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.
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