Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo (Chinese新浪 微 博, Pinyin Xinlang Weibo ) is the name of the largest Chinese micro-blogging service. It was founded on August 14, 2009 by Sina Corporation, inter alia, the Internet portal Sina.com operates. The Chinese government had previously several foreign bids ( including Twitter and Facebook) off - a response to the unrest in Xinjiang in July 2009.

Importance

The term Weibo in Chinese means literally microblogging [ evidence ?]. This Weibo.com is synonymous with corresponding offers in China. End of 2011, the service had where the daily ten percent publish their own news according to its own representation 250 million registered users (of which two million in Hong Kong ). In February 2013 Tech reported in Asia 500 million Sina Weibo - users, but a study by the University of Hong Kong based on 30,000 randomly selected member profiles came to the conclusion that these were 57.4 percent of the reviewed accounts empty; Sina himself admitted according to the Wall Street Journal, the number of daily active users end of 2012 with 46.2 million.

Censorship

Because of the Internet censorship in the People's Republic of China weibo.com is continuously monitored by government agencies. This happens, among other things with the help of keyword lists, filter the reserved words. Messages that contain short links (for example from bit.ly ), and message in the Tibetan language is generally not common. Censorship should be reinforced in the future.

On 9 March 2010 the short messages of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and activists removed and his account was deleted. Messages that include its name can not be created. On October 30, 2010 News of actress Gigi Leung has been deleted after she had written about the activist Zhao Lianhai.

On March 31, 2012, as a punitive measure for the spread of rumors about an alleged coup attempt in China's two major micro blogs at sina.com and tencent.com instructed to shut down their comment function for five days.

In May 2012, it was reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of further restrictions and believed that the Internet company Sina is willing to cooperate in the control of the network.

Nevertheless Weibo.com guaranteed compared to other media in China relatively far-reaching possibilities of expression.

Functions

Many features are derived from the U.S. market leader Twitter. So the short messages may have a maximum length of 140 characters. User names are characterized by a @. Subjects are characterized by so-called hashtags. Also the color of Sina Weibo is intended to resemble the model of Twitter.

Foreigners in Weibo

In recent years, some non - Chinese users have established themselves on Weibo. The most famous foreigner is of Chinese -born U.S. citizen Mike Sui with about half a million followers (as of October 20, 2013 ). The best-known German users are the travel blogger Leikexiaoliumang ( Christopher Rehage ) with 134,000 followers and the linguist Deyulaoshi Sven ( Sven Hänke ) with 38,000 followers.