Threads: A Surprising Success in Taiwan's Social Media Landscape

Friday - April 5 2024, 04:15 UTC - 10 months ago

Since its launch in July 2023, Meta's text-based social network Threads has seen unexpected success in Taiwan. This is due to a combination of factors, such as the platform's allowance for open discussion and the country's low adoption of Twitter. With many new users joining after the January 2024 presidential election, Threads has become a popular platform for making new friends and finding community. Despite facing initial backlash and low usage, Threads has rebounded and is now a thriving part of Taiwan's social media landscape.

For most people around the world, Meta’s text-based social network Threads is a platform that they haven’t thought of for months. But for Liu, a design professional in Taipei, it’s where she’s receiving unprecedented attention.

"My casual posts often receive a large number of reposts now. It used to only happen every few months on Twitter, but it’s happening every few weeks or even days on Threads," says Liu, who has used Twitter (now renamed X) for more than eight years and has posted on Threads since January. She asked MIT Technology Review to use only her last name for privacy reasons.

Even Meta has noticed the pickup in interest. In early March, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, shared in an "ask me anything"–style story that "[Threads] is doing really well in a variety of countries, exceptionally well in Taiwan of all places, which has been fun to see." A Meta spokesperson confirms that Mosseri has publicly spoken about the trend but declined to offer more data on the platform’s growth in Taiwan.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. Threads has managed to meet the demand for open discussion when Meta’s other platforms, like Facebook, are losing their appeal. Taiwan’s presidential election in January also brought in a significant number of new accounts and a lively discussion of politics and social issues.

As a result, many people in Taiwan are joining Threads and using it daily. Liu spends less than an hour on average every day on the app, where she writes down whatever’s on her mind. Originally, her friends were real-life acquaintances connected through Instagram, but she’s increasingly making new friends on the platform now."I’m an ordinary, introverted person … I feel so surprised and honored for the high level of attention I receive [on Threads]. This has never happened on any other platform," she says.

Threads was introduced to the world as Meta’s answer to Twitter after the latter was infamously acquired by Elon Musk, prompting many long-term users to look for alternatives. But in Taiwan, unlike most other places that began experimenting with Threads, people had never really adopted Twitter in the first place. "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.

There were a few exceptions. "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.

Outside these niche groups, though, Threads had a fresh chance to win Taiwanese users over. "In my observation, [Threads] popularized Twitter’s socialization logic and pushed it toward the mainstream communities," Huang says.

Still, Threads’ popularity plummeted after its launch in July 2023. In Taiwan—like the rest of the world—many users left the platform within the first month. This was likely due to the high expectations placed on the platform as the "Twitter replacement" and the reality that it was a completely different platform from what users were used to. But it has since rebounded.