Media and broadcast experts are urging the government to avoid over use of social media for policy announcements and promotions, as the speed at which information spreads on the Internet — for both good and bad — has become so fast.
Danny Lin (林柏蒼), former chief executive officer of the micro-blogging service Plurk, who also previously worked on Yahoo Messenger, said government agencies should have guidelines regarding the use of social networking Web sites for policy promotion.
Communicating with and managing an online community is an ongoing process of noticing minutiae within the group, and it is much more than simply budgeting a sum for the endeavor, Lin said.
Photo: Hung Mei-hsiu, Taipei Times
Government agencies’ media or communications departments should be responsible for recruiting social network managers who can serve as the department’s voice on the Internet, he said.
These managers should provide reports analyzing media responses to government policy so that improvements or corrections can be made, Lin said.
Crisis-management should be handled with transparency and should be quick and neat, he added.
However, social networking Web sites are not the main platform on which the government should announce its policies, he said.
Instead, agencies should provide links to their own Web sites after making announcements on social media, allowing transparency and ease of access to information, Lin added.
Facebook is the predominant social networking site in Taiwan and its primary users are between the ages of 30 and 50 years old, the prime demographic to target with pictures or short videos with easy-to-read text to promote governmental policy, he said.
“Government agencies should avoid topics that might incite flame-wars to avoid losing focus on the government’s message,” he added.
Flame wars are when users engage each other in a lengthy and abusive back-and-forth over a particular subject or issue.
They should also refrain from overemphasizing the potential engagement on a post and should instead ensure that the public knows and understands the content of the policies, he said.
New policies would best be announced on specially created campaign sites — which should be easy on the eyes and accessible to the public — to offer the public a closer view of the policy, he said, adding that suitability of popular live-streamers should be assessed before they are approached to work with the government, as some of them might undercut the government’s message.
Governmental commissions to companies for policy promotions could focus on the wrong kinds of key performance indicators, which might result in “likes” and shares of a post, but could lose sight of the necessary balance they must keep for governmental policies, Lin said.
Instagram, highly favored by the younger generation, is more useful to promote easily understood concepts, but should not be the go-to medium for prolonged discussions, Lin added.
Du Sheng-tsung (杜聖聰), chair of Ming Chuan University’s radio and television department, said that while new platforms should be considered in the Internet age, one should not blindly select Internet celebrities or popular live-streamers to promote government policies simply because it is the trend in the corporate world or elsewhere.
The public should be told the logic behind any government policy, he said.
They should also be informed about why certain celebrities have been selected to promote the policies and whether the effects and “fairness” of the promotion of a policy by these individuals was considered during the decision-making process, Du added.
The Government Procurement Act (政府採購法) offers clear legal guidelines on how the government spends its money and those hiring such celebreties need to observe the regulations, he said.
The government must also provide information about the source of funding for the celebrity spokepeople, Du added.
“Everything should be transparent,” he 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:
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
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
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