One political post, 160,000 views, 462 comments: my critics weren't the blue camp, they were the green camp

"Social Watch" is our new series. We pull every comment under a post and read them one by one to see what readers are actually saying and how the platform is actually distributing it. For the first installment, I'm putting my own post under the knife.

At 1 a.m. on November 6, I posted a long political essay, "The post-KMT era: Taiwan needs an opponent that lets the DPP step down with peace of mind," to both my personal FB and Threads. Right at the top, I wrote that "this view is bound to get flamed."

Two days later, the two platforms had a combined 166,000 views, about 3,800 likes, and 468 comments. Excluding my own 6 replies left 462, and we pulled and categorized all of them. The original essay is included at the end of this article.

The short version

• Most of the criticism came from green-camp supporters, not the blue camp.Most of them agree that "Taiwan needs a second homegrown party." They disagree that now is the time to talk about it, and they disagree even more that "the DPP should help build it."
• On FB, the most-liked comments were all objections.The 28 comments from a KMT/TPP standpoint received just 19 likes in total.
• Threads was friendlier than FB.The agreement rate was 19% on Threads and 13% on FB.
• The line readers repeated most: "I vote DPP now so that someday I won't have to."
• Same post, completely different engagement curves on the two platforms: Threads burned out within a day, while FB was still accelerating at hour 35.

How big a response is this?

First, compare it with this Threads account's own history. We log every post's performance to a database daily and have records for 1,189 posts so far:

The top two posts by views were both trivia quizzes. People glance at a quiz while scrolling past. This post is one readers finish and still want to weigh in on, which is why its likes and replies were far higher. Followers grew from 267 to 300 in two days, up 12%.

On FB, the Insights curve for "typical content" barely leaves zero. This post shot up to 90,000.99% of views came from people who don't follow me, because the post was shared beyond my circle of friends.

Two caveats:

• 166,000 counts "views," not "people."On FB, 46,513 people actually saw it, so each viewed it nearly twice on average, and readers also overlap across the two platforms. We estimate actual reach at roughly 100,000 people.
• It's still a step below political influencers.Large political pages often get tens of thousands of likes per post. A fair way to put it: a personal account belonging to someone who isn't a public figure produced a political post that was widely shared and sparked debate.

Where people stood

Each comment is assigned only to its single main point, so this is a rough breakdown. Read it for the overall direction, not as a poll.

Likes on FB comments are visible, but Threads' official interface doesn't expose likes on other people's comments. All FB comments together received about 670 likes. "Not feasible" got 184, "Too early" got 132, and "Challenges the premise" got 130, so those three made up about two-thirds. "Agree" got 112 likes, and "Opposing camp" got just 19.

In plain terms:On FB, the dominant voice was green-camp readers. They don't mind you calling the KMT rotten. What they mind is you "finding the DPP a rival."

Five recurring arguments

1. "This isn't the post-KMT era yet": the headline got called out first.The KMT still holds the majority in the Legislative Yuan, in mayoral and county magistrate posts, and in council seats, so many readers rejected the premise from the headline alone. One Threads reader wrote: "The very first sentence is wrong. We're nowhere near a post-KMT era."

2. "Once the KMT falls, the DPP will split on its own": the most common alternative answer.Many comments on both platforms made the same point: there's no need to deliberately nurture anyone, because once the KMT is gone, the DPP's factions will naturally divide into two homegrown parties. The top comment of this kind on FB got 39 likes.

3. Point 5, "The DPP should support such a party as it grows," took the hardest hits.Readers gave two reasons. One is that it goes against human nature, since no party trains its own replacement. The other is precedent: the DPP backed both the New Power Party and the TPP, and both turned on it. One FB comment with 48 likes read: "All it does is split the DPP's vote and hand the advantage to the KMT."

4. "The TPP once came close" was contested.Some said that's exactly why they voted for Ko Wen-je in 2024. Others disagreed entirely and argued that Ko was pro-China from the start.

5. "I vote DPP now so that someday I won't have to."On Threads, at least 6 people restated this line in their own words, making it the point that resonated most. It struck deepest with readers who "grew up in a blue family, gradually turned green, but don't really like the DPP." The most-liked agreeing comment on FB (43 likes) opened exactly that way: "I come from a blue, mainlander family."

