In an effort to catch up with pan-green politicians who are generally perceived as more tech-savvy than their pan-blue counterparts, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) earlier this year signed up for his own Facebook page in the hopes of wooing the nation’s netizens.
This leap into social networking has evidently gained a lot of interest from the president, as suggested by his rather frequent Facebook activity.
First, the public learned about Ma’s endorsement of the use of Facebook through his recommendation to Cabinet members last month, when he urged them to also establish Facebook pages and make good use of the site as a communication channel with netizens.
“Let people know you,” Ma said at the time. “If they don’t know you, they won’t believe what you say, nor will they want to hear what you have to say.”
The value the president places on his Facebook page was next made obvious by a comment he posted on March 5, thanking his supporters as he marked the day that his number of Facebook fans reached 500,000. Then, on Tuesday, the president’s latest Facebook-related activity was the announcement that he would hold more than one chat with his Facebook fans nationwide.
It’s nice to see the head of state making the effort to stay up to date by embracing new technology to connect with Taiwanese. It is also gratifying to learn the president has the intention to reach out to his people, as statistics suggest that 72.5 percent of the nation’s population has Internet access, and social networking sites such as Facebook or Plurk (the local version of Twitter) provide a great platform for the president to connect with the public.
However, a closer look at the meticulous attention Ma pays to his Facebook page and Facebook fans dumfounds many Taiwanese, leading to questions of whether the president has been sucked up into the Facebook frenzy and lost sight of the far more solemn issues of national importance that are much more worthy of his attention.
Ma’s number of Facebook fans easily towers over that of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) 102,000 and former premier Su Tseng-chang’s (蘇貞昌) 127,000. However, was it really necessary and worth the thought and effort to make note of when his number of Facebook fans reached 499,998, 499,999 and 500,000 — saving those pages as memorabilia? Surely there are more important issues for the president to better instruct his office staff to pay attention to.
While it is nice to have chats with his Facebook fans, hasn’t it crossed the president’s mind that there are people in corners of the country who live in poverty and have no access to the Internet, and that these people have a greater need for his attention?
After all, netizens already have the tools and opportunities to voice their likes and dislikes on Ma’s Facebook page. It is the underprivileged Taiwanese who haven’t had the chance to directly communicate with the president that Ma should pay attention to.
Ma has long been criticized as fancying himself more of a “celebrity” than a head of state, and the superficial “like” button Ma sees on his Facebook page seems to fan his ego while not helping to remind him of the somber responsibility he shoulders as the nation’s president.
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