Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) leads a Google chart of the most-searched-for politicians in Taiwan this year, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) garnered the most online interest among presidential candidates, the search engine said on Friday.
Ko, who also grabbed the top spot last year, when he won the mayoral race as an independent, continues to attract online users’ attention, and the controversy surrounding a picture of a Japanese porn star being printed on EasyCards earlier this year also kept him in the spotlight, Google said.
Developments leading up to the Jan. 16 presidential and legislative election have been popular topics among users of Google’s search feature, the company said.
In terms of online searches, former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) was ranked second. She is followed by Tsai, who has been frequently searched since the DPP’s trouncing of the KMT in the nine-in-one elections in November last year.
Google also noticed a surge in searches after parties announced their lists of legislator-at-large candidates.
President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was ranked fourth, while his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping (習近平), was ranked seventh. Their Nov. 7 meeting in Singapore, the first between leaders across the Taiwan Strait since 1949, was the most searched political event this year, Google said.
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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: