This week saw a torrent of Chinese social media news, which dominates the line-up you see here. We broke the stories behind two major developments – one each for Tencent’s WeChat and Sina Weibo – and those stories inevitably top the list.
1. Now China’s WeChat app is censoring its users globally
China’s biggest web company also makes the world’s most-used messaging app, so we were astonished when Tencent’s WeChat was very clearly blocking the sending of certain “sensitive” words…
2. Tencent responds in case of apparent WeChat censorship
…24 hours later, Tencent responded to the story with a statement of its own. And even though that keyword filtering/blocking seems to have stopped happening in WeChat, do you believe the explanation given?
3. Finally, Sina Weibo rolls out partial English interface
On Wednesday we noticed that the Twitter-esque Sina Weibo has just rolled out a partial English-language interface. It’s far from ready for primetime, but we have it on good authority that there’s more to come. But it took years to materialize, prompting my colleague to wonder why it took so long.
4. New study proves that Twitter users in China are rare birds
Twitter might be broadly irrelevant now in China (both being blocked, and outpaced by Weibo), but it’s still fun to figure out how many China-based web users still love to tweet. The number is a lot lower than you’d expect.
5. China hits 88% broadband coverage in villages
While coverage did grow over 2012, the growth wasn’t nearly as impressive as you might expect; it’s up just a few percentage points from 84 percent at the beginning of the previous year.
6. China’s top 10 search engines at the end of 2012
From Chinese traffic stats company CNZZ, the data for December 2012 shows Baidu slipping yet again in terms of traffic share to 71.76 percent. Google is still hanging on too. Check out the full top 10 list inside.
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