Friday, January 31, 2014

China's Sina Weibo is in danger of becoming boring - just how the authorities want it...

It's easy to be glib about social media. Page upon page of selfies, pleas for attention from celebrities, misogynist trolls and angels-on-pinhead arguments.

But as the Telegraph's research shows, the Chinese authorities take the web very seriously indeed.

Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, is a huge platform, with over 200 million users. And for a while, it functioned freely, or as freely as anything does in China. It was, of course, monitored, and thousands of people were employed to post pro-government opinions and stories on the network.

 But the old-style censorship didn't seem to be working as well as it should. Partly because it was just too obvious. In March 2012, rumours spread that the son of a Communist Party Official had been involved in a fatal crash while driving his Ferrari. As people discussed the story, they suddenly found that the word Ferrari had been blocked. For many, this made it clear that someone powerful had something to hide, and people openly wrote about their frustration with the system. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. The term "truth" deleted from the Internet in China!!!
  2. China moves to tame microbloggers amid censorship claims...
  3. Why are the people of China doing push-ups?
  4. China bans the word "Ferrari" on the web to prevent rumours of top...
  5. China fights to silence the social network...
  6. Popular China blog site shuts accounts over 'rumors'
  7. Chinese soldiers banned from blogging, creating web sites...
  8. Internet censorship is bad in China; is it any better in the "free" world?

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