Several comments on both platforms also pointed out that I left out the New Party and the People First Party. They're right.

How the FB and Threads algorithms differ

The same post went up at the same time on both platforms, which makes a natural side-by-side comparison. Below, items marked [Verified] can be seen directly in the data, and items marked [Inference] are our hypotheses about the causes.

Speed: Threads is a flash burst, FB is a slow burn

Momentum by when comments came in (Taiwan time):

• [Verified]Nearly 80% of Threads replies (215/277) arrived between hours 6 and 18 after posting, and after 24 hours they dropped to almost zero. Views stalled too: 73,725 at hour 29 and 75,555 at hour 35, an increase of only 1,830 in 6 hours.
• [Verified]FB had only 13 comments in the first 11 hours and was still accelerating at hour 35. In Insights, the view curve was nearly flat for the first 8 hours, then climbed in a straight line.
• [Inference]Threads' "For you" feed pushed the post to a large number of strangers right away, so it heated up fast and cooled down fast. FB spreads layer by layer through shares, and each share opens up a new circle of friends, so it starts slowly and has a long tail.

Who the readers were: all strangers, but arriving by different routes

• [Verified]99% of FB views came from non-followers. The Threads account has only 300 followers, yet it drew 250 times that many views. Reach on both platforms came almost entirely from algorithmic distribution.
• [Inference]FB's strangers are "friends of friends." They arrive through shares and mostly comment under their real names. Threads' strangers are matched to the post directly by the algorithm, mostly use anonymous accounts, and have no social ties to each other.

What engagement looked like: earnest debate on FB, likes and agreement on Threads

• [Verified]Threads beat FB on every engagement rate, and its share rate was 5 times higher.
• [Verified]The comments themselves differed. On FB, "Not feasible" and "Opposing camp" together made up 38%, and the most-liked comments were all objections. On Threads, "Agree" made up 19%, along with many short comments like "great post" and "boosting for friends." ("Boosting for friends" is Threads slang for leaving a comment so friends see the post too, which also helps raise its reach.)
• [Inference]The Threads algorithm weighs reply counts heavily, and readers know that commenting helps a post spread, which explains the many short comments. On FB, comments are visible to friends and posted under real names, so people are more willing to spend time writing long rebuttals.

Variables we didn't control for

• FB is my personal account and Threads is a separate account, so each started with a different set of followers.
• This is only one post, and it landed right before an election (voting on 11/28), when political topics were already hot.
• FB comment timestamps only show rough markers like "X hours ago," so the time windows may be off by ±1 hour.

How we did it

• Threads: We pulled the full reply thread, including replies to replies, through the official API, for a total of 280 comments. The performance figures also came from the API.
• FB: Posts on personal accounts can't be read through any official interface, so we expanded "All comments" in a logged-in browser and read them from the page, for a total of 188 comments. The platform's displayed comment count was a few higher than what we captured, usually because of deleted or hidden comments.
• Classification: AI read each comment and assigned it to one of the eight categories above. A comment that expressed both "agree" and "too early" counted toward only one category.
• All comments quoted in this article are anonymized.

Appendix: the original post

Below is the full Threads version. On Threads, the post was split in two, with the second half posted as the first comment. The FB version has the same content.

The post-KMT era: Taiwan needs an opponent that lets the DPP step down with peace of mind

The bottom line:

1. Taiwan's problem isn't that the DPP is too strong. It's that people who dislike the DPP have no option that doesn't gamble with the country
2. The KMT isn't that option. The TPP came close, but its leader got into legal trouble and the party drifted toward the KMT, so it isn't that option either
3. The problem with the New Power Party and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party is that they poach DPP votes instead of drawing out the localist voters within the KMT
4. What Taiwan needs is a homegrown party that breaks away from the KMT, like the early Taiwan Solidarity Union
5. What the DPP should do is support the growth of such a party, not prop up yet another junior partner of its own

I remember Miao Poya saying something roughly like this: the pro-Taiwan camp also needs to imagine a party that comes after the DPP.

When I first heard it, it struck me as odd. Isn't the pro-Taiwan camp just the DPP?

The more I thought about it, the more I felt she'd hit the nail on the head.

