Why Threads Succeeded in Taiwan but Failed Everywhere Else

Sunday - April 7 2024, 19:35 UTC - 9 months ago

Threads, a short text post platform created by Meta and connected to Instagram, succeeded in Taiwan due to its smaller user base and the country's political climate. Its success is a rare win for Meta, as replicating it in other countries will be a challenge.

Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released 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 dwindled, I felt maybe it was not necessary to use it. 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: most of these 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 quite different, making it easy to spot your own people .

And on most platforms that are truly global, the conversations in Chinese are mostly dominated by people in or from mainland China, since its population far outnumbers the rest. But why did Threads succeed in Taiwan when it has failed in so many other places? My interviews with users and scholars revealed a few reasons. First, Taiwanese people never really adopted Twitter. Only 1% to 5% of them regularly use the platform, now called X, estimates Austin Wang, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas .

The mainstream population uses Facebook and Instagram, but still yearns for a platform for short text posts. The global launch of Threads basically gave these users a good reason to try out a Twitter-like product. But more important, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year means there was a lot to talk, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) "gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool," Wang says .

"Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more interaction on Threads than Instagram and Facebook." "Taiwanese people gather on Threads because of the freedom to talk about politics [here]," Liu, a designer in Taipei who joined in January because of the elections, tells me. "For Threads to depoliticize would be shooting itself in the foot." The fact that there are an exceptionally large number of Taiwanese users on Threads also makes it a better place to talk about internal politics, she says, because it won’t easily be overshadowed or hijacked by people outside Taiwan .

The 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 the Taiwanese users are saying. That feels like a fresh breeze to Liu. These are some tough questions to answer for Meta, because users will simply flow to the next trendy, experimental platform if Threads doesn’t feel right anymore .

Its success in Taiwan so far is a rare win for the company, but preserving that success and replicating it elsewhere will require a lot more work.