Almost 90 percent of Taiwanese aged 7 to 15 are social media users, with the average having three accounts and spending two hours a day on them, a survey released on Tuesday by the Child Welfare League Foundation showed.
Eighty-seven percent of students in elementary and junior-high school have social networking accounts, the foundation told a news conference in Taipei.
Each respondent had an average of 3.8 social networking accounts that they used 16.7 hours per week, the foundation said.
The survey showed that 9.3 percent of respondents used the sites more than 40 hours a week and 60.8 percent used electronic devices until midnight.
Nearly 63 percent of respondents considered it important to stay online, while 39.9 percent became anxious when offline or without their cellphone, the survey showed.
The median age of smartphone ownership was 10.1 years and 82.7 percent of respondents owned one, it showed.
Privacy was not an issue for 46.7 percent of respondents and 33.2 percent allowed Web sites to collect their personal data, it showed.
The survey found that 56.1 percent of respondents had watched scary or violent content online, 37.3 percent had seen pornographic material online, and 27.6 percent had negative experiences on social networking sites, including cyberbullying or harassment.
The survey showed that students in elementary and junior-high schools using social media face the risks of Internet addiction, loss of personal data, exposure to inappropriate content and cyberbullying, said Harold Li (李宏文), head of the foundation’s policymaking center.
The foundation advised parents to do more to protect their child’s privacy, to monitor their child’s contacts on social Web sites and to remind them to be careful when commenting online.
The group also urged the government to set up an agency dedicated to managing Internet safety.
The survey was conducted by the foundation from May 6 to 24 and had 1,542 valid respondents. It had a confidence level of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.49 percentage points.
Taiwanese can file complaints with the Tourism Administration to report travel agencies if their activities caused termination of a person’s citizenship, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said yesterday, after a podcaster highlighted a case in which a person’s citizenship was canceled for receiving a single-use Chinese passport to enter Russia. The council is aware of incidents in which people who signed up through Chinese travel agencies for tours of Russia were told they could obtain Russian visas and fast-track border clearance, Chiu told reporters on the sidelines of an event in Taipei. However, the travel agencies actually applied
Japanese footwear brand Onitsuka Tiger today issued a public apology and said it has suspended an employee amid allegations that the staff member discriminated against a Vietnamese customer at its Taipei 101 store. Posting on the social media platform Threads yesterday, a user said that an employee at the store said that “those shoes are very expensive” when her friend, who is a migrant worker from Vietnam, asked for assistance. The employee then ignored her until she asked again, to which she replied: "We don't have a size 37." The post had amassed nearly 26,000 likes and 916 comments as of this
New measures aimed at making Taiwan more attractive to foreign professionals came into effect this month, the National Development Council said yesterday. Among the changes, international students at Taiwanese universities would be able to work in Taiwan without a work permit in the two years after they graduate, explainer materials provided by the council said. In addition, foreign nationals who graduated from one of the world’s top 200 universities within the past five years can also apply for a two-year open work permit. Previously, those graduates would have needed to apply for a work permit using point-based criteria or have a Taiwanese company
The Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday indicted two Taiwanese and issued a wanted notice for Pete Liu (劉作虎), founder of Shenzhen-based smartphone manufacturer OnePlus Technology Co (萬普拉斯科技), for allegedly contravening the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例) by poaching 70 engineers in Taiwan. Liu allegedly traveled to Taiwan at the end of 2014 and met with a Taiwanese man surnamed Lin (林) to discuss establishing a mobile software research and development (R&D) team in Taiwan, prosecutors said. Without approval from the government, Lin, following Liu’s instructions, recruited more than 70 software
RSS