Page 87 - Feasibility Study of New Media Technology on Constructing Online Public Sphere

Chapter 3. Contextual Background

3.3.5.1 Sina Weibo

‘Weibo’ is the Chinese word for ‘microblog’. Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblog-
ging website with a Web 2.0 concept. Akin to a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook, it is
one of the most popular SNS in China and Weibo.com is one of the most visited online
platforms for internet users to share, communicate and acquire information, which

is used by over 40.9% of Chinese internet users, with a market penetration similar to
Twitter (CNNIC, 2018). It was launched by Sina Corporation on 14 August 2009 and
as of December 2012 had 503 million registered users, about 100 million messages are
posted each day (Tao, 2015). According to Sina’s report, the monthly active users of

Sina Weibo reached 573 million by the end of 2021 (Bai, 2022).
Sina Weibo implements many features from Twitter. A user may post with a
2,000-character limit, mention or talk to other people using ‘@Username’ formatting,
add hashtags, follow other users to make their posts appear in one’s own timeline, re-

post, select posts for one’s favourites list and verify the account if the user is a celeb-
rity. Each Weibo user has a personal profile that may include basic information (e.g.,
hobbies, hometown, etc.) and statistics (e.g., total posts, followers and followings). Of-
ficial and third-party applications allow users to access Sina Weibo from other websites

or platforms. Mackinnon (2008) claimed that Sina Weibo can be considered as an up-
grade of BBS due to its features of message threading and the freedom of commenting
other’s posts. It is a more sophisticated medium which obtained great popularity among
Chinese netizens. Various levels of verification are also available.

3.3.5.2 Tencent Weibo

Tencent Weibo is another Chinese microblogging website launched by Tencent in
April 2010. Like Sina Weibo, the idea of Tencent Weibo is to connect all users together
but with support to the user’s QQ account. Tencent company does not intend to launch

Tencent Weibo at a strategic level, but as a marketing tactic to curb competitors. With
the support of Tencent QQ, Tencent Weibo has an important characteristic, which is the
large amount of QQ overlap with Tencent Weibo.

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