Blocked on Weibo

They live in Guangdong (well, many of them do at least):

Some background: Now that I finally got around to playing with Weibo’s API, I’ve been collecting (you might call it hoarding…) a lot of fun data. I’m currently engrossed in this dataset I’ve developed of anti-Japanese comments and I’ve been doing a lot of spatial analysis—all of which is only possible because Weibo neatly provides a wealth of detailed location data included with every post/comment. Whereas Twitter offers whatever location a user supplies (“In your head”; “Your mom’s house”) along with a time zone (geo-coordinates and detailed location info are only available on a tiny percentage of tweets), Weibo’s API neatly gives you every user’s province, city code, and chosen location. The options are selected, not filled-in, so the data is super clean and crisp (well, outside of people who lie about their location).

Thus, seeing as it might be helpful for my other projects to know where Weibo users are blogging from (or at least say they are), I conducted a data expedition, grabbing the latest 200 posts from Weibo every five minutes for one full week. After discarding repeat messages (Weibo’s API doesn’t guarantee the posts are the absolute most recent, though for the most part, the majority of the posts matched my download date-time), I came up with a sample of 283,109 unique users, 236,611 of whom live in mainland China and which I used to generate the map above and chart below (this whole exercise was basically an excuse to show off some of Google’s super easy-to-use Fusion tables and an unnecessary distraction to my thesis writing, sigh).

direct link

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The question of how many Chinese Twitter users there are made headlines a few months back when the market research company GlobalWebIndex published results from a survey which claimed that 35 million people in China used Twitter. Media outlets ran with the story of how there was a huge secret upswell in “free” netizens in China who climbed the Great Firewall to access blocked sites like Twitter, with the seeming implication being that revolución! was just around the corner. Social/human rights progress may still indeed take place in China in the near future, but most smart social media watchers agree it won’t be because of Twitter: Chinese folks just aren’t on the service in the same numbers that they are on other local social media sites like Sina Weibo, RenRen, and even upstart mobile apps like WeChat/Weixin. People (and even companies in advertisements) don’t pass around their Twitter handle in the same frequencies as they share their Weibo contact info.

Even if our eyes told us that Twitter seemed to have attracted an active but small group of activists in China—but not many others in the country—was there a possibility that we were all missing something? Was there really a secret group of Chinese Twitter users being overlooked? Fortunately, after this week, I hope we can finally dismiss GWI’s 35 million number once and for all. Inspired by an SCMP story detailing the findings of the Chinese Twitter user @ooof (h/t Steven Millward of Tech In Asia)—who cleverly used data on the website Twiyia.com to conclude that roughly 18,000 people who posted a tweet in Chinese selected Beijing as their home timezone—this weekend I performed a similar test using publicly available tweets on Twitter utilizing its API. According to the data I extracted, there are most likely tens of thousands of Twitter users in China, not millions as claimed by GWI, a result that confirms @ooof’s finding.^[1a] The exact numbers @ooof and I come up with may differ, and only Twitter itself would be best able to  reveal how many Chinese Twitter users there actually are, but our independent results are likely within an order of magnitude to the actual number of Twitter users in China, unlike GWI’s result which is about 2000 times greater than our calculations. The hard evidence backs up what our eyes are telling us.

If you’re interested in the technical information of how I performed this fairly rigorous (though certainly not at the level of an academic research paper) test, read on. (Apologies for the non-Weibo-related post; I hope it’s still of relevant to those who read this blog.)

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Note: 0 is the new blocked (results below are from Sina Weibo, Nov 4, 2012)

温家宝 (Wen Jiabao): 0 results
张蓓莉 (Zhang Beili, wife): 0 results
杨志云 (Yang Zhiyun, mother): 0 results
温家宏 (Wen Jiahong, younger brother): 0 results
温云松 (Wen Yunsong, son): 0 results
杨小萌 (Yang Xiaomeng, daughter-in-law): unblocked
温如春 (Yun Ruchun, granddaughter): unblocked
劉春航 (Liu Chunhang, granddaughter’s husband): unblocked
张建明 (Zhang Jianming, brother-in-law): unblocked
张剑鹍 (Zhang Jiankun, brother-in-law): 0 results
于剑鸣 (Yu Jianming, Wen Yunsong’s classmate and business partner): 0 results
段伟红 (Duan Weihong, investor): 0 results
郑裕彤 (Chen Yu-tong, investor): unblocked
李嘉诚 (Li Ka-shing, investor): unblocked

image source: NY Times, The Wen Family Empire

As of the beginning of this month, Sina Weibo has made a number of changes to the way they handle their censorship of search results. I’ve previously tweeted about a rising number of searches that are “partially blocked” rather than blocked wholesale with the typical “According to relevant laws, search results are not displayed” message.

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