TAIPEI (TVBS News) — Taiwan's Democratic Progressive Party (民進黨) rode social media to power in 2014 — Facebook was their weapon, young activists their army, and the Sunflower Movement (太陽花學運) their proving ground. A decade later, the National Communications Commission (NCC, 國家通訊傳播委員會) reports that 72.5% of those same young voters now watch TikTok, a platform the party refuses to touch. The social media generation has moved on. The DPP hasn't.
The NCC revealed Sunday (Jan. 4) that 47.5% of Taiwan residents aged 16 and above had watched TikTok content in 2025, up from 18.7% in 2019. The surge was most pronounced among 16-to-25-year-olds, where viewership skyrocketed from 24% to 72.5% over the same period — a tripling in just six years.
The data clarifies why viewership far exceeds account ownership: while less than a quarter of the population are registered active users, nearly half consume content passively through shared links, embedded videos, or web browsers without logging in. This passive consumption makes the platform's political influence harder to measure — and harder to counter.
The findings arrive as Taiwan's government faces mounting criticism over its approach to Chinese-owned social media platforms. The DPP-led administration banned RedNote (小紅書) last month for one year, affecting an estimated 3 million users. Yet the party has stopped short of similar action against TikTok, creating what critics describe as an inconsistent policy framework.
A potential game changer emerged last month when TikTok signed a deal to transfer ownership and control of its U.S. operations to American investors led by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Emirati investment firm MGX. The new entity, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, is expected to close on Jan. 22, meeting the deadline set by President Donald Trump's executive order delaying the ban-or-sell law passed by Congress in April 2024.
Under the deal, content moderation will be managed by American investors, while ByteDance (字節跳動) will retain a 19.9% ownership stake — just below the maximum allowed under U.S. law. In practice, ByteDance maintains technical infrastructure while ceding editorial control — a distinction that may prove crucial for Taiwan's policy debate.
The restructuring could fundamentally alter the DPP's calculus. With American investors controlling content moderation and Chinese ownership diluted, the national security rationale for banning TikTok becomes significantly weaker. Political analysts suggest the deal may open the door for the ruling party to embrace the platform ahead of the 2026 local elections and the 2028 presidential and legislative races.
The Ruling Party's TikTok paralysis
Lai Hsiang-wei (賴祥蔚), a professor at National Taiwan University of Arts and former broadcast media executive, said the DPP remains the strongest party in overall messaging, but its advantage on social media has eroded. He noted that young people and social media users are difficult to predict, and that capturing their attention requires creating immediate resonance.
Shen Po-yang (沈伯洋), a DPP legislator and information warfare expert, acknowledged the party's predicament during a television appearance in December 2023. He claimed that searching for the DPP on TikTok yields more than 50 negative hashtags and that 95% of content criticizes the ruling party — a figure that appears to be his assessment rather than verified research.
The DPP's anti-China stance leads party members to avoid TikTok, while their commitment to free speech principles prevents them from banning it entirely, effectively ceding the platform to opposition voices, according to Chen Chia-hsing (陳嘉行), a Taiwan opinion leader who supports the party. Speaking ahead of the January 2024 presidential election, Chen expressed concern that the party was losing support among youth by abandoning the platform.
KMT Legislator Niu Hsu-ting (牛煦庭) represents Taoyuan's sixth district, a swing constituency with a large youth population. He said social media management has become "standard equipment" for politicians across the spectrum, adding that the DPP can no longer monopolize the social media generation.
Beyond Partisan Politics
Researchers have raised concerns that the platform may be reshaping Taiwan's political landscape in ways that extend beyond partisan advantage. Lin Thung-hong (林宗弘), a researcher at Academia Sinica's (中央研究院) Institute of Sociology, said Taiwan high school and university students who represent TikTok's first generation of users show lower political participation than previous generations. "In recent years, young people's willingness to vote has significantly decreased," Lin told the Central News Agency (CNA, 中央通訊社). "We worry they will become politically apathetic and withdrawn."
A poll released in 2024 by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation (台灣民意基金會) found that 20-to-24-year-olds are no longer the age group with the highest Taiwan identity ratio, marking a reversal of a long-standing trend. However, the polling organization has not established a direct causal link between TikTok usage and identity shifts, and researchers acknowledge multiple factors may be at play.
