A Facebook group called “Baoliao [爆料, “tip-off”] Commune” has been registered as a company, with its owner, Yeh Chang-chun (葉昌圳), saying that it will serve as a platform for people to voice their grievances.
The group, established in 2014, accepts reports on topics and stories that are unlikely to be carried by mainstream media, including celebrity and odd news, as well as issues of public interest.
Baoliao Commune Co was on Aug. 1 registered by the Ministry of Economic Affairs as a Taichung-based firm with paid-in capital of NT$3 million (US$98,905) whose main businesses include information and software services, advertising, data processing and electronic information supply.
In an interview with the Central News Agency, Yeh said that his management team earlier this year decided to form a company to offer “powerless ordinary people” a platform to voice their grievances, as mainstream media would not report on their problems.
The company is to offer free skills training to single parents as part of its social responsibility program, Yeh said, but added that for the time being it would focus on covering its personnel and management costs with advertisement revenue, Yeh said.
Facebook’s algorithms do not match the company’s goals, Yeh said, adding that his team is developing apps to help the company’s sustainability.
It is to allow the media to use its materials for free, because its employees are not professional media workers and do not intend to become so, he said.
Yeh said he hopes the company will coexist with mainstream media by collecting public grievances that can be turned into news articles to reach a wider audience.
Liu Chen-chen (劉蓁蓁), a ministry official in charge of trademarks, said the company has applied for six trademark names: Baoliao Commune (爆料公社), Baofei Commune (爆廢公社), Baojiang Commune (爆漿公社), Baoxi Commune (爆系公社) Baoxi Story House (爆系故事館) and the English-language name Baoliao Commune.
It will take the ministry at least five months to review the trademarks and determine which ones can be used, she said.
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:
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