China’s Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo hardly seems like a happy place for opinionated American tweeters.
Think the United States’ attempt at a great firewall is bad? An account on Weibo survives entirely at the whim of China’s censors. (Good luck getting occupy Beijing (占领北京) to trend.)
So why do so many people in the U.S. have an account?
Despite the service’s recent trigger-happy censorship, Sina Weibo now boasts more than 450,000 users in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported earlier today. That’s about 0.2 percent of Sina Weibo’s 225 million total users; to put it another way, there are as many Americans on Sina Weibo as there are living in Sacramento, California.
Since there are only about 150,000 Chinese foreign students in the U.S., a majority of these accounts are probably owned by Americans. So who are they? And why make an account when Twitter—the self-described “free speech wing of the free speech party”—is just a click away?
San Francisco’s first Chinese American mayor, Ed Lee is a user. He has nearly 40,000 followers. The International Monetary Fund’s head, Christine Lagarde also has a page (apparently registered from within the U.S.), as do Bill Gates, Radiohead, and international Scientology mascot Tom Cruise.
Brands and celebrities want to connect to a Chinese audience. So does anyone with even a passing interest in China (myself included). And there’s no better place to do so than with what one social media analyst has called “the national watercooler of China.”
Just be careful what you post, lest you fall victim to what may be the biggest banhammer on Earth.
Photo from Wikipedia
