MCLC: Weibo losing users

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Mooney <pjmooney at hotmail.com>
Subject: Weibo losing users
*******************************************************

Source: The Daily Beast (1/25/14):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/25/china-s-weibo-losing-users
.html

China’s Weibo Losing Users
By Matt Schiavenza

China’s version of Twitter has been bleeding users this year, thanks to a
government crackdown and the rise of new social technologies.

On the night of July 23, 2011, two high-speed trains collided near
Wenzhou, a large manufacturing city in China’s Zhejiang province, and
caused an accident that claimed 40 lives. Within minutes, users of Sina
Weibo, China’s Twitter-like service, began uploading photos of the crash
and speculating on what may have caused it. As first responders tended to
the injured, word of the disaster spread throughout the country—even
though no official media source had reported on it. In China, where
state-run newspapers and television often suppress bad news, this wasn’t
unusual. But because information of the accident had already leaked
online, Communist Party officials could not ignore the story for long. The
following day, Railways Minister Sheng Guangzu arrived in Wenzhou to
coordinate rescue efforts.

The Wenzhou collision revealed the shaky foundation of China’s high-speed
rail network, the crown jewel of the country’s transportation
infrastructure. But the incident became an important media story, too.
China’s state-run media had traditionally functioned as a propaganda
network, employing top-down coverage of the stories the Communist Party
wished to report. Now, because of bottom-up sources like Sina Weibo, this
fundamental balance was starting to shift. In its recap of the crash, The
New York Times wrote that the event signaled “the arrival of weibos [the
Chinese word for ‘microblogs’] as a social force to be reckoned with.”

Two and a half years later, SinaWeibo’s arrival looks, in retrospect, more
like its peak. This week, the China Internet Network Information Center
reported that for the first time since 2010, membership in SinaWeibo
declined by 28 million people, or nine percent. And a survey released this
summer <http://www.techinasia.com/sina-weibo-users-less-active-2013/>
found that among Weibo’s most popular users, those with 10,000 or more
followers, activity declined in October 2012.This decline, too, comes at a
time when China’s Internet population continues to grow by 10 percent
annually.

So why are users abandoning Weibo?

The first explanation is the simplest: The Chinese government has
accelerated its crackdown on online speech. For years, the Communist Party
has selectively censored online speech, employing a small army of workers
to delete objectionable content as well as contribute pro-government
commentary to blogs and message boards. Of course, the vast majority of
online content in China—much like everywhere else in the world—has nothing
to do with politics. Content that is political in nature typically
involves issues like environmentalism and local government corruption; few
challenge the Communist Party’s legitimacy.

But in 2013, the first year of Xi Jinping’s administration, the Communist
Partyengineered a crackdown on SinaWeibo’s “Big V” users—those with
“verified” accounts and millions of followers. And as Weibo’s membership
exceeded 500 million, hundreds of popular users were detained on account
of “spreading rumors.” One, an investor and U.S. citizen named Charles Xue
who had achieved a wide following on Weibo, was accused of soliciting
prostitution. His forced confession
<http://www.techinasia.com/charles-xues-confession-disaster-chinas-web/>,
televised throughout China, sent a chilling message: Become popular online
at your own risk. Some users got the message. One, nicknamed smallspearv,
told the BBC <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-25775191> that using
Weibo was “simply not worth it anymore.”

But the more plausible explanation for Weibo’s decline has less to do with
censorship than with something far less sinister: competition. Since its
creation in 2011, WeChat, an application developed by Sina’s rival
Tencent, has replaced Weibo as China’s go-to web service
<http://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/07/wechat-not-weibo-is-the-c
hinese-social-network-to-watch/278212/>, and has—if the China Internet
Network Information Center’s numbers are accurate—siphoned off 34 percent
of Weibo’slost users. The two services are not identical: Weibo
essentially functions like Twitter, while WeChat is like a combination of
What’sApp, Instagram, and Skype. Nevertheless, WeChat has emerged as the
hotter product 
<http://www.economist.com/news/china/21594296-after-crackdown-microblogs-se
nsitive-online-discussion-has-shifted-weibo-wechat> in a China where
obtaining a wide following online has lost much of its appeal. As Charlie
Custer, a journalist who writes about Chinese technology at Games in Asia
<http://www.gamesinasia.com/> writes, “Weibo is a publishing platform, in
essence, and WeChat is a chat platform. One is for talking to the world,
the other is for talking to your friends."

WeChat’s other advantage is even more basic. According to Xinhua, 70
percent <http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/sci/2013-07/18/c_132551883.htm>
of China’s new Internet users use cell phones to go online, a market that
cheapsmart-phone manufacturers like Xiaomi has come to dominate. And
WeChat—with its wide range of services and simple, intuitive interface,
has become an essential app for these newly wired millions.

“The circles formed on Wechat are smaller and more intimate, and are
mostly among friends and acquaintances,” says Helen Gao, a writer and
Beijing native. “It allows you to message them, follow their activities,
and speak to them more easily than Weibo does.”

It’s easy to view the decline of Weibo as a setback for free speech in
China, and by all means, this is the intent of the Communist Party. But
the rise of WeChat shows that, though China’s next major train crash may
not achieve as much circulation on Weibo, it will hardly go unnoticed
online.