On Thursday last week — one day after the legislature’s Transportation Committee announced that deliberations over a draft news media and digital platform bargaining act remain at an impasse — students from the nation’s top journalism schools publicly urged lawmakers to pass the act and include a journalism development fund.
Citing social media’s increasing prevalence, they emphasized that news firms are often forced to sacrifice quality of reporting to prioritize online traffic and advertising revenue. The absence of any relevant legislation, they said, further contributes to the already deteriorating media environment and could undermine Taiwan’s democracy.
These concerns are well-founded, as Taiwan is no exception to the current global trend — social media’s rising influence is altering the media environment and negatively impacting traditional media, which suffer from declining engagement, public trust and digital subscriptions.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report in June found that total advertising revenue allocated to mass media in Taiwan fell 36 percent from 2016 to 2023.
According to the report, 46 percent of Taiwanese respondents get their news from YouTube, followed by Line at 42 percent and Facebook at 37 percent. Meanwhile, traditional media have faced significant drops in popularity — TV news dropped to 56 percent from 77 percent in 2017, and print news fell from 41 percent to just 14 percent.
Overall trust in news now stands at a mere 30 percent, ranking Taiwan 39th out of the report’s 48 surveyed markets — a statistic that, while not unusual given the nation’s increasingly polarized political environment, is nonetheless alarming.
Draft bills proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators would require large international platforms to negotiate with Taiwanese news media over the pricing of online news content.
However, several lawmakers expressed hesitation, given the aftermath of similar laws in Canada and Australia.
Meta in 2023 responded to Canada’s Online News Act by blocking access to news on Facebook and Instagram for Canadian users. An analysis by McGill University and the University of Toronto in August last year found that Canadian news outlets subsequently lost 85 percent of their engagement on the platforms — a gap that was not filled by increased views on other Web sites, resulting in a 43 percent decrease in overall engagement.
While Australia initially had more luck with negotiations after passing its own regulations in 2021, Meta in March last year said that it would no longer make deals with Australian news publishers. In response, the government introduced a “bargaining incentive” that would require digital platforms with annual revenues exceeding A$250 million (US$163 million) to pay a fixed charge should they refuse to enter direct deals.
This prompted intense criticism from US President Donald Trump, who characterized it as placing an unfair financial burden on US technology companies and threatened to impose retaliatory measures to “repair any resulting imbalance” created by such policies.
Passing a law that would directly impact US technology giants such as Meta and Alphabet, parent company of Google and YouTube, could very well stall the progress of ongoing tariff negotiations.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Su-yu (陳素月) urged the committee to pause its review and give the Ministry of Digital Affairs time to communicate with platform operators.
No doubt there is an urgent need for legislative intervention to address the rapidly changing media landscape, and support high-quality and trustworthy journalism. Lawmakers are right to err on the side of caution — a law, if not carefully designed, could very well end up doing more harm than good.
Having lived through former British prime minister Boris Johnson’s tumultuous and scandal-ridden administration, the last place I had expected to come face-to-face with “Mr Brexit” was in a hotel ballroom in Taipei. Should I have been so surprised? Over the past few years, Taiwan has unfortunately become the destination of choice for washed-up Western politicians to turn up long after their political careers have ended, making grandiose speeches in exchange for extraordinarily large paychecks far exceeding the annual salary of all but the wealthiest of Taiwan’s business tycoons. Taiwan’s pursuit of bygone politicians with little to no influence in their home
In a recent essay, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” a former adviser to US President Donald Trump, Christian Whiton, accuses Taiwan of diplomatic incompetence — claiming Taipei failed to reach out to Trump, botched trade negotiations and mishandled its defense posture. Whiton’s narrative overlooks a fundamental truth: Taiwan was never in a position to “win” Trump’s favor in the first place. The playing field was asymmetrical from the outset, dominated by a transactional US president on one side and the looming threat of Chinese coercion on the other. From the outset of his second term, which began in January, Trump reaffirmed his
It is difficult not to agree with a few points stated by Christian Whiton in his article, “How Taiwan Lost Trump,” and yet the main idea is flawed. I am a Polish journalist who considers Taiwan her second home. I am conservative, and I might disagree with some social changes being promoted in Taiwan right now, especially the push for progressiveness backed by leftists from the West — we need to clean up our mess before blaming the Taiwanese. However, I would never think that those issues should dominate the West’s judgement of Taiwan’s geopolitical importance. The question is not whether
In 2025, it is easy to believe that Taiwan has always played a central role in various assessments of global national interests. But that is a mistaken belief. Taiwan’s position in the world and the international support it presently enjoys are relatively new and remain highly vulnerable to challenges from China. In the early 2000s, the George W. Bush Administration had plans to elevate bilateral relations and to boost Taiwan’s defense. It designated Taiwan as a non-NATO ally, and in 2001 made available to Taiwan a significant package of arms to enhance the island’s defenses including the submarines it long sought.
RSS