Social News
Written by: Guo Xiaoqing, Lin Zhitong
2020-07-03 07:30
Last update date: 2020-07-03 07:30Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the "three meals a day" during the outbreak of many people. Staying at home to fight the epidemic, social media has become one of the important pleasures of the public, leading to the use of social media by Hong Kong citizens from the end of 2019 to 2020 At the same time, the number of social media frauds has increased over the past few years.
"Hong Kong 01" wrote a letter on the issue and received a reply from the Police Public Relations Division, pointing out that between January and April this year, there were 498 social media frauds involving an amount of 94.6 million Hong Kong dollars.
According to the statistics of the NapoleonCat website, the cumulative number of social media users increased from 6.773 million users in May 2019 to 7.838 million users in May 2020, an increase of about one million users.
Social media users experienced the highest increase in August in previous years. It is believed to be related to the anti-amendment incident. The usage dropped slightly from November to December until it started to rebound in January. Affected by the epidemic, some citizens started to work at home after the Lunar New Year and schools switched to online courses. In addition, many citizens purchased anti-epidemic supplies online, which is believed to be the reason for the increased use of social media.
The reporter compared the social media data of the United States and the United Kingdom and found that the usage of the three places increased sharply in August 2019. At the time, in addition to the anti-fixing incident in Hong Kong, the speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi launched The investigation of President Donald Trump's impeachment, the Brexit incident and the holding of early elections, social events have affected citizens' increased search, sharing, and comment on social media, leading to a sharp increase in usage.
In addition to viewing friends’ activities and sharing personal lives, citizens also use social media to check news and receive the latest and interesting information. According to Google Trends Analysis, the most searched terms from January to May 2020 include the new coronavirus, Epidemic information, masks and other epidemic prevention supplies, hot drama series and video games, etc.
However, as usage increased, the number of Internet scams also increased over the past few years. According to information from the Security Bureau, social media fraud increased from 261 in 2013 to 1678 in 2019, and the amount of losses involved increased more than 4 times to approximately 262 million Hong Kong dollars.
Although the number of social media scams declined in 2019, during the epidemic there were more citizens buying social media or online anti-epidemic supplies, and there are still risks involved. Police earlier stated that a total of 1,865 cases of fraud involving online payment for masks were received, involving more than 3,900 victims and a total loss of about 56.9 million yuan. According to the data provided by the Police Public Relations Section, from January to April this year alone, there were 498 social media fraud cases involving an amount of 94.6 million Hong Kong dollars.
01 data social network facebookInstagram
