On Facebook and Twitter in China, and Getting the Numbers Right

image: FastCompany.com

A number of publications have been citing Global Web Index research that claims Facebook and Twitter have 63 million and 35 million users respectively. We thought those figures smelled funny, so we stayed clear. But those numbers are being widely reported by big name publications, and I think that’s regrettable [1].

I’ve exchanged a few emails with the folks at Global Web Index regarding the Twitter user count [2], just to question their methodology, and to their credit they were very receptive and made a few good points [3]. They tell me their results are survey-based from a sample of 8,000 total respondents [4], with surveys conducted in Chinese. The following is parts of my email correspondences, adjusted and supplemented to be posted.

How many actually climb the wall?

Like many, my main concern was that Twitter is blocked in China and that circumvention tools were not used widely enough to support such high user counts. The Berkman Center published research back in 2010 about the use of circumvention tools in China, and a the time they gave a generous estimate of no more than three percent, qualifying that the “actual number is likely far less.”

So perhaps considering that this is now two years later, we could be generous again that say that “far less than three percent" has now reached three percent [5]. And if we are again generous and assume that all of those users are using those circumvention tools to use nothing but Twitter, that would mean about 16 million Twitter users. Again, still far less – and that’s being generous.

Notice how many times we had to be generous there, and we still didn’t reach half of GWI’s 35 million figure.

Comparing to Sina Weibo

Sina Weibo had about 300 million registered users as of last May. Those figures came from Sina itself, with no mention of what portion were active. But…

• If we are generous and say that 100 percent of them are active, it would mean that there is about one active Twitter user for every 10 active Sina Weibo users in China (35 million to 350+ million).
• If we are conservative and say that 50 percent of those 300+ million are active, it would mean almost one active Twitter users for every four active Sina Weibo users (35 million to 150+ million).

Neither of those two estimates seems realistic to me. Twitter doesn’t have the same visibility in China that it has in the West. It is not a part of mainstream vocabulary (Weibo is), it is not plastered all over the Chinese internet in the form of share buttons (Weibo is), and it is blocked. If it could reach 10 percent of Sina Weibo’s user total despite all that, it would be a miraculous feat indeed.

Can we measure language use?

We could also consider examining the languages used on Twitter, which has been done to some extent by Eric Fischer in this visualization from late 2011. In the graphic, you’ll notice that China is not very active, especially when compared to neighboring Japan. But Italy for example (which GWI estimated to have 3.1 million active Twitter users) is far more ‘visible’/active. There are numerous other examples too. This is hardly conclusive, but again, another indication that China’s Twitter count is very low.