Audrey Tang, 44, uses her hacker skills, her IQ of 180, and her position as Taiwan’s minister of digital affairs — which she has held for nearly 10 years — to make the internet a safer place. Her goal is to ensure that the web serves its users, not the other way around. Although she does not believe in democracy without technology, she tries to reduce the time she spends online by keeping her screens in grayscale and avoiding compulsive consumption of content. She also argues that “artificial intelligence is a parasite that fosters polarization.”
For “advancing the social use of digital technology to empower citizens, renew democracy and heal divides” Tang has just won one of the 2025 Right Livelihood Awards, known as the alternative Nobel. The award ceremony will take place on Tuesday, December 2, in Stockholm.
Tang is the first transgender minister in the history of her country’s cabinet. She emerged from g0V, a collective of technologists who worked to design a transparent governance model in Taiwan. Her work laid the foundation for the 2014 Sunflower Movement, when hundreds of young people occupied Taiwan’s parliament in protest of a trade agreement with China that had been negotiated in secret. The minister believes that the internet — though full of conflict and polarization — has the power to give citizens a direct role in policymaking and restore trust in the state: “The first thing I did when I entered government was try to rebuild the trust of citizens. Taiwan was very polarized, but by 2020 we managed to raise citizen approval from 9% to 70%.”
In nearly a decade in office, Tang declared broadband internet a human right, created a mask map during the coronavirus pandemic to report real-time availability, and organized several campaigns against disinformation and deepfakes (videos or images manipulated with AI). She also created the Robust and Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) for the 2025 Paris Artificial Intelligence Summit, a decentralized and collaborative system that helps detect cases of child sexual abuse on platforms like Bluesky and Roblox.
No democracy is an island
At 15, Tang decided to leave school and began working with her father, who at the time was a political adviser to one of the presidential candidates: “I got involved in politics at a very young age and realized that the internet had arrived to change everything. The internet can really listen to and amplify what the people actually feel on the ground, instead of just the few people that are the key opinion influencers or gatekeepers.”
Now, Tang devotes her time to training leaders from other countries. In the United States, for example, she helped California Governor Gavin Newsom create a platform called Engaged California, aimed at generating a collective voice to speak on behalf of all citizens affected by the wildfires that devastated the area earlier this year.
She also works with Japan, where she gave this interview. Takahiro Anno, a Japanese science fiction writer, AI engineer, and political figure, read Plurality, the book Tang wrote, last year. A month before the Tokyo gubernatorial elections, he decided to run for office. Nobody knew him, but he created a platform based on Tang’s principles to try to address citizens’ main concerns. Anno won more than 1% of the vote — over half a million ballots. Many young people believed in his proposal, and he later founded a party called Team Mirai.
“I help other countries because, even though it seems we’ve healed the problem of polarization in Taiwan, no democracy is an island — not even Taiwan,” the minister says.
Digital democracy as bubble tea
“In Taiwan, the internet and democracy literally emerged at the same time,” Tang explains.
The first personal computers appeared in the 1980s, coinciding with the lifting of martial law in 1987 — a dictatorship imposed after World War II, when Taiwan returned to the control of the Republic of China following the withdrawal of Japanese forces. In total, there were 38 years of political repression.
“Our first presidential elections were held in 1996, right when the first web browsers were created. That’s why, for us, one cannot exist without the other.”
In a video posted on Instagram, the minister explains while preparing bubble tea, a typical Taiwanese drink: “Internet and democracy are not two things, but rather one and the same thing. Just like bubble and tea.”
Tang believes that ever since technology has existed, humans have imagined the future in the same way: “We’ll build a robot that will then help design the next version; eventually, robots will no longer need humans anymore to make new versions, and they’ll dominate us.”
This idea is known as technological singularity, which Tang says is widely accepted — even in Silicon Valley, where she started working at age 16. “Many people in Silicon Valley believe that this is inevitable, that the human species is just a cradle for future species that will inevitably do whatever they want with us.”
But Tang doesn’t see it that way: “We don’t need super intelligence to save us, because we’re already a superintelligent species. We just need to move from singularity to plurality.”
The plurality Tang speaks of is the cooperation between opposites: “Instead of treating conflict as a volcanic eruption that must be extinguished immediately, we should tap into that magma — that reactive energy that emerges from disagreement — to find solutions and build a kind of geothermal plant to resist the heat.”
That’s exactly what she did with ROOST, the online child sexual abuse prevention system she co-created: “It came from joining forces to improve a very dangerous field.” Tang explains that today, anyone can produce Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM), a crime that’s extremely difficult to track. “In some countries, certain kinds of images aren’t considered profane, while in others they are. So a single surveillance model would be obsolete,” Tang says.
ROOST seeks to close existing gaps in digital safety by providing each community with essential, tailored tools and developing solutions that offer the protection they need. For example, to avoid sharing sensitive graphic material, Tang says they decided to convert all images into text — which is legal and also protects the victims’ privacy. “This is what I mean by plurality: humans must come together so that technology serves us — not the other way around,” she concludes.
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