In a normal democracy, the ruling party eventually steps down. That isn't a curse; it's the design. The problem is that in Taiwan, the DPP stepping down still means "handing power to a party that has questions about the nation's identity."

Until that equation is broken, Taiwan's democracy will never be normal.

[Who should Taiwanese who dislike the DPP vote for?]

Let me first describe who these people are.

They see Taiwan as a country. Whether you call it the Republic of China or Taiwan, it isn't part of China. In comparative-politics terms, they support "ROC independence": they're in no hurry to change the country's name, but they're absolutely opposed to unification.

But they dislike the DPP, for many reasons: arrogance after too long in power, factional spoils, energy policy, judicial controversies, and distaste for certain figures. These are normal grievances that any party accumulates after eight or ten years in power.

A large share of these people actually sit among KMT voters. They vote KMT not because they believe both sides of the Strait belong to the Chinese nation, but because they don't want to vote DPP and the KMT is the only other side big enough.

In the 2024 presidential election, another large bloc voted for Ko Wen-je: 3.69 million votes, or 26%.

That wasn't about Ko's charisma. It was a group of people finally finding an exit that was "neither the DPP nor the KMT."

Then that exit collapsed.

In 2024, Ko was detained over the Core Pacific City case, and in March 2026 a district court sentenced him to 17 years. Huang Kuo-chang took over the TPP and tied it to the KMT in the Legislative Yuan, and during the 2025 mass recall campaign the two parties acted almost as a single bloc.

Where does that exit lead now? To the KMT.

And the KMT? Cheng Li-wun was elected party chair in 2025. In April 2026 she led a delegation to mainland China, where she attended a welcome banquet in Shanghai hosted by the Association of Taiwan Investment Enterprises on the Mainland. Her public message was that "both sides of the Strait belong to the Chinese nation."

I'm not judging whether that line is right; that's the KMT's own choice. I'm stating one fact: a voter who sees Taiwan as a country but dislikes the DPP looks at these two opposition parties and can't bring themselves to vote for either.

That leaves two outcomes: hold your nose and keep voting DPP, or hold your nose and vote KMT.

Either way, you're holding your nose. That's the problem.

[Has a ruling power ever helped its opponent grow?]

Yes, and it happened right here in Taiwan.

First: Chiang Ching-kuo made no arrests (1986)

In September 1986, opposition activists announced the founding of the Democratic Progressive Party at the Grand Hotel in Taipei. Martial law was still in effect, and forming a party was illegal.

Chiang Ching-kuo could have made arrests. He didn't.

That year he said the line that would later be quoted again and again: "Times are changing, the environment is changing, and the tide is changing too." Martial law was lifted the following year.

It isn't that Chiang loved democracy. He saw clearly that a regime that won't allow opponents to exist will eventually be toppled by opponents it can't control. Letting rivals grow within the system was actually the KMT's insurance policy for its own survival.

He turned out to be right. The KMT is still around today.

Second: Lee Teng-hui joined hands with the DPP (1990–2001)

While Lee was president, the KMT's biggest enemy wasn't the DPP. It was the non-mainstream faction inside his own party.

So he did something many people didn't notice: he worked with the opposition to reshape his own country.

He invited the DPP into the 1990 National Affairs Conference. In 1991 he ended the Period of National Mobilization for Suppression of the Communist Rebellion, and in 1992 the entire legislature was elected anew for the first time. At the 1997 National Development Conference, the KMT and the DPP (then chaired by Hsu Hsin-liang) worked together to pass the constitutional amendment that froze the provincial government.

During the 2000 election, some in the KMT kept accusing him of "abandoning Lien to save Chen," that is, secretly helping Chen Shui-bian. It remains a Rashomon to this day, but it's a fact that the KMT expelled him in 2001.

Third: the early Taiwan Solidarity Union (2001)

That same year, Lee backed the founding of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). Its first chair, Huang Chu-wen, came from the KMT and had served as Minister of the Interior. Many of the early TSU's core members were KMT localists.

This is the example I consider most important.

The early TSU was neither a group of street activists nor a group of people greener than the DPP. It was made up of people who walked out of the KMT, who identified with Taiwan but didn't want to become the DPP. The voters it set out to win were the localist voters inside the KMT.

In that year's legislative election, the TSU won 13 seats.

