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Ed Sander
November 20, 2016 at 10:18 pm
After the arrest of ‘big V’ Charles Xue in the summer of 2013 new legislation was passed that made spreading of rumours – with the CCP defining what is and isn’t a rumour – punishable with up to 3 years in prison. Weibo very quickly dead out in the months after. Many, among whom myself, thought that this would be the end of Weibo, which up till then had been a platform where the public could have its say (as long as it didn’t mobilize and criticize the central government) and expose corrupt local officials through ‘human flesh search engines’, an era that started with the Wenzhou train crash. Figures from 2014 seemed to confirm the decline of Weibo (e.g. http://www.chinainternetwatch.com/8829/weibo-aug-2014/). However in early 2015 more positive statistics began to appear (e.g. http://socialbrandwatch.com/weibo-has-stunning-2014/) and since then I haven’t seen much negative news about Weibo. The contradicting sources were gone and Weibo indeed seemed to be in a great revival, which now nobody can deny anymore.
Having said that, the plarform hasn’t just changed in functionality but also in type of content. The height of the online citizen movement of the 2011-2013 (a highly interesting period for social media during which I lived in China) has been replaced by gossip news about the stars, with divorces of moviestars and their cheating wifes now being the most popular topics. And that’s exactly how the CCP likes it: panem et circenses. Weibo has survived and revived but at the same time Weibo is also very much dead and decomposing.
Shelly
November 23, 2016 at 11:24 am
Binfer makes private video sharing very easy. See http://www.binfer.com/solutions/domains/file-sharing-solution-for-video-production
overseaschinese
December 4, 2016 at 7:06 pm
There are a plethora of features on Weibo that completely supersedes anything that we see on Instagram, Twitter or Youtube.
Even Wechat is much more superior than Facebook.
If it’s anything like, we can already say that Facebook is trying to be like Wechat. Twitter is trying to be like Weibo.
Let’s not fool ourselves, these Chinese apps is cashing in, while the US-based ones are struggling to monetise.