Weipocalypse Now: With Real-Name Deadline Looming, the Numbers Don’t Look Great

Tomorrow is March 16, the deadline imposed by the Beijing government for the implementation of real-name registration on microblogs like Sina Weibo. Yesterday, we wrote about how Sina is making things easier by allowing SMS-based registration (and how that could be easily cheated). We also mentioned the counter on Sina’s registration site, which is slowly ticking away the number of people who’ve registered their real names. Yesterday, it was below 18 million. Today, it’s….still below 19 million. That’s not great news for a service that allegedly has over 300 million registered users.

Moreover, the counter’s speed doesn’t seem to be increasing despite a site-wide advertisement attempting to promote real name registration. Yesterday, my colleague Steven found it was rising at a rate of about 20,000 new registrations per hour. Today, it’s moving even more slowly, rising by a little more than 13,000 per hour when we checked this afternoon.

The counter for registrations, as of 15:40 Thursday, Beijing time.

Of course, it’s not clear exactly what that counter is counting; it just says that 18 million plus people have “gotten the badge” one gets from registering with one’s real name. But however you interpret that, it’s looking like Sina’s proclamation that sixty percent of users would be registered by the deadline is really optimistic. In fact, in online polls on weibo like this one, less than 45 percent of users suggested they planned to register with their real names (although it’s worth noting that an additional 5 percent said they planned to register their weibo using someone else’s name and ID number). And in this poll, more than 77 percent of users said they opposed the real name rules, while only 12 percent supported it.

It is likely that there will be a quick jump in registration numbers when the regulation is actually enacted and users who haven’t registered lose their speaking privileges on the site. But ‘sixty percent of users registered by the deadline’ means about 180 million users need to be registered by midnight tonight for Sina to have hit that goal. So, unless the counter jumps by 150 million or so in the next few hours, it sure doesn’t seem likely Sina’s sixty percent prediction is going to come true before the deadline hits. After the deadline, no one really knows what will happen. But we could be looking at a brave new world.