That result proved one thing: within the KMT, there really is a group of people who are localist and pro-Taiwan but don't want to vote DPP. Give them an exit, and they'll walk out.

Why did the TSU fade? Two reasons.

One was the electoral system. In 2008, legislative elections switched to single-member districts with two ballots, which left small parties almost no room to survive in district races. It isn't that the voters weren't there; the system flattened their voice.

The other was its direction. The later TSU grew more and more radical until it became a party deeper green than the DPP. Once it went that way, it was no longer a home for KMT localists. Instead, it was competing with the DPP for the same voters.

This point is crucial, and I'll come back to it.

Fourth: the DPP stepped aside for Ko Wen-je (2014)

In the 2014 Taipei mayoral race, the DPP fielded no candidate and backed the independent Ko Wen-je. Ko won 850,000 votes and defeated Sean Lien.

Did that count as the DPP being "magnanimous"?

I'd say half. The calculation at the time was clear: the DPP's own candidates couldn't win Taipei, and Ko was the only one with a shot. That was tactics, not strategy.

And we all know how it ended. The two sides split in 2018. In 2019 Ko founded the TPP, later declared that "both sides of the Strait are one family," and then moved step by step toward the KMT.

Fifth: the New Power Party and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party

In 2016, the DPP stepped aside in several districts for the New Power Party (NPP). Huang Kuo-chang, Freddy Lim, and Hung Tzu-yung won, and the NPP took 5 seats in one go to become the third-largest party.

In 2020, the DPP stepped aside for Chen Po-wei of the Taiwan Statebuilding Party, who defeated Yen Kuan-heng in Taichung's 2nd district.

So, "could the DPP ever be that magnanimous?" It already has been, many times.

But look at how it turned out. Relations between the NPP and the DPP grew increasingly strained, and the NPP was wiped out in 2024. Chen Po-wei was recalled the year after his election.

I think the problem isn't whether the DPP is magnanimous enough. It's that the direction was wrong.

Whose votes did the NPP and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party draw? Young people, activists, and those frustrated that the DPP wasn't green enough or moving fast enough. Put bluntly, they were poaching the DPP's own votes.

They didn't bring over a single KMT localist voter.

To people who dislike the DPP, a small party that grew out of the green camp will always look like "little green." All it can do is redistribute votes within the pan-green camp, and the pro-Taiwan camp's total vote doesn't grow.

The party that can really change Taiwan's politics is one that brings votes over from the KMT side. The early TSU did that. The later TSU, the NPP, and the Taiwan Statebuilding Party didn't.

[Examples from abroad]

Taiwan isn't the only country to face this problem.

Japan. After 1955, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) governed almost continuously as a single party, and the largest opposition party, the Socialist Party, never got beyond opposition. The LDP was finally ousted for the first time in 1993, not by the Socialists, but by people who split off from the LDP itself, led by Ichiro Ozawa.

It's the same logic as the TSU: an established big party's real rivals are often not outsiders but people who split off from it, because they can take the old party's voters with them.

Ireland. This is my favorite example. Ireland's two major parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, both split from the Irish independence movement. Back then they fought over whether to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and even went to civil war over it. A century later, the two parties take turns governing, and they argue about how to run the country, not whether the country should exist.

That's exactly the kind of two parties Taiwan needs.

Mexico. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ruled Mexico for 71 years starting in 1929. In 1977, the PRI itself pushed through political reforms that widened the space for opposition parties and introduced proportional representation seats. The motive was practical: after too long as the dominant party, no one trusted the elections, and the regime's legitimacy was draining away. In 2000, twenty-three years after that door opened, the PRI lost to the National Action Party. Mexico didn't collapse. Instead, it became a normal democracy with regular transfers of power.

Singapore. In 1984, the People's Action Party created the Non-Constituency Member of Parliament scheme, which guarantees at least a few opposition seats in parliament. This wasn't magnanimity but careful calculation, since bringing opposition voices into the system is safer than letting them build up outside it. Whatever the motive, it did preserve a stage for the opposition.

[Where will that party come from?]

I think the most likely, and most appropriate, source is a split from the KMT.

The KMT has always had a localist wing. Among its local factions, mayors and magistrates, farmers' associations, and grassroots representatives, many people have far deeper ties to Taiwan than to the other side of the Strait. The KMT of the Lee Teng-hui era was effectively an "ROC independence" party, so this has happened before.

