Internet addiction has become a problem affecting many families around the nation, an Internet watchdog group warned yesterday, one day after a murder in New Taipei City was linked to playing an online game.
A 36-year-old man allegedly killed his teenage son on Wednesday amid a dispute over the best strategy for playing an online game.
Statistics from the Institute of Watch Internet Network showed that from January to June, the group received 111 telephone calls from people seeking consultation on issues with Internet use. While 61 of the calls were related to online safety, the remaining 50 dealt with Web addiction.
The group said that most of the 50 cases involved teenagers between 13 and 15 years old, who became addicted to the Internet through the use of social networks, online chat rooms and playing online games.
The teens’ dependence on the Web reportedly not only caused them to forgo sleeping and eating, but created tension between them and their parents, the group said.
In one case, a father told a case worker that his son stole money from him to play online games in Internet cafes, adding that the father — presumably out of desperation — had asked if he should tie up his son to force him to have his addiction treated by the institute.
“We encourage parents to seek professional assistance if their children spend excessive amounts of time online. Professional case workers can propose ways to help parents and children deal with Internet addiction based on the specific requirements of each case,” institute executive director Huang Wei-wei (黃葳威) said.
Meanwhile, the group said it received more than 15,000 complaints between August last year and June relating to online content, more than 76 percent of which were to do with material the complainants deemed pornographic.
The group said that 66 percent of the complaints involved material on Web sites based in other countries, with more than 660 complaints made about YouTube content, while 235 others were related to content on domestic and foreign news sites that was deemed inappropriate.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily topped other news outlets by drawing 92 complaints of inappropriate content on its Web site, Huang said.
“Its [the Apple Daily’s] online version tends to display photographs of an explicit sexual or violent nature,” Huang said. “Also, the stories on the page involving physically challenged individuals have been found to contain derogatory wording, which has drawn constant criticism from civic groups.”
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater