Threads is giving Taiwanese customers a region to focus on politics

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Like most journalists, I actually have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. Nonetheless for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) launched by Meta last year. The way it has to be tied to your Instagram account didn’t sit well with me, and as its popularity declined, I felt it was perhaps not necessary to use it.

Nonetheless I eventually joined Threads last week after I discovered that the app had suddenly surged in popularity among Taiwanese users. For months, Threads has been the most downloaded app in Taiwan, as users flock to the platform to discuss politics and more. I spoke with professors and Taiwanese Threads users about why the Meta-owned platform experienced a redemption arc in Taiwan this year. You can read what I found here.

I first noticed the trend on Instagram, which occasionally shows you a few trending Threads posts to try to entice you to join. After seeing them a few times, I realized there was a pattern: all of these posts were written by Taiwanese people talking about Taiwan.

That was a rare experience for me, since I come from China and write primarily about China. Social media algorithms have always shown me accounts similar to mine. Although people from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all write in Chinese, the characters we use and the expressions we choose are somewhat different, making it easy to identify your own community. And on most platforms that are truly global, conversations in Chinese are mostly dominated by people in or from mainland China, since its population far outnumbers the rest.

As I dug into the phenomenon, it soon turned out that Threads’ recognition has been surging at an unprecedented pace in Taiwan. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, publicly said that Threads has been doing “exceptionally well in Taiwan, of all places.” Data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence agency, shows that Threads has been the most downloaded social media app on iPhone and Android in Taiwan almost every day of 2024. On the platform itself, Taiwanese users are also gradually realizing their impact when they see that comments under popular accounts, such as a K-pop group, come mostly from fellow Taiwanese users.

Nonetheless why did Threads succeed in Taiwan when it has failed in so many other places? My interviews with users and scholars revealed several reasons.

First, Taiwanese people never really adopted Twitter. Only 1% to 5% of them use the platform, now called X, on a regular basis, estimates Austin Wang, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The general population uses Facebook and Instagram, but still desires a platform for short-text posts. The global launch of Threads gave these users a good reason to try a Twitter-like product.

Nonetheless more importantly, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year meant there was a lot to discuss, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “gathered on Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” Wang says. “Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more engagement on Threads than on Instagram and Facebook.”

Even though Meta has tried to position Threads as a less political version of X, the reality is that its success in Taiwan was likely driven by the very desire to discuss politics.

“Taiwanese people use Threads because of the freedom to discuss politics [here],” Liu, a fashion designer in Taipei who joined in January due to the elections, tells me. “For Threads to depoliticize might well be shooting itself in fact be shooting itself in the foot.”

The fact that there are an exceptionally large number of Taiwanese users on Threads also makes it an even better place to discuss domestic politics, she says, because it won’t easily be overshadowed or hijacked by people outside Taiwan. More established platforms like Facebook and X are rife with bots, disinformation campaigns, and controversial content moderation policies. On Threads there’s minimal interference with what Taiwanese users are saying. That feels like a strange turn to Liu.

Still, I can’t help feeling that Threads’ popularity in Taiwan might easily go wrong. Meta’s decision to keep Threads distanced from political content is one factor that could undermine Taiwanese users’ experience; an influx of non-Taiwanese users, if the platform truly becomes more successful and celebrated in various parts of the world, might also introduce heated disagreements and the very reasons why many platforms have deteriorated.

These are some refined inquiries to acknowledge to for Meta, attributable to customers will merely waft to the next celebrated, experimental platform if Threads doesn’t feel perfect-wanting anymore. Its success in Taiwan to this level is a rare catch for the firm, but maintaining that success and replicating it in other locations will require arrangement more work.

Do you think Threads stands a chance of rivaling X (Twitter) in locations other than Taiwan? Let me know your thoughts at [email protected].

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Meet up with China

1. Morris Chang, who founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at the age of 55, is an outlier in today’s tech industry, where startup founders generally start in their 20s. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. A team of Chinese researchers used the expertise in the service of hypersonic missiles to develop high-speed trains safer. (South China Morning Post $)

3. The US authorities is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send applications to the US. Nonetheless many US corporations also benefit from the exemption now. (The Information $)

4. The Chinese commerce minister will visit Europe soon to plead his nation’s case amid the European Commission’s investigation into Chinese electric vehicles. (Reuters $)

5. After three years of unsuccessful competition with WhatsApp, ByteDance’s messaging app designed for the African market in some way shut down last month. (The Rest of World)

6. The rapid progress of AI makes it seem much less necessary to learn a foreign language. Nonetheless there are still things AI loses in translation. (The Atlantic $)

7. Here’s the incredible story of a Chinese man who takes his piano to play outdoors at sites of public danger: in front of the COVID quarantine restrictions in Wuhan, at the epicenter of an earthquake, on a river that submerged villages. And he plays the same music—the simplest piece he knows, composed by the Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto. (NPR)

Lost in translation

With Netflix’s March release of The Three-Body Problem, a series adapted from the worldwide hit sci-fi novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Western audiences are also discovering a film-like true-life drama behind the adaptation. In 2021, the Chinese publication Caixin first investigated the mysterious death of Lin Qi, a successful businessman who acquired the film rights to the novel. In 2017, he hired Xu Yao, a prominent lawyer, to handle legal affairs and government relations.

In December 2020, Lin died after he was poisoned by a mysterious combination of toxins. According to Caixin, Xu is a fan of the TV series Breaking Bad and had his own laboratory in Shanghai where he produced poisons. He would obtain various toxins through the dark web, mix them, and test them on pets to experiment. A week before Lin’s death, Xu gave him a bottle of pills that were supposedly probiotics, but he had replaced them with poison.

Xu was arrested soon after Lin died, and he was sentenced to death on March 22 this year.

Yet any other thing

Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, announced it’s experimenting with delivering applications by rockets. Yes, rockets. Made by a Chinese startup, Taobao’s pilot rockets will be able to deliver something as large as a car or a truck, and the rockets will even be reused for the next delivery. To be honest, I still can’t imagine this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.