Hsu Hsee (徐曦), a researcher at Doublethink Lab (台灣民主實驗室), a Taiwan-based think tank, is conducting what he describes as the first systematic survey on TikTok's impact on Taiwan society. He told CNA the platform may not make Taiwan youth identify as Chinese or support unification, but it could reduce their concerns about and resistance to Beijing.
Preliminary research from Doublethink Lab found that TikTok's algorithm begins recommending soft political content after pushing dance videos to accounts mimicking Taiwanese students for several days. Some content included street interviews in Taipei's Ximending (西門町) district, where Taiwanese youth were asked to compare Chinese "democracy" with the weaknesses of Taiwan's political system.
The Algorithm's Soft Power
The concerns echo international research. A study led by Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, found last year that TikTok provides content favorable to the Chinese Communist Party at rates "disproportionately high" compared to Instagram and YouTube. Heavy TikTok users held notably more positive views of China's human rights record and more favorable attitudes toward visiting China.
TikTok and ByteDance did not respond to inquiries about the Taiwan-specific allegations. The company has previously stated it takes security concerns seriously and continues to improve protective measures.
The platform's influence extends to Taiwan's youngest users. Government-supported data from the Taiwan Communication Survey Database (台灣傳播調查資料庫) shows 44% of elementary school students use TikTok, rising to nearly 60% among junior high students. Cultural influence has accompanied this growth: Chinese slang terms, including the northern expression "Niú" (牛), meaning "awesome," have entered Taiwan teenagers' vocabulary over the past three years, according to the Financial Times.
Lin argued that as cross-strait exchanges in investment, tourism, and education have decreased over the past decade, China has turned to social media to reach Taiwan's youth. "This causes our young people who have never been to China and know nothing about it to develop fantasies about the country, then project their dissatisfaction with Taiwan onto this imagined China," he said.
The Ban Debate
The NCC report showed LINE dominates Taiwan's social media landscape with 98.2% account ownership, followed by Facebook at 82.4%, YouTube at 68.6%, Instagram at 47.8%, and TikTok at 23.8%. LINE has historically been the platform of choice for Taiwan's political campaigns, with verified official accounts becoming standard infrastructure. During the 2020 presidential election, President Tsai Ing-wen's (蔡英文) LINE account attracted over 610,000 followers — the most of any political figure at the time.
Wu Yi-nung (吳怡農), a DPP politician, has proposed banning TikTok on national security grounds, mirroring the U.S. approach. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld a TikTok ban on Jan. 17, 2025, ruling that the app's ties to Beijing pose significant national security threats. The ban took effect Jan. 19, leading to a brief blackout period where the app was pulled from U.S. digital storefronts. On President Trump’s first day in office, Jan. 20, he signed an executive order granting a 75-day reprieve to allow for a forced sale, narrowly averting a permanent shutdown.
By late January, although service was restored for existing users, the app remained unavailable for new downloads on major app apps stores until mid-February. In Taiwan, this American precedent shifted the political landscape, prompting a critical debate on whether the island should adopt similar drastic measures to counter CCP influence operations.
However, Taiwan's opposition politicians argue the government should not interfere with free speech. Shen acknowledged the challenge: "Once the DPP government takes action on this, the opposition party will fight fiercely with us, accusing us of restricting freedom of speech."
A decade ago, the DPP mastered Facebook and transformed Taiwan's political landscape. Now, with TikTok reaching nearly half the population and dominating among youth, the party faces a familiar crossroads — adapt to the platform where voters live, or watch opponents claim territory they voluntarily abandoned. The U.S. deal closes Jan. 22. The 2026 local elections are less than 10 months away. And 72.5% of young voters are already watching — on a platform the party still won't join.
>>> The findings come from the NCC's 2025 Communications Market Report, based on face-to-face interviews with 1,222 Taiwan residents aged 16 and older conducted March 22 – April 25, 2025. The survey distinguished between platform account ownership and content viewership, capturing passive consumption through shared links, embedded videos, and web browsers without login. The commission has conducted this annual survey since 2019, providing longitudinal data on social media adoption trends. The margin of error is ±3.0% at a 95% confidence level.
