Sina Weibo Backlash Beginning as US Consulate in Shanghai Gets Banished

The official Weibo page of the US Consulate in Shanghai has met its end, today being blocked by Sina (NASDAQ:SINA) with no explanation. Formerly on this page, the US Consulate joins the ranks of the New York Times and the Bloomberg accounts in all being blocked in recent weeks.

Instead the US Consulate has taken to a rival microblog service, Tencent’s (HKG:0700) Weibo, and is posting there instead. It was actually set up before today. See it here. The Tencent account is now that consulate’s primary outreach mode on the web. It has far fewer than the half million and more fans that were on its Sina Weibo page, with 102,000 at present. Other US Consulate pages remain online.

Its most recent post at 5pm local time today on Tencent Weibo is about the closure of its Sina Weibo account:

This morning we discovered that Consulate Shanghai’s official Shanghai page was not accessible. We are working to find out why, and we plan to resume normal operations as soon as possible.

It’s not known what has caused the apparent ban on that page. In such instances, it’s often the case that a tweet has crossed the line in terms of what can be discussed – especially in the realm of politics – and such tweets, or the entire microblogging accounts, will be deleted. Although the US Consulate has pointedly fled to a rival social media service, no one can say for sure if Sina is really the source of the censorship or if it’s acting on the instructions of authorities to avoid certain sensitive words being posted. Sina Weibo, being the hotter and more active of the two major Twitter-like services, is the one that sees the most high-profile censorship-related issues. Like this, this, this, this, this, or this. And there are plenty more examples. But Tencent Weibo, too, has content censors with fingers poised over the delete key.

Responding to the US Consulate’s banishment from Sina Weibo, the prominent China-born blogger Isaac Mao said:

I’m seeing the demise of Sina Weibo once all foreign consulates in China migrate their social media channel to Sina’s competitors. Just do it.

He himself has boycotted Sina Weibo in recent weeks, and has moved to using Tencent’s service instead. Meanwhile, Beijing-based investor and analyst Bill Bishop said:

Sina has now shut weibo accounts of Bloomberg, new York times & us government. And yet they enjoy all the benefits of the us capital markets

— Bill Bishop (@niubi) July 12, 2012