These people don't necessarily agree with the party leadership's current line. It's just that the KMT is big enough and well-resourced enough that leaving is too costly, so everyone stays.

Once the gap between the leadership's line and local voters grows wide enough, someone will step forward.

Two things to keep in mind.

First, this party can't become a second DPP. It needs to be conservative, pro-business, and pragmatic, so that former KMT voters feel "this is still the side I know." The difference is that it won't tell the other side of the Strait that both sides belong to the Chinese nation.

Second, it can't repeat the later TSU's path. Once it starts competing over who's greener and more radical, it loses KMT voters and is left fighting the DPP for votes.

Part two: what's happening in Hualien, and what the DPP can actually do

[What's happening in Hualien]

A small-scale experiment along these lines is already underway in Hualien.

Hualien County Council Speaker Chang Chun used to chair the KMT's Hualien County chapter, so he was one of the KMT's own. When the county chapter didn't nominate him in the 2022 speaker election, he left the party. In 2025, he led the recall effort against Fu Kun-chi.

This year he's running for Hualien County magistrate as an independent. His opponents are Yu Shu-chen, the KMT nominee backed by the Fu family, and Wei Chia-hsien, another KMT defector.

What kind of place is Hualien? It's a KMT stronghold where the DPP has almost no chance of winning.

The DPP's approach in Hualien has been to keep its options open, and reports say some grassroots DPP officials are already helping Chang. In Chang's own words: "This isn't about parties now. It's about whether we want change."

This is exactly what I described earlier: in places the DPP can't win anyway, let someone who walked out of the KMT take on the KMT.

Of course, Hualien is still some distance from the homegrown party I'm describing. Chang left the KMT mainly because of a local feud with Fu Kun-chi, not because of cross-Strait policy. He's also one person, not a party.

But the direction is right. It tests exactly one thing: will KMT voters vote for someone who walked out of the KMT and isn't from the DPP?

The votes will be counted on November 28. Whatever the outcome, the pro-Taiwan camp should take a hard look at it.

[What the DPP can actually do]

So, back to the opening question: should the DPP, and can it, use the resources of government to support the next pro-Taiwan party?

My answer is yes. But it has to support the right people in the right way.

1. Support localists who split from the KMT, not more green-camp junior partners.

Almost everyone the DPP stepped aside for in the past grew out of the green camp or social movements. The only result was splitting votes within the pan-green camp.

If KMT localists ever do break away, the DPP should generously decline to nominate candidates in those blue strongholds and let the localists run. The DPP can't win those districts anyway, and a homegrown conservative winning is better than someone who says both sides of the Strait belong to the Chinese nation.

2. Reform the electoral system.

The TSU was killed by single-member districts. If the share of party-list seats were raised, or the system switched to a German-style mixed-member proportional system, a party winning 10% of the vote could win roughly 10% of the seats. That would give a homegrown party that split from the KMT room to grow, instead of being crushed between the two big parties from the day it's born.

This works against the DPP's own interests, since the current system favors big parties most. That's exactly what would make it magnanimous.

3. Don't push every KMT member toward the other side of the Strait.

In today's political rhetoric, KMT members are easily labeled wholesale as "CCP fellow travelers." Some truly are, but not all of them.

If a KMT localist is treated as pro-unification no matter what they say, they'll never have a reason to walk out. If the DPP wants a homegrown party to split from the KMT, it first has to acknowledge that the KMT has localists, and then give them a way out.

4. Take national identity out of party hands.

Taiwanese identity shouldn't be the DPP's monopoly. The more parties can naturally say "Taiwan is a country," the less unique the DPP becomes. That's a short-term loss for the DPP but long-term insurance for Taiwan.

It's what Chiang Ching-kuo realized back then: letting rivals grow within the system is far safer than letting them spiral out of control outside it.

[Finally]

The nine-in-one local elections are three weeks away.

This time, many people will once again hold their noses when they vote. Whoever they vote for, they'll be thinking "at least it's not the other one."

I hope that one day, Taiwanese voters will be thinking "I like this one better," not "this one scares me less."

On that day, the DPP can step down with peace of mind.

On that day, Taiwan will truly become a normal country.