Facebook remains the most commonly used social media Web site in Taiwan, at 98.9 percent of all Taiwanese Internet users, vastly outstripping second-placed Instagram, at 38.8 percent of all users, a Taiwan Network Information Center report showed.
Facebook is popular across all age groups in Taiwan, although younger users are beginning to use it less often, the annual report found.
Users under the age of 30 rarely frequent Facebook, although they form the majority of users of other social media sites, it found.
Photo: AFP
The report said that no other social media Web site is used by more than 10 percent of Internet users, an indication that other Web sites have select audiences.
This trend indicates that Internet users are attempting to maintain some sort of privacy while not completely eschewing the popular Facebook and Instagram, it said.
In third is Twitter, at 5.6 percent of all Internet users, while Professional Technology Temple (PTT) — the nation’s biggest online bulletin board system — is the fourth-most frequented social media Web site, at 1.4 percent of all users, the report said.
Users of Twitter and PTT are mostly male — more than 60 percent — and most fall in the 25 to 29 age bracket, the report said.
Instagram seems to have more female users and, as mentioned in reports in other countries, seems to be frequented by younger people, with more than 70 percent of 15-to-24-year-old Internet users frequenting the site, and about 60 percent of 25-to-29-year-old users visiting it.
Aside from Facebook, Instagram is the only Web site that 12-to-14-year-old users frequent, the report said, adding that 65.2 percent of Internet users in that age group visit it.
The report said that a fairly high percentage of female Taiwanese Internet users visit Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging site, attributing it to people following celebrities.
Dcard is similar to PTT, but the average age of its users, at 20-to-24, is slightly younger than the PTT user base, the report said.
Sina Weibo and Dcard placed fifth and sixth, with 1.4 percent and 1.3 percent of all users frequenting the sites respectively, it said.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s comment last year on Tokyo’s potential reaction to a Taiwan-China conflict has forced Beijing to rewrite its invasion plans, a retired Japanese general said. Takaichi told the Diet on Nov. 7 last year that a Chinese naval blockade or military attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially allowing Tokyo to exercise its right to collective self-defense. Former Japan Ground Self-Defense Force general Kiyofumi Ogawa said in a recent speech that the remark has been interpreted as meaning Japan could intervene in the early stages of a Taiwan Strait conflict, undermining China’s previous assumptions
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
RSS