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Why Threads is suddenly popular in Taiwan

Apparently, Twitter was quite niche and the launch of Threads coincided with a surge of interest in presidential elections, for which one party's supporters rallied on Threads which also pulled in their friends.

Many (worried) pan-green supporters noticed that their complaints on politics were promoted to more readers on Threads than any other social media platforms (especially Facebook and Instagram), so more and more pan-green supporters gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool[.]

Also, the pictured election slogan reads "Choose the right person; walk the right way". Like, seriously?

garretble ,
@garretble@lemmy.world avatar

I thought Threads was supposed to “suppress” political posts.

Maybe that’s just in the US.

Aatube OP ,
@Aatube@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Thread wants to, at least.

autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Users and observers point to a few factors that contributed to Threads’ unexpected success on the island, including the fact that Twitter never became truly mainstream for Taiwanese people.

“According to numerous surveys, at most 1% to 5% of Taiwanese people use Twitter regularly,” Austin Wang, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said in an email.

“I use [Twitter] first because the K-pop circles use it to save images of their idols, and secondly because LGBT communities (especially gay men) use it as a subculture social platform to meet new people,” says Sebastian Huang, a college student in Taipei.

Before the emergence of Threads, these discussions happened mostly on Facebook and Twitter, but the prevalence of bots, misinformation, disinformation, and spam content drove people to find new alternatives.

Liu, who joined Threads in January because of the election-related content, says talking about politically sensitive topics on other social platforms could often result in being shadowbanned or even suspended.

“As with all our products, we take safety seriously, and we enforce Instagram’s Community Guidelines on content and interactions in Threads,” a Meta spokesperson said in response to MIT Technology Review’s emailed questions.

The original article contains 1,660 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 88%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Aatube OP ,
@Aatube@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Hmm, this is the first time I've seen this bot miss the point and almost entirely.

Caligvla ,
@Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Really? This bot is borderline useless most of the time, it just picks random sentences and stitches it together into a semi coherent post.

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