shared several observations on how Taiwan was not only able to hold secure and widely trusted elections, it also succeeded in increasing social cohesion on key policy issues through deliberative polling strategies leading up to the election.
Tang’s recommendations fall into six key recommendation areas:
Pre-bunking Deepfake Strategies: Taiwan deployed a two-year “pre-bunking” campaign to strengthen public inoculation to disinformation and raise awareness of the capabilities of deep fake technologies before they were widely misused. Part of this campaign included Tang creating and publicizing a deepfake video of themselves, demonstrating how easily such content can be created, and demonstrating the need for public consumers to seek independent content verification.
Information Manipulation Layers: Taiwan’s efforts included educating public consumers to critically evaluate the layers of information manipulation including actors, behaviors, and content. Instead of assessing the trustworthiness of information based solely on content, consumers should also consider the behavior of the disseminators (e.g. is this coordinated inauthentic behavior such as a foreign interference campaign or someone with an ideological agenda?) and the actors behind that dissemination (who is creating this campaign and do they have an agenda?).
Verified Information Sources: This campaign also involves implementing systems that verify the source of information, such as using a consistent, secure number for official communications (e.g., government SMS messages). All communications in Taiwan from widely recognized short-code numbers can help the public distinguish between trustworthy and potentially fraudulent messages.
Collaborative Fact-Checking (Cofacts): Creating campaigns that encourage the public to participate in collaborative fact-checking including tools for real-time verification that can empower communities to combat disinformation effectively. This crowdsourced approach allows for rapid response to emerging disinformation campaigns.
Deliberative Polling and Civic Engagement: Investing in technologies and methodologies that enhance civic engagement and deliberative polling can increase public participation in democracy. These technologies ensure that diverse perspectives are represented and that the public can contribute meaningfully to policy discussions.
Paper Ballot Voting: Tang argues for the continued use of paper ballots in elections, highlighting their transparency and reliability (Canada uses paper ballots but uses ballot-counting machines in some regions). The ability of citizens to use their devices to record and verify the vote-counting process in real-time strengthens trust in the electoral system and mitigates concerns about election fraud.
Focus on Bridging Divides: Efforts should be made to bridge societal polarizations by fostering community relationships and deliberative discussions. By engaging people in meaningful consensus-building activities, democracies can strengthen social cohesion and resilience against divisive tactics.
To be sure, Taiwan is not Canada and there are distinct complicating factors in Canada owing to different political structures, demographics, language, and cultural diversity. There is also a growing influence of extremist political perspectives emerging from US politics which is sowing division in Canada.
Nevertheless, Taiwan’s election integrity success is noteworthy at a time when concerns are on the rise about the ability to hold credible elections. Its success offers a proactive approach to future-proofing the integrity of electoral systems from disinformation and external influences by strengthening transparency, public education, civic participation, and secure technologies. Canada should take note.
Implications for Canada
Even before Generative AI came along, election integrity was already a major concern. Canada is in the midst of a public inquiry into foreign interference by China, Russia, and other foreign states that was launched in January and is expected to provide a final report by year-end. If the inquiry finds that Canada has been “a playground for foreign spies”, the Liberal Party will face hard questions on its failure to protect the integrity of Canada’s democracy from external threats.
The government has taken steps within its departments and agencies to identify and mitigate potential threats including shoring up technology infrastructure, bolstering coordination among security agencies, and funding some citizen-focused projects. Yet more can be done to not only protect the integrity of Canada’s election processes but also better engage Canadians in election processes.
In particular, Canada should consider:
Establish an independent National Digital Affairs Agency that is governed by a representative board of civil society experts and mandated to secure critical infrastructure in coordination with relevant agencies.
Develop and fund “rapid pre-bunking” and “co-facts” strategies to engage Canadians, improve access to reliable and quality information, and reduce the impact of disinformation in upcoming elections.
Develop a Short Codes Strategy to provide confidence to Canadians in the provenance of critical information and explore such strategies for other major areas of digital risk including banking fraud.
Experiment with Deliberative Polling and Citizens’ Assemblies to improve engagement in both elections and policies on the social impacts of technology
Establish Bridge Building Initiatives that promote policies and narratives around consensus-building on emerging policies and issues
Assuming the Liberal - NDP partnership holds until next October, Canada has time to go further. The Government would do well to take a page or two from Tang’s playbook for its own sake and to secure Canada’s elections. Indeed given increasing risks that democracy is at stake, it would be foolish not to.
