Headline, June 20 2024/ ''' TIKTOK TAIWAN TIMES* '''

''' TIKTOK TAIWAN

 TIMES* '''

 

! FIRST AND FOREMOST ! On The World Students Society the safety of every student and respect for law, rules and regulations comes very, very first. As we learn about how Taiwan deals with TikTok in its own way.

As it is in the United States, TikTok is popular in Taiwan, used by a quarter of the island's 23 million residents.

Peoplepost videos of themselves shopping for trendy clothes, dressing up as video game characters and playing pranks on their roommates. Influencers share their choreographed dances and debate whether the sticky rice dumplings are better in Taiwan's north or South.

Taiwanese users of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant ByteDance, are also served the kind of pro-China content that the U.S. Congress cited as a reason it passed a law that could result as a ban of TikTok in America.

HERE IN TAIWAN - lawmakers say, they do not have the luxury of thinking of TikTok as the only threat. DisinformatIon reaches Taiwanese internet users on every type of social media, from chat rooms to short videos.

'' If you say you are targeting China, people will ask why we are not also talking about others,'' said Puma Shen, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party .  

'' That's why our strategy needs to be that we are regulating every social media platform, not just TikTok,'' said Mr. Shen, formerly the head of Doublethink Lab, a disinformation research group in Taipei.

Taiwan has a deeply ingrained structure of free political speech, having taken the first steps to democracy, only about three decades ago.

Debate thrives across a huge variety of social media platforms, including on Taiwanese online forums, such as Dcard and Professional Technology Temple.

But the most widely used platforms have foreign owners, and TikTok is not the only one. YouTube,  Facebook and Instagram, operated by publicly traded U.S. companies, are even more popular than TikTok in Taiwan.

And Line, a messaging app owned by a Japanese subsidiary of the South Korean Internet giant Naver, is commonly used in the country as a news source and a way to make payments.  

Legislators in Taiwan are considering measures that tackle internet threats - fraud, scams and cybercrime - broadly enough to apply all these existing social media platforms, including TikTok, as well as whatever might replace them in the future.

One proposal introduced last month would require influential platforms that feature online advertising, which effectively encompasses all of them, to register a legal representative in Taiwan. Officials said these restrictions were not aimed at TikTok.

'' We currently think that TikTok is a product that endangers national information security, but this designation does not target TikTok specifically,'' said Lee Huai-jen, the departing spokesman for the Ministry of Digital Affairs.

The ministry slapped the same classification on other Chinese short-video apps, including Douyin and Xiaohongshu, which have large audiences in China.

In March, executives from TikTok's Singapore office met with government and political officials in Taiwan.

The company talked with officials to '' seek their feedback on our platform and for us to detail the many ways in which we keep our community safe,'' a TikTok spokeswoman said. She added that the app's data collection policies were in line with industry practices.

When Taiwan went to the polls in January, multiple organizations and government agencies were on call to make sure the conversation on TikTok stuck to the facts.

TikTok communicated with Taiwan's election commission, police agency and interior ministry to flag potentially illegal content.

TikTok said it had removed almost 1,500 videos for violating its policies on misinformation and election integrity, and took down a network of 21 accounts that were amplifying pro-China narratives. 

It also worked with a local fact-checking group to tag election-related videos with resources about misinformation.

Many had seen videos on TikTok and YouTube showing volunteer poll workers making errors in the vote count and questioned the results of the election, Ms. Chiu said. Some of these videos were real, she added.

The problem was that viewers were primed to think the scale of the error was much larger than it was.

Officials debate over app, but a U.S. style ban is not under any consideration.

The Honour and Serving of the Latest Global Operational research on Social Media, Internet and Regulatory efforts continues. The World Students Society thanks authors Meghan Tobin and Amy Chang Chien.

With most. respectful dedication to the Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See You all prepare for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society - the exclusive and eternal ownership of every student in the world : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter X !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011 :

Good Night and God